Is Bill C-11 Going to Harm Natural Influencers Outside of Canada?

Insider reports highlight why Bill C–11, which has been described as Trudeau's government's online censorship Bill, is extremely problematic for the influencers it's going to affect and the way that we communicate truth as we know it.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) has teamed with Professor Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa, an expert in broadcasting and online regulations, to produce “Bill C-11: A Fatally Flawed Gateway to Government Censorship.”

The use of the word Gateway is important because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his ministers will tell you the bill has nothing to do with censoring the Internet. Rather, the express purpose is to modernize broadcasting regulations in Canada to bring them up to speed with online streaming and social media. However, the legislation is also a gateway to online censorship.

It does this by giving the Canadian radio-television and Telecommunications commission has the power to regulate what they called “user-generated content.” This means that what Canadians post to places like YouTube and Tik-Tok would fall under government control.

As The Insider report explains, “No other Democratic Nation regulates user-generated content for broadcasting rules in this manner. Canada would be unique among allies in doing so, and not in a good way.”

The government swears that they're not planning on using these powers to censor Canadian voices, but then why do we need the bill? Allegedly, the goal of the bill is to more broadly promote and amplify Canadian content and culture. We do not see that happening if this bill is only able to be put into action in Canada. This would actually significantly lower the chance of the Canadian content creator being viewed at all.

“What happens if the government starts to view content that's inconvenient for the government and as a Canadian?” Asks Geist in his report.

For this reason Canadian and American influencers and their management and multiple platforms correspondents have been standing up, sharing their opinions and lobbying to get to the bottom of this bill. it's a good question and a key reason why the user-generated content Provisions must be removed. The problem is the government is hostile to improving on its bill and isn’t really up for suggestions.

They rammed the bill through committee without leaving time for amendments early last week. It's now expected to be passed in the House of Commons with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh’s blessing. It will then proceed to the Senate where it will hopefully be toned down or rejected completely.

“Why the rush?" Asks Geist in his report notes. “Why not take the time to hear from both advocates and critics? The government's process with this bill is almost as concerning as its content.”

And he's right.

In a meeting earlier today between Lobbyists, Free Speech activists, platform representatives, influencer management teams, FCC and FTC agents discussed the bill at length over concerns that the legislation would spill into US territory causing severe problems for our already fragile DMCA and copyright systems.

So what is the C-11 Bill? The bill is also known as the Copyright Modernization Act. it's described as an act to amend the Copyright Act and was introduced in the House of Commons Canada on September 29th, 2011 by the industry Minister Christian Paradis. it was virtually identical to the government's previous attempt to amend Copyright Act, Bill C–32.

Bill C-11 ammends the broadcasting Act (the Act). The Act sets out the broadcasting policy for Canada, the role and powers of the Canadian radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the commission) in regulating and supervising the broadcasting system, and the Mandate for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This bill and act seeks to amend the broadcasting act to account for the increase prominence of internet video and digital media, and to prioritize the “needs an interests” of Canadians, and the inclusion and involvement of Canadians of diverse background in broadcasting programming.

However, what this really means is they wish to expand the broadcasting act that grants the CRTC regulatory powers over radio and television to cover all audiovisual content on the internet, including content on platforms like Tik-Tok, YouTube, Spotify, and podcast clients. The Liberal government’s online-streaming Bill, which has been the subject of fierce debate among members of parliament, is now headed to the Senate. The CRTC wants to ensure “each element of the Canadian Broadcasting System shall contribute in an appropriate manner to the creation and presentation of Canadian programming."

Now this raises red flags for many of us that work with influencers in America due to our valuing our free speech above most of our rights as humans and the opinion that taking away our ability to speak freely is kind of like taking away our rights and we fear Canada's overreach might become a problem. It's come to our attention that even the minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez has caused some problems for Americans in similar positions as he as well as Jeanette P Taylor being in the back end of many major American website hosting services and businesses, We Fear this may be a grab at total power or at least to change and manipulate the narrative. The two aforementioned having outrageous online behavior alone when they think nobody is looking has caused us to lose a significant amount of trust in their ability to make decisions when it comes to the safety of their citizens. Due to Canada's proximity and business relation with the United States we're already seeing some concern where this might be used to silence others and rival businesses or who have opposing opinions, all to benefit mostly Canada's rulers and not necessarily their citizens.

