Official language minority groups ask to be included in Broadcasting Act overhaul

The government’s draft legislation to reform Canada’s Broadcasting Act must be amended to explicitly include official language minority communities, stakeholders told the House of Commons heritage committee Monday, during its first hearing into Bill C-10. Representatives of the Fédération culturelle canadienne-française and the Quebec English-language Production Council both told the committee that the Bill should be amended to specifically reference the communities, which consist of Anglophones in Quebec and Francophones in the rest of Canada. QEPC co-chair Kenneth Hirsch said the legislation reforming the broadcasting sector was “more desperately needed than anything Parliament has enacted for broadcasting since the establishment of the CBC in 1936 due to the influence of foreign video streaming services." “Yet Canada’s official language minorities are totally absent from this draft of C-10. Despite the parliamentary mandate to support the vitality of the official languages minorities in the Broadcasting Act and the Official Languages Act, the draft legislation before you fails to even mention us. We ask you to reconsider and rectify this regrettable oversight,” Hirsch said. “Canadian broadcasting policies must consider the need of the official language minorities and help us secure our future.” The bill, tabled by Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault in November, has been criticized as not being comprehensive enough by the federal opposition parties. On Friday Guilbeault told a heritage committee hearing probing the relationship between the government and Facebook Inc. that once the bill is passed -- which he expects to be around the end of the year -- the CRTC will be issued a policy direction to bring online platforms like Netflix Inc. and Spotify AB into the regulatory sphere within nine months. In addition to the the Broadcasting Act update, the government plans to introduce other measures to regulate online services, including a corporate tax on some revenues of the biggest web giants, as well as an extension to the sales tax and regulation around online hate speech, followed by new rules requiring the likes of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Facebook to compensate news outlets for linking to their content.

Official language minority groups ask to be included in Broadcasting Act overhaul

Brief | February 1, 2021

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