No, it's okay. That's what happens. It's rare that there is a woman on a panel like this.
Good morning. I would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Morghan Fortier. I am the co-owner and CEO of Skyship Entertainment, creator of Canada's most-watched YouTube channel, Super Simple Songs, with over 1.3 billion lifetime views in Canada alone.
Since founding our company in 2015, we've grown into a studio that employs 35 artists, writers, puppeteers and musicians. During that time, we've built a global audience, and today we share our Canadian-owned and Canadian-created content with more than 30 million families, classrooms, and day cares all around the world every single day, including hundreds of thousands of Canadians.
We accomplished this because of three main factors: the desire to create great content for children, parents and caregivers; our willingness to take risks for the sake of owning and controlling our own IP outright; and the tremendous skill, dedication and creativity of our hard-working Canadian artists. We accomplished it without broadcasters or government intervention.
We are but a single success story among a robust and rapidly growing industry of like-minded entrepreneurs who have started small businesses as digital content creators right here in Canada. We are also an example of the amazing things that can happen when the government takes a soft-touch approach and allows a new industry to flourish.
Bill C-11 is not an ill-intentioned piece of legislation, but it is a bad piece of legislation. It's been written by those who don't understand the industry they're attempting to regulate, and because of that, they've made it incredibly broad. It mistakes platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Facebook for broadcasters like the CBC, Netflix and Amazon Prime. It doesn't understand how those platforms operate, and it ignores the fundamental importance of global discoverability. Worst of all, proposed section 4.2 hands sweeping power to the CRTC to regulate the Internet use of everyday Canadians and small businesses like mine that are not even associated with broadcasters.
I absolutely appreciate the necessity of updating the Broadcasting Act to include the new band of broadcasters—companies that take pitches, green-light shows and movies, and pay for productions—but regulating user-generated content on platforms like Facebook, TikTok and YouTube is far too overreaching. In the Venn diagram of the entertainment industry, the needs of legacy broadcasters and the enterprise of digital content creators are not interconnected. There is no demonstrable reason that user-generated content needs to be included in this bill.
Minister Rodriguez has insisted that UGC will not be included in Bill C-11, but this is untrue. Last week, the chair of the CRTC, Mr. Scott, confirmed that UGC is in the current draft of the bill. If it truly isn't intended to be in the bill, then it simply needs to be removed; proposed section 4.2 just needs to be taken out. If you don't remove that section, you're asking Canadians to just trust that you won't misuse this far-reaching law and that future governments won't misuse it either. Thousands of Canadian small businesses and digital content creators deserve far more consideration than that.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to taking your questions.