We see things happening in places like China where citizens are silenced and unable to have an opinion and we fear that for ourselves, which is why free speech is so important in America. However China has invested $82 billion dollars into Canada since 2001, more than $51 billion dollars of which was funneled into oil and gas, according to data from the China Institute.(national post) We personally have had significant problems when it comes to the leaders in Canada attempting to take credit for or money from American businesses and claim them as their own. This is incredibly dangerous when it comes to the marijuana Market where its specifically subsidized into Medical Districts for medical patients with medical cards. Should we stop talking about those districts and those patients and just walk our weed across the border to Canada, all of the medical patients would go without their medicine that they literally had to struggle with their own government to get in the first place.

For example, we see this with MaRS solution lab Advisory Board, where Graham Flack also serves as a deputy minister of Canadian Heritage to the federal government of Canada, also is the co-chair of the Deputy Minister committee on policy innovation. He has a long career in government from 2013 he was deputy secretary to the cabinet at the privy Council office, before he was associate Deputy Minister, then acting Deputy minister of Public Safety Canada, associate assistant Deputy minister of energy policy and assistant Deputy minister of international trade and finance. Following 9/11 he became director of operations responsible for developing and implementing the Canadian-US SMART borders declaration and action plan and for helping Canada's first national security policy, Securing an Open Society. Graham is now Deputy minister Champion for the federal youth Network and the Dalhousie University.

You also have Gina Wilson Deputy Minister, diversity and inclusion and youth and Senior Advocate Deputy Minister, Canadian Heritage minister and the deputy Minister Champion for indigenous federal employees.

Some of these titles just don't seem to add up even though all the names do. And we had to deal with these names when trying to work on a fair method to legalize marijuana all across our country as well. However it's come to our attention that the way that Canada regulates is simply by shutting down anything that is not Canadian, preventing them from earning an income with Fintech, and then giving all of their credit for their work to their French territories. like when providing the award for CBDC payments to their French founders, Going so far as to work with American judge and jewelry store owner Ellie Torres and the Vader system to blatantly rip off American companies, silence them, prevent them from earning income with fintech AKA payment processing systems that are needed for a business to survive, and then claiming them as their own.

Now imagine if Canada obtains the right to silence all of our manufacturers and our business owners, prevent them from earning an income, and claiming their work as their own and then silencing them according to their new law.

This is already being seen happening all across the country and we fear giving them more power to do so in their own country will simply lead to them spilling out onto American rights and brutally taking away the rights our countries veterans have died to protect.

Among very obvious copyright claim and dmca system problems, this will cause a significant delay and any type of revolution in regards to this industry and it's putting all of our influencers involved in this as a whole at risk for not only losing their ability to speak the truth and speak publicly but to be seen or paid or heard from at all.

Canadian creators are at risk of having their content and visibility diminished by the passing of the online streaming act, says YouTuber J. J. McCullough, who recently opposed Bill C-11 in Parliament. After speaking at a parliamentary hearing earlier this month to oppose the Online Streaming Act and its introduction into Canadian law he shares his thoughts on the experience and potential impact of the bill:

“The hearing was revealing. I've never been a part of a parliamentary committee before, so I put a lot of effort into trying to come up with a powerful opening statement and people responded quite favorably to it. I took the process seriously. I had worked in television for a few years and as a TV political pundit and so I had gotten comfortable being on camera. I worked for Sun News in its final years and when it shut down in 2015, I was abruptly out of a job. That is when I started my YouTube channel and I've been doing it for over six years now – only professional for the last month or two, in terms of it being my primary source of income.”

Income - a topic legislation seems to not understand in regards to online content creation and those that orbit around it.

McCullough continues, ”It can be exhausting. You write the script, film the videos, edit them and add all of the sound effects and graphics and all of those things. But I like creative projects. It's very rewarding to see the reactions that my content gets, especially from young people. As I get older, I feel like there's a paternalistic side of me that's coming out more and so I like to know I'm helping and that's very rewarding and very validating to me because that's what I got into this business to do. I'm grateful to have the chance to do this full time, but my career now seems at risk with Bill C-11; it's crushing that so hard and the passion might disappear because of it.”

