Quebec sets the Liberal agenda on Big Tech

MONTREAL • Wearing a headset and a look of practised indignation, Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin began her media availability Friday trying to convince everyone that her government hadn’t just backed down. “Despite a deliberate filibuster by our Conservative colleagues, Liberal members of the heritage committee were finally able to share the social media amendments to Bill C-10 while respecting parliamentary privilege,” Dabrusin said.

Nevertheless, behind Dabrusin’s statement was an obvious concession. After weeks on the receiving end of ire from Conservative MPS — as well as academics, legal experts, columnists and free-the-internet activists — the government was making changes to a bill it hoped would update the Canadian Broadcasting Act for a world increasingly dominated by digital platforms.

You’d think legislation on the country’s broadcasting rules would be about as compelling as a “Corner Gas” rerun. In the Liberal telling, Bill C-10 seeks simply to “promote and make discoverable our artists, our stories and our shared experiences,” as Dabrusin put it.

WHILE WE’VE ALWAYS BEEN SUPPORTIVE OF WORKING CLOSELY WITH GOVERNMENT TO PROMOTE THE SAFE AND JUST USE OF OUR SERVICE, AND OTHERS LIKE IT, IN OUR COUNTRY, WE HAVE CONCERNS THAT NEW LEGISLATION PRESENTS AN OVERSTEP OF WHAT’S WARRANTED, GIVEN HOW CANADIANS USE DIGITAL TOOLS AND CONSUME DIGITAL CONTENT. — TWITTER’S MICHELE AUSTIN

The government wants these services to pay into Canadian media funds, as well as make Youtube and other music streaming services to futz with their algorithms in order to up the “discoverability” of Canadian artists. No, Justin Trudeau doesn’t want to regulate your cat videos.

And yet Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has somehow ended up on the wrong end of a debate that has seen the Liberals accused of “a full-blown assault” on free expression in Canada and of running the most anti-internet government in Canadian history. Those accusations have by and large come from English Canada.

But to understand how we got here, you have to understand Guilbeault’s efforts to address the concerns of the country’s broadcasters and cultural institutions — specifically those in his home province of Quebec. And, you have to understand Justin Bieber.

Youtube is the most popular music-streaming service in Canada, and Bieber’s is the most popular Youtube channel in the country. According to social media marketing company Socialbakers, the curated compendium of the Biebs’s collabs, live videos and assorted Auto-tuned ditties has generated over 19 billion views in this country — equivalent to about 505 views for every man, woman and child within its borders.

For the Canadian culture industry, Bieber’s Youtube ubiquity is an existential problem. The country’s recording industry would have benefited mightily from royalties had those 19 billion views been broadcast on conventional TV or radio. But because Beliebers consumed their favourite star’s output on Vevo, a music-streaming service Youtube hosts, that bounty instead goes to far-flung record companies and a certain American multinational whose name sort of rhymes with “brutal” and “feudal.” (Google it.)

The Canadian Broadcasting Act has been updated just four times since coming into being in 1932 — and not since 1991, when Zubaz pants were a thing and the internet wasn’t. It is certainly time to update the regulations, and broadcasters and cultural-industry types have lobbied the Liberal government to force the Spotifys and Apple Musics of the world to contribute to organizations fostering Canadian music artists.

As it was originally written, C-10 would have brought Spotify, Apple Music et al into the CRTC’S regulatory embrace — but not Youtube. That’s because the bill at first exempted social media platforms like Youtube from regulation. Except, as Bieber demonstrates, Youtube is also a formidable broadcasting platform. So Liberal and other non-conservative members of the committee examining the bill voted to remove the exemption. Which would seem to make all user-generated social media content — not just on Youtube, but on Facebook, Twitter and beyond — subject to the oversight and constraints of the country’s broadcasting regulator. Of course, other countries monitor social media. China and Saudi Arabia are two of them.

Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa and one of the country’s loudest voices on matters of online copyright and regulation, has spent the last several weeks using his blog, his Twitter account and any other media platform available to him to warn of the consequences. The Conservatives have seized on the issue, which speaks to a pair of their favourite themes: free speech and Liberal big-government overreach. And suddenly the likes of Dabrusin find themselves scrambling to contain the damage.

It’s not just Geist and the Conservatives. Representatives of the big social media companies have been decidedly quotable since this apparent cock-up. “While we’ve always been supportive of working closely with government to promote the safe and just use of our service, and others like it, in our country, we have concerns that new legislation presents an overstep of what’s warranted, given how Canadians use digital tools and consume digital content,” Twitter’s Michele Austin told me. “Someone described C-10 to me as being like if Godzilla is attacking your city, one way to get rid of Godzilla is to throw a nuclear bomb on the city,” said Google Canada’s Lauren Skelly.

Even the Liberals’ ostensible allies are shaking their heads. “The law is necessary, because it closes the loophole allowing Youtube to stream music without any obligations to Canadian broadcasting or programming, but the way the government got to (it) was confusing,” said Luc Perreault of Stingray, the Montreal-based broadcast platform. Tacitly, at least, the Liberals seem to concur. When I asked Guilbeault’s spokesperson Camille Gagné-raynauld whether it was a mistake to yank the social media-exclusion section, there was a pause on the line. “Bills are perfectible,” she finally said.

