Hi, and thank you for inviting me. I am appearing as an individual, not on behalf of the Toronto Metropolitan University.
I've been writing publicly on issues relating to Bill C-11 since 2014, when I testified at “Let's Talk TV”.
Bill C-11 to me is not the visionary legislation we deserve. Its story could have been how a small nation of 37 million will engage a global audience of seven billion. As one of few researchers to table original data on new and legacy content, I'm deeply concerned that C-11 will chill Canadian media innovation.
Today, I'll share data from Watchtime Canada, the YouTube study I led, and my book Mediaucracy, which is on legacy media. To be clear, Bill C-11 does not support Canadian storytelling. It supports old ways that define and distribute our stories.
As you heard this morning, Bill C-11 needs clear, decisive amendments. Politicizing this process hurts all Canadians, because we all benefit from a strong media sector, and so does our tax base. Our media is our face to the world.
Our Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asserted in 2016 that Canada would be known for resourcefulness, not resources. Just this month, this May, Trudeau announced a $3.6-billion auto sector investment that will make Canada a global leader in electric vehicles, innovations that he said will create hundreds of jobs.
Without public investment, YouTube, costing more than $6 billion annually at no cost to Canada, created more than 160,000 Canadian entrepreneurs and 30,000 jobs. Make no mistake; as you've heard today, working YouTube, TikTok or Instagram is gruelling. We found that 60% of eligible channels on YouTube earned less than $10,000, and 9% did earn more than $100,000, but it's 100% risk—no free ride.
Yet in open global competition for audiences, Canadians are winning. They're YouTube's number one exporters, with 90% of views outside of Canada, diverse without quotas and enhancing the soft power of our values around the world.
YouTube has empowered local Canadians of every race, ethnicity, ability and gender to engage global audiences. French Canadian YouTubers include this year's Juno nominee singer Charlotte Cardin, Chef Carl is Cooking, beauty artist Cynthia Dulude and Radio-Canada journalist PL Cloutier.
Bill C-11's wrong turn starts with the notion that CRTC has jurisdiction over the whole internet for two reasons. The first is scale. Consider the math. On YouTube alone, 500 hours of content is uploaded per minute, which is 12,000 a day, 150,000 a week. Then add TikTok and other platforms. YouTube does know what's uploaded in Canada; it just doesn't know if the uploaders are Canadian or their team. They don't know if Canadians are uploading from any other place on earth, say, a Buffalo Airbnb, or a VPN. Shoving the new into the old instantly gets absurd.
Second, new media is a feature, not a bug. It's additive innovation. The open Internet paved our way to electric cars, mRNA vaccines and more. Why mess with the earnings of self-starters who never asked a penny from the public purse? If user-generated content, why not video games and reality TV? These are two genres that are healthy because they are market-driven. Bill C-11 gets it backwards. Instead of positioning new media as a model to engage audiences, it ensnares new media in the epic fail part of our old media: disregard for audiences.
Amendments to narrow scope and clearly delete user-generated content would have multiple benefits of quelling concerns about free speech, discoverability—at least for UGC—and the 1950s-style rule-making authorities. The result would focus CRTC on what it does urgently owe legacy media: producer-accessed, platform—agnostic funding.
As a researcher who believes in data-based, goal-driven policy, I ask this: What is C-11's goal? I get that Liberals have the power to pass Bill C-11 as it's written, yet if they do, I suspect challenges will long delay the urgent work and promised windfalls, as you heard this morning.
I'll close with the words by a legacy media CEO who recently sent me an email about Bill C-11. It's short. Here it is: “The industry is shooting itself in the foot.”
Thank you for your time. I'm truly honoured to be here, and I look forward to your questions.