Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
For well over a decade, content on YouTube has been reflecting Canada's cultural mosaic, raising diverse voices and sharing Canadian stories around the globe.
Thanks to YouTube, creators like the Hacksmith are building businesses, artists like Shawn Mendes are breaking through and Canadians from all walks of life can share their voices with the world. Canadian YouTuber Lilly Singh explained it best when she said, “For Canadian creators who don't fit the mainstream mould, the openness of YouTube provides the opportunity to find their niche among billions of people.”
We've seen first-hand that, when barriers are removed and Canadians are given equal, free access to an open platform and a global audience, they can take on the world. For Canadian creators, YouTube is a level playing field on a world stage. It doesn't matter who you know or what you look like. Any Canadian with an idea and a smart phone can be a creator and find an audience on YouTube.
In many ways, YouTube serves as a digital video library of Canadian culture, past, present and future. It has allowed our Canadian heritage moments to cross borders with over 28 million views.
And Encore+, our partnership with the Canada media fund, has brought CanCon favourites to viewers around the world.
We support the objectives of Bill C‑11, and we want to work together to achieve these shared goals.
I want to be very clear about YouTube's position on Bill C-11, because it is often misunderstood and sometimes misrepresented.
Some believe that we want to avoid all regulation. This is not true. In fact, when the minister says that an official song by The Weeknd on YouTube should be subject to the act, we have no objection to that, and we certainly have no objection to further financially contributing to Canadian content.
Our concern is that Bill C-11 gives the government control over every aspect of Canadians' experience on YouTube. It does not include effective guardrails on either the powers given to the CRTC or the content to which those powers apply.
And when I say “content”, I mean all content—whether that's a dance challenge, a cat video, or an official music video by Charlotte Cardin.
If this bill passes as written, the CRTC could determine what content should be promoted in Canada through discoverability obligations and how Canadian creators advertise against their content. This approach puts the regulator between viewers and creators, handing the CRTC the power to decide who wins and who loses.
Bill C-11 could deeply hurt Canadian creators and viewers. For viewers who rely on us to serve them content that is relevant to their interests, artificially forcing an open platform like YouTube to recommend content based on government priorities would backfire. It imposes supply-side measures onto a demand-based technology and ignores two critical features of today's digital reality.
First, Canadians have infinite choice. If the government mandates that they be recommended content that is not personally relevant, they will simply abandon the video or even give it a thumbs-down.
Second, these behaviours train our systems, and that's where the risk to creators comes in. The system learns that this content is not relevant or engaging for viewers, and then it applies those lessons on a global scale. It means that, ultimately, creators boosted in Canada as CanCon could be demoted in search results around the world. That is a terrifying prospect for Canadian creators, who depend on international audiences for over 90% of their watch time, and it would directly hurt their revenue.
It is possible to support Canadian musicians, artists and storytellers without putting thousands of creators at risk, and we have some ideas how. The first is to protect the livelihood of Canada's digital creators by narrowing the language of proposed section 4.2 to only capture full-length commercial music. The second is to strengthen proposed section 9.1 to prevent regulatory impacts to the recommendation algorithms. Finally, it is to narrowly apply broadcasting regulations and better reflect differing technology and business models.
We are confident that, with more precision in Bill C-11, the government can accomplish its objectives. Ultimately, we all have the same goal: to preserve and celebrate Canadian stories and culture.
Thank you for the chance to speak with you today on this important piece of legislation.
I look forward to your questions.