Which is true.

While all creators love their jobs and got involved as a hobby, money plays a factor. Most creators entire day revolves around that content, there’s no time to do anything else. To get well made content, takes time… time someone with a full time job because they can’t earn and income from their art, doesn’t have. They aren’t being greedy, it’s being realistic. If everything in life was free, youtubers wouldn’t care about their incomes… but life isn’t free and they still have to support their families.

“The way that YouTube works at present is that the content audiences discover is determined by a controlled algorithm that recommends videos based on what Youtube perceives the user to be interested in. For example, if my YouTube habits suggests that I'm interested in cooking videos, then YouTube will naturally recommend a lot of cooking videos.” McCullough adds. “We know from the text of the bill that the CRTC is going to be given a mandate to promote the discoverability of Canadian content, specifically, and that website under the CRTC jurisdiction, such as YouTube, will be obligated to comply with this discoverability mandate. What this means is that CRTC is going to have to come up with some sort of criteria for what is good Canadian content and then YouTube is going to have to live up to its legal obligations to promote and recommend that content.”

Have you ever tried to make Youtube do anything? Have you?

The site is mostly ran by in influencer ranking system, highest to the top runs to the top, along with influencer management that reaches out to platform staff and sponsors to discuss problems arising from situations like this on a daily basis. Part of the problem is simply put, these large platforms assuming that all of us are dumb and have no idea what they do or what is going on behind the doors in the backrooms. They assume we cannot communicate with each other and we don't know anything at all that's going on, which is very unfortunately incredibly untrue. As it stands creators and partner managers have been attempting to fix things like the DMCA report system, copyright Claims System, abuse of said systems, and communication for years.

Between that, payment processing, and greed of said payment processors along with demonetizing channels that you then take upon yourself to advertise on - simply so you don't pay those creators there's a lot going on at YouTube right now. If this deal goes through it will not be implemented instantly and probably not correctly for years which will cause a lot of chaos for those of us that work in that in that Influencer Market. Not to mention you already have ill-will between creators and this will just add more fuel to that fire. YouTube is an international platform that would have to change its coding specifically for Canada to make an algorithm to pick out Canada Safe programming and I have no idea how they would do so and I don't think Canada knows either.

“The thing that really struck me from the parliamentary hearings - and this is just a personal insight - was that when witnesses are testifying, you would think that they are the center of attention. But when you're there in-person, almost none of the politicians seem to be listening at all. Everybody is just on their phone. It was incredibly upsetting and disrespectful.

It felt like whistling in the Wind.”

Watch J.J. McCullough's video on the topic in it's entirety:

As it stands, both influencers and American businesses are seeing through this wondering if Canada’s huge reliance on communist China coming into play. Americans are unanimously against this bill, but don’t have a say or even know how it will effect them yet. Maybe Canada should have taken it more seriously when Trudeau said he, “admired China’s dictatorship.” (source: MaineWire)

Time will tell if the bill goes through, yet another way to silence voices that don’t say EXACTLY what their government allows them to say. Another push for controlling the worlds narrative.

We stand with our influencers and creators against Bill C-11 and we hope anyone of our partners who truely values freedom for all, will vote the same in Canada.

References

Geist, Michael - “The Unrecognizable Bill C-11: The Online Streaming Act Comes to the Heritage Committee” - MichaelGeist.ca - https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/05/the-unrecognizable-bill-c-11-the-online-streaming-act-comes-to-the-heritage-committee/

Miltmore, John - “Justin Trudeau said he admired China’s dictatorship. Canadians should have believed him” - MaineWire - https://www.themainewire.com/2022/02/justin-trudeau-said-he-admired-chinas-dictatorship-canadians-should-have-believed-him/

Seles, Nicholas - “Why Bill C-11—the Online Streaming Act—is bad news for Canadian YouTubers like myself” - Macleans - https://www.macleans.ca/politics/why-youtubers-like-me-oppose-bill-c-11