But in Quebec, any flaws the bill has are seen as less important than its benefits. The province has a history of setting the Liberal agenda on Big Tech. Five years ago, I hoofed alongside Mélanie Joly as the Montreal-area MP and then-freshly appointed heritage minister took a decidedly tech-friendly jaunt through Toronto. Her first stop was the now-shuttered Youtube Space at George Brown College, a sort of freewheeling content pasture where Youtube creators could create stuff for their respective channels free of charge. In between mouthfuls of clichés — “I like to think outside the box. I’m a creative person and I’m a risk taker” — Joly promised legislation that would see Canadian broadcasters thrive alongside the Youtubes and Netflixes of the world.

These promises fell flat, particularly in Quebec. The news that Netflix wouldn’t pay tax in Canada kneecapped Joly’s cheery announcement lauding the company’s five-year, $500-million investment here. That a California-based company would be able to stream its (mostly English) content tax-free throughout Quebec, while homegrown (and overwhelmingly French-speaking) producers in Quebec were taxed might charitably be described as utterly tone-deaf. Joly was shuffled out of Heritage less than a year later. (Quebec now taxes Netflix and the other members of the internet-dominating FAANG group.)

Enter Guilbeault, the scowling antagonist to Joly’s Bon Cop schtick. Guilbeault’s 2019 treatise on artificial intelligence, the cheekily named The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, casts many a stink-eye at the likes of Facebook and other addictive, homogenizing, data-hoarding, misinformation-spewing platforms. During a call last week to discuss C-10, he reminded me how much his province of birth had shaped this worldview. “Being a small island of Francophones in an ocean of North American Anglophones is something that many Quebecers are well aware of,” he told me.

You hear a similar perspective from Quebec’s influential cultural sector, which argues the future of the French language is at stake. “It is almost exclusively via the Internet … and increasingly in English, that words, animations and sounds are consumed every day,” reads a brief to the heritage committee from the Union des producteurs et productrices du cinéma québécois. “Since it is no exaggeration to say that the survival of French as a common cultural space for Quebeckers and Francophones outside Quebec will be decided on these platforms, Quebec must finally take appropriate action and it must do it now.”

The province’s mighty cultural industry isn’t the only stakeholder gunning for streaming dollars. But the historical and electoral importance of Quebec to the Liberals has meant the province has played an outsized role in the shaping of the party’s thinking on what Guilbeault has called “big foreign streamers.” It is also where Guilbeault’s prise de bec with Big Tech has had particular resonance. It’s probably not a coincidence the Liberals gave Quebec magazine L’actualité unusual access to Guilbeault this spring, resulting in a mostly credulous 6,500-word profile portraying the minister as the plucky David to Big Tech’s Goliath just as he was in mid-pr push for C-10.

And while Joly at least seemed open to asking whether the CRTC, born to regulate the one-way traffic between radio towers and television broadcasters, was at all equipped to deal with the borderless, multi-direction, user-generated gong show that is the internet, Guilbeault is keen on ensuring the CRTC simply does it — at least when tech companies act like broadcasters.

Whether you call it broadcasting or streaming, Big Tech is doing it. Amazon, Facebook and even Clubhouse are getting into sports. Spotify wants to. Thanks to a partnership with UFC, you can watch grown men and women throttle each other into submission on Tiktok. Youtube, meanwhile, is home to the aforementioned cat videos, live Justin Bieber concerts and select MLB games. Right now, all of it is available to anyone with an internet connection, the CRTC be damned.

The charm offensives aimed at Guilbeault’s ministry are indicative of the high stakes surrounding the legislation. According to lobbying records, 39 organizations have lobbied Heritage on Bill C-10. One side includes traditional broadcasters (Rogers), cable companies (Shaw Communications), content producers (Québecor Média) and industry groups (Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture, Canadian Association of Broadcasters). On the other: Netflix, Twitter Canada and Spotify Canada.

Whether C-10 will end up becoming law is anyone’s guess at this point. “I have to be very honest with you, the window is getting smaller and smaller,” Guilbeault told me last week. The Conservatives aren’t in any particular hurry, in large part because C-10 has been good for the party coffers. For online fundraising, the Conservative’s hashtag-strewn campaign against Bill C-10 has eclipsed the party’s broadsides against the Liberal budget, border security, vaccine rollout and handling of the COVID-19 crisis in general, a senior Conservative Party source told me recently.

And Guilbeault handed the bill’s opponents a bit more red meat over the weekend. After swearing up and down that Bill C-10 wouldn’t affect individuals, Guilbeault told CTV that, well, actually, the legislation could apply to individuals with “millions of viewers” who are “generating a lot of money on social media.” He started the week off promising the legislation would be “crystal clear.” It ended the week as clear as mud.

Should it pass into law, Guilbeault can expect plenty of pushback from Big Tech. Already, Youtube is wondering out loud what exactly constitutes Canadian content and how it is meant to hive it off at the behest of the CRTC, when its recommendations are based on user preferences. “The main concerns we have are around how this would impact Canadian creators and their ability to monetize both within and outside of Canada,” Google Canada’s Skelly told me.

Of course, fighting the likes of Youtube over money and cultural sovereignty is exactly what Guilbeault wants to do. While English Canadian discontent over the bill was coming to a boil last week, a group of Quebec’s leading cultural groups issued a release deploring the heritage committee’s delays and urging C-10’s swift passage. Even if this bill fails, Quebec’s hold on the Liberals means as long as they’re in power the issue of platform regulation isn’t going away.