Heritage and Justice ministers to appear before CHPC to address charter concerns

The House of Commons’ Heritage Committee is moving forward with a charter review on Bill C-10, the revision to the Broadcasting Act, and will get answers from Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, as well as the Minister of Justice David Lametti on how it will impact the freedoms of everyday Canadians. Experts will also be bright in to give their interpretation of the revised bill. Work on the clause-by-clause amendments to the bill will be paused in the meantime. OpenMedia campaigns director Matt Hatfield said the organization welcomed the move. “It's not the proper long phone consultation we would have wanted but we're glad that they're slowing it down at least a little bit and filling in some of the pieces that they probably should have dealt with earlier on,” he said in a phone interview with the Wire Report. “This is very broad legislation that, as it turns out, has significant speech implications for people in Canada. There should have been a public consultation at which ordinary citizens.” “We need to go to the text itself, and as they put these amendments forward read the text itself, and get legal scholars to tell us what the revised version of the text means, because unfortunately the Department of Heritage keeps saying things that are not true to the bill.” The committee's review of the bill stalled after it voted to remove Section 4.1 of the bill, thereby bringing social media platforms under regulation. The Conservative Party voiced concern that it could impact everyday Canadians’ freedom of expression and requested that the bill undergo a new charter review to see if it was still compliant. On Friday, after almost two weeks of debate on the matter and procedural complications, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather brought forward a new motion to have the charter statement done as soon as possible and to invite the ministers “to discuss the revised charter statement, and any implication of amendments made by the committee, to the bill.” Conservative MP Kevin Waugh brought forward an amendment Monday requesting that work on the bill be suspended until the charter review is completed and the ministers appear before the committee. He also requested that University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, an outspoken critic of the bill, be part of the panel with the ministers. The committee tweaked his request by allowing each of the four parties to choose an expert to appear before the committee, after Bloc Quebecois MP Martin Champoux said he had “serious reservations” about allowing only one party to choose an expert witness. The ministers will appear before the committee this Friday, and the expert panel will convene next Monday as a chance to respond to the ministers’ testimony. “There are so many possible speakers, for example from the culture sector who were already invited here, and who have been calling on us for the last number of weeks because they are concerned by the impasse that the committee has experienced. And rightly so they want to be heard just as much,” Champoux said in French, according to simultaneous translation. On Monday, the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA) union released a statement “urging expeditious passing” of the bill. “The Broadcasting Act in its current form is outdated. It does not reflect the modern digital era and continues to put Canadian creators and broadcasters at a disadvantage,” David Sparrow, its national president, said in the release. “Bill C-10 is an overdue but positive first step in modernizing our broadcasting system – one that will benefit Canadian culture, our economy and our creators.” The Writers Guild of Canada also issued a similar statement. “Simply put there has been a massive decrease in the volume of Canadian-written shows in the last several years,” it said, adding that Canadian-created series has fallen by 50 per cent since 2017. In a teleconference after the committee meeting, Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin said she was “happy” that the committee finally found common ground. “I'm relieved to see the Conservatives are finally listening to the cultural sector, there two weeks of unnecessary filibustering,” she told reporters. Dabrusin added that there are still proposed amendments to Bill C-10 up for debate that will “severely limit the powers of the CRTC to regulate social media platforms.” One of the amendments was tabled by Dabrusin last Friday (and has yet to be voted on) which proposed to limit CRTC regulation to discoverability of Canadian content and to subjecting web giants to financial contributions into the Canadian cultural system. However, Hatfield said "interfering with discoverability is still affecting speech.” “A feed has a finite amount of content in a given timeframe that someone spends in it and if you're mandating that your feed must show certain content, implicitly, you are hiding other content that would have been in the feed otherwise," Hatfield said. Dabrusin, at the press conference, said there would be no quota for how much Canadian content has to be promoted and Daniel Bernhard, Executive director of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, previously told the Wire Report that privately-owned web giants already suggest to users what to watch, and that therefore criticism was “overblown”. Hatfield said that while companies making decisions on how to curate user content can also raise freedom of speech concerns, putting that power in the hands of the government “all across the internet” is no better. He said a better solution would be to ask social media platforms “for more transparency on how their algorithms work and to do more to empower us as users to make decisions around how algorithms on those platforms curate our content.” On Sunday Guilbeault appeared on CTV’s Question Period and appeared to say that channels with “millions of users” would fall under the act. His office later clarified, according to CTV, that “an individual -- a person -- who uses social media will never be considered as broadcasters and will not be subject to the obligations or regulations within the Broadcasting Act. Following criticism of Guilbeault's CTV appearance, Dabrusin sought to further clarify at Monday’s press conference, saying that Canadian YouTubers who make money off their channels will not be brought under the Act and that it will only require social media platform companies, such as Alphabet Inc., which owns YouTube, to make financial contributions. -- Reporting by Jenna Cocullo at jcocullo@thewirereport.ca, and editing byMichael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

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Heritage and Justice ministers to appear before CHPC to address charter concerns

Broadcast | May 10, 2021

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