Canadian Heritage Committee on May 30th, 2022

[Margaret McGuffin]

It's been very interesting watching legislation being passed around the world in reference to the tech companies. What we saw in the last two years out of Europe around their copyright act and the misinformation and the misleading statements that were made around that act is something we can learn from here in Canada. We also saw this in Australia with their newspaper legislation, where Google made misleading statements and threatened that the legislation was going to break the Internet.

It is a script that we are seeing over and over again, and you as parliamentarians are going to see it as we move to other kinds of legislation. We need to make sure that the misinformation ends and that there is a way of going through the information that's being presented and making sure that we're not misleading the public or scaring people into thinking that the Internet is going to break. The Internet is not going to be broken by Bill C-11.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Thank you.

Maybe Catherine Edwards would like to weigh in. I saw you nodding your head a lot with some of the testimony earlier. What do you think about the power of platforms to perform gatekeeping roles?

[Catherine Edwards]

Just a couple of things pop to mind. I sort of agree with Mr. Coteau. I took a master's in civic media in Boston a couple of years ago, and one of the things we talked a lot about is that algorithms are never neutral. They're always informed by the biases of the people that write them. For example, for a Black person to get a mortgage in the United States is much more difficult than for a white person. It's kind of like young men getting car insurance in Canada. It's assumed that they're more likely to have an accident, so it's harder for them to get it and the rates go up.

Those are a result of algorithms. You type in information to get an estimate online. All of these factors are already in there. They're not gender neutral. They're not race neutral. They're not nation neutral. I think the biases of every algorithm are going to be different, but I totally think that it's legitimate for the Canadian government to study those biases and to make sure that Canadians have equal access to those platforms.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Sonoda, thank you for joining us today as well. You guys spoke very eloquently about the state of Canadian arts and culture and how you've seen a decline over the past few years. Can you just give us a little bit of context about the 1991 Broadcasting Act that's already in place supporting Canadian content, and what that's done to our arts and culture in this country to date?

[Warren Sonoda]

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Madam Chair and committee members.

I remember reading the 1991 Broadcasting Act—this was prior to film school—and I thought it was poetry. The act that you are putting together will last not just a generation, but for generations. It's been 31 years. It has not just protected the Canadian voice; it nurtured it. With the migration from Canadian storytelling from the linear broadcast role that we know to what is now the online streaming role, we need the same sort of act and legislation to continue what we're doing. The work we're doing is not finished. It won't be finished. Even though Schitt's Creek won every Emmy last year, we still have more stories to tell. Our creators need to do that. Yes, the act is consequential that way.

Was there a follow-up?

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

My follow-up question would just be, how urgent is a modernization of the Broadcasting Act in your opinion?

[Warren Sonoda]

We need to do this now. We need to do this immediately, and I'm glad that this is going through committee. Again it's going to take time after this has passed to do the “ways and means”, which we like to call it, but again we need to make sure that this is solid and it will last, hopefully, another 30 years. That's why it's platform agnostic and it centres Canadian talent and storytelling.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much. That's it, Lisa.

John, I don't think we're going to hear from Mr. Uppal. Do you want to go for it?

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

That's fine, Madam Chair. I'm happy to take another turn. I just feel excited that the committee wants to hear me ask questions so often.

I want to follow up on a couple of points that we've talked a bit about earlier. First, I want to go back to Mr. Benzie and just a little bit about algorithms. I think a lot of times we can see algorithms for what they are, and we can see algorithms for what we might want them to be, or what we might want to imagine them to be. In your opinion, with the assumption that algorithms may not always be completely neutral, do you think that the government should have a role in adjudicating the algorithms of these entities?

[Scott Benzie]

What I was trying to say is that algorithms are theoretically content agnostic. They react to how people are engaging with content. They have profiles of who people are, and they try to serve that content up to other people. I will say that I am all for algorithmic transparency. I think we should be having conversations about what goes into an algorithm and how it works. I just know that artificially manipulating them is not going to work. That's a terrible idea for a number of reasons, but there also is no....

If we take YouTube as an example, this is machine learning and AI. While to my colleague's point, there might have been biases to put into it, but we're not going to be able to call “Mr. Algorithm” before the CRTC and ask him how this all works. There are too many things that go into it. I wish it were different, quite frankly. I guess we'll see. I do support algorithmic transparency, though.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

To that end—and I'm not going to really get into it because it will take over this discussion—but I think there is a conversation to be had on the power of tech giants globally and how they operate in monopolistic and duopolistic ways as organizations. I think there is that conversation to be had, but it's for another day.

I want to come back to the question at hand and to that conversation that was happening earlier about the algorithms and spending money to promote content. Maybe you could just talk to us a minute about buying advertising versus manipulating the algorithm itself and how we can differentiate those two on these platforms.

Could you just explain to the committee, and to anyone tuning in at home, how what we're talking about are two different things there?

[Scott Benzie]

Sure. When you're buying advertising as an advertiser, you're setting the demographic or cohort that you want your content to be identified by. You're targeting that audience. When something's happening naturally in the algorithm, the algorithm is deciding who that cohort is based on likes, wants and the other same personalities they've built. For maximum sharing and watching, these platforms want revenue. They want people on the platforms for the most time possible, so they want to give you the most engaging content.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I appreciate that.

Again, going back to the question I had from the first round about proposed section 4.2 and the concept of direct versus indirect revenue that someone might benefit from, I'm sure the organizations you've worked with and stakeholders who I've had conversations with are really perplexed by the idea of direct versus indirect revenue, implying that, in one way or another, almost anything could be seen to have an indirect revenue function.

Do you just want to give us a few thoughts or your opinion on that aspect of it?

[Scott Benzie]

Indirect revenue can mean anything from merch sales to concert tickets to selling your online course, whatever it is. Indirect revenue can literally be anything.

More importantly, just because a creator is not monetizing a piece of content does not mean that the content is not being monetized. On a lot of platforms, ads are run on content regardless of the creator monetizing them. That content is, by its nature, getting direct or indirect revenue. Literally everything on YouTube has direct or indirect revenue.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

I appreciate that.

I want to step away just a minute from you, Mr. Benzie, and go to some of our other witnesses.

We heard some conversations earlier in this committee and others about the definition of Canadian content and some of the challenges that certain entities have had with the definition and assumption of ownership of intellectual property.

I want to turn to Mr. Sonoda and Ms. Noble from ACTRA to get your opinions on the definition of Canadian content and what we may hope or expect to see in a ministerial directive to the CRTC on revising what Canadian content may or may not be post-Bill C-11.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

That's a nice question, but I think we have 10 seconds. If the answer can be done in 10 seconds, John, that would be great.

[Warren Sonoda]

We have a working CanCon definition, and it's flexible. It's 10 to 10 for Canadian content and six out of 10 for service production. It's working. If it wants to be revisited, we'll do that as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Sonoda.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

See, Madam Chair, that was an answer in 10 seconds. It is possible.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[Warren Sonoda]

I'm a director.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I know that. I get that.

We're going to go to one more round, and it's going to be Mr. Waugh for the Conservatives.

You have five minutes, Kevin.

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

Madam Chair, could we just skip Mr. Waugh for now? He's apparently on his way to the room. He was online and now he's coming here physically.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

All right. Can you go again, Mr. Nater?

[John Nater, Conservative, Perth—Wellington, ON]

No, I'll save my spot. Mr. Bittle is eager to go.