Mr. Chair, let me put some context to this amendment.
You will remember that Mr. Chan of Facebook came to committee. I asked him this question. Do you know that Facebook is used today for broadcasting? This is where this amendment came from. I know hundreds of former broadcasters who have been laid off or let go who now have a show on Facebook, a one-hour show, or maybe two- or three-hour shows—Bob McCown, Rod Pedersen, Don Cherry—and this is where the amendment comes from, Mr. Housefather.
Mr. Chan could not answer my question when he came to committee with a Facebook group in February as I asked Facebook the question: Do you know people are using Facebook as a broadcasting tool? They're selling advertising on Facebook for their shows. They have subscribers. He claimed he knew nothing about this, which I found hard to believe, but this is where this amendment comes from.
Then I flagged it with our side, saying this is going to explode because what's happening is these people are entrepreneurs and to keep their hand in the broadcasting industry they've taken to Facebook to do these shows.
Mr. Ripley, you were correct when you answered that. This amendment by Mr. Rayes talks about this.
Do we want the CRTC regulating everyone with 10 subscribers and $1,000 coming in? No, we don't want that. This figure arrived from the Australian figure, more or less. We went to the former commissioner of the CRTC and vice-commissioner and asked. This is a big issue in this country. You know it's going to get more and more common as we see less and less conventional broadcasting, whether it's radio or TV stations going dark. This is something that has been coming for the last three or four years on social media. I flagged it in February with Mr. Chan, who claimed at the time Facebook knew nothing about it.
Therefore, this amendment is very important to the Broadcasting Act. I would say it's one of the most important amendments that we can make, because people in this country are using Facebook to generate subscribers. They're using Facebook to generate money and advertising, which according to Mr. Chan is fine.
I'm going to back up what Mr. Rayes said, and just in layman's terms this is where this amendment came from. In the discussion, Mr. Chair, that we had with Facebook officials in February or March, when they came, I flagged this because I see many people in this country making money off Facebook, which is fine, but are we going to over-regulate them with the CRTC, or is there going to be a threshold? We think that 500,000 subscribers and $80 million per year is the threshold.
If I can give you some context on the amendment, here it is. It was through the questions that I posed to Mr. Chan and Facebook that we felt this amendment had to be included in the regulations.