Majority of Canadians support subjecting foreign broadcasters to Canadian laws: survey

A survey by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an advocacy group for the broadcast industry, has found that 70 percent of Canadians surveyed support the idea of subjecting companies such as Facebook Inc., Netflix Inc., Alphabet Inc. with its Google/YouTube platform, and others to Canadian laws and taxes. Released Wednesday, the Friends group commissioned the survey from Nanos Research and found that 87 per cent of respondents fully either support (70 per cent) or somewhat support (17 per cent) requiring foreign companies to follow Canadian laws. It further said 58 per cent strongly agree and 20 per cent somewhat agree that foreign companies such as Netflix broadcasting into Canada via the internet “should be subject to the same rules and contribution obligations as Canadian broadcasters,” it said Thursday. Canadians are also 48 per cent more likely to disagree that foreign companies should not be required to financially contribute to support new Canadian programming, the survey found. “Canadians understand that it is fair and reasonable to require trillion-dollar American media companies like YouTube, Facebook and Netflix to contribute to Canadian culture, which also benefits the broader economy,” Friends of Canadian Broadcasting’s executive director Daniel Bernhard said in a statement on the survey. “That means, for example, that Netflix should be required to invest in Canadian content AND pay taxes on the income it makes from Canadian subscribers, just like everybody else,” he added. Just exactly how tech giants like Netflix, YouTube, and Facebook should be made to contribute to the Canadian system is at issue in the contentious Bill C-10, the revised Broadcasting Act. Earlier this week, Google released a report on YouTube Canada’s “economic, societal and cultural benefits” throughout the country in 2020, “based on direct feedback from our creator community and users,” the company said on its blog, adding that the report estimates YouTube's "creative ecosystem" has contributed some $923 million to Canada's GDP, and the equivalent of 34,100 full-time jobs. The company said the amount of Canadian YouTube channels making six figures in revenue, in Canadian dollars, increased 30 per cent year over year. As well, more than 450 Canadian channels had over 1 million subscribers as of December 2020, and 3,500 channels had over 100,000 subscribers. “These continually growing subscriber counts and revenue figures are strong indicators of the overall health of the Canadian creator economy, which draws on advertiser revenue, channel subscriptions, merchandise sales and additional revenue streams from an engaged global audience,” the company said. On Monday, the House of Commons' Heritage Committee moved to publicize the details of a 2017 deal with Netflix. In September 2017, then-Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly, unveiled her cultural strategy which included a $500 million commitment from Netflix to produce content in Canada, but in which the minister declined to impose sales taxes on foreign digital services. NDP MP Heather McPherson said she brought the motion forward out of concern when she saw the 2021 budget come forward which included a tax exemption for Netflix. Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has said in the past the government intended to introduce legislation that would require Google and Facebook to compensate news organizations when their content appears on their platforms, and that it would follow a similar approach to laws adopted by France and Australia. According to the Friends survey, 59 percent of respondents support having legislation that would require Facebook and Google to pay news organizations for content appearing on their platforms, while 22 per cent said they somewhat support it. Nanos Research surveyed 1,007 Canadians, age 18 years or older, between March 27, 2021, and March 30, 2021. They were randomly recruited by telephone using live agents and administered a survey online. The results come with a margin of error of 3.1 per cent, 19 times out of 20, it said. — Reporting by Hannah Daley at hdaley@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Majority of Canadians support subjecting foreign broadcasters to Canadian laws: survey

Broadcast | June 17, 2021

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Majority of Canadians support subjecting foreign broadcasters to Canadian laws: survey

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