Evidence of meeting #29 for Canadian Heritage in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was amendments.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Vice-Chair Québec and Senior Vice-President, Content Development & News, BCE Inc.
Yes, we are all in favour of promoting Quebec culture, and I am the first to say so since I am a Quebecker. As I have said, we invest a great deal in Quebec content, both audio and video. In terms of quotas, I think the goal is to offer people what they want to hear. If they want to listen to music from Quebec, we offer it to them. The same is true for television programming from Quebec.
Ultimately, the goal is to offer Canadians and Quebeckers—
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
Madam Chair, Mr. Julian and I set our clocks at the same time and they say the same thing. So I have at least 30 or 40 seconds left before you interrupt me.
If I may, I would like to ask Ms. Moses my last question.
Vice-Chair Québec and Senior Vice-President, Content Development & News, BCE Inc.
Shall I continue?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I will give you that leeway, but my clock is not saying that. I set my clock exactly when I told you that you had two and a half—
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
Okay, thank you.
Ms. Moses, you said you have to offer people what they want, but that in a way contradicts the principle of allowing people to discover music. We cannot continually provide what people are already familiar with.
Would you not agree that the requirements relating to discovering music mean that people can discover and appreciate music?
Vice-Chair Québec and Senior Vice-President, Content Development & News, BCE Inc.
Yes, I agree with you, and I was just about to say that diversity and the content offered are extremely important. That is what makes our industry flourish, and that applies to both television and radio. Discovering talent applies to all platforms and all kinds of art. That is our goal.
Regardless of the content, if it is not diversified, there is no audience. On the other hand, the larger the audience, the higher our revenues, and the more we invest in our Canadian, Quebec, French and English content.
Vice-Chair Québec and Senior Vice-President, Content Development & News, BCE Inc.
Thank you.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much.
I now go to Mr. Julian for two and a half minutes, please.
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
I'd like go to Ms. Boltman now.
Ms. Boltman, the Friends' brief talks about the tens of thousands of jobs lost over the last few years and cites that Google and Facebook made $7.5 billion in Canada from digital ads in 2019.
Is this why Friends is pressing the committee to adopt Bill C-11? Is it that we're seeing, in addition to its being an uneven playing field, that we're essentially hoovering money out of the country and some of it should come back to actually create Canadian productions and provide for the ability of Canadians to tell stories, both to themselves and to the world?
Executive Director, FRIENDS
If I may, I guess what you're asking is why Bill C-11 matters to us.
We share the longest international border with the most dominant power and most prolific producer of entertainment content in the world, and for better or for worse, American content has an incredible influence over our culture. However, history has taught us time and time again that failure to protect and promote our culture and our identity is a recipe for foreign domination.
Our ability to protect and promote Canadian culture and identity happens through our sharing of stories, be they film, television, journalism or music. By whatever audiovisual means, the survival of our stories has always rested on government support, and Bill C-11 will allow us to remain in control over our culture and our stories by shoring up that support.
Requiring contributions from foreign tech giants that extract billions of dollars from our country will help sustain our industry while driving investment and innovation in the creation of Canadian content that continues to reflect our diversity of voices and who we are as Canadians. Foreign contributions will level the playing field between Canadian broadcasters and foreign platforms. Frankly, it sends a message to the world that Canada is open for business, but there are no more free rides. If you benefit from the system, you must contribute to it.
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
The link between the loss of jobs in the industry and the fact that, at the same time, we've seen massive amounts of revenue leaving the country, essentially means that, as you note in your brief, Canadian media lost 50% of its ad revenues from 2017 to 2019.
Executive Director, FRIENDS
I think that in our brief we're talking more about news. If you want to talk about jobs in the cultural sector in general, I think there are other people.... The DGC spoke to this last week, about the declining sector, and I think the CMPA can speak well to it, too.
I'm happy to speak about news, but I get the impression that you are trying to speak more about the cultural sector in general. I'm happy to speak about the news sector, if that's what you're asking.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
I'm afraid you have only one second left.
Thank you very much, Ms. Boltman.
We will move on now to Ms. Thomas for the Conservative Party for five minutes.
Conservative
Rachael Thomas Conservative Lethbridge, AB
J.J., you wrote a column in the New York Times a little while ago, in April. In it you said the following:
...an act of an authoritarian-minded government seeking greater control over independent media for purely ideological purposes in a globally unprecedented reimagining of the state’s right to control online content, justified only by an imperious assertion that politicians and bureaucrats should decide what their citizenry needs to see.
If passed, it will serve only to empower other regimes that believe the unrestricted freedom to choose what we watch and hear is a monster to be slain.
Do you care to elaborate on this?
As an Individual
That's some good rhetoric on my part—isn't it?
It was in The Washington Post, just for the record. When we hear some of this rhetoric, I think it disturbs some people. We hear stuff about how we have to protect ourselves from foreign domination and we have to maintain our cultural sovereignty. It's the idea that Canadian culture is this fragile thing that the evil foreigners are going to corrupt and sort of erode. That, to me, is the kind of rhetoric you associate with Viktor Orbán's Hungary or something.
I don't think that a progressive democratic country like Canada wants to set the road map to regulating the Internet that can then be adopted by the Viktor Orbáns of the world. What's to prevent an authoritarian government from saying that we want to protect our cultural sovereignty too, and that's why we need to regulate YouTube and make sure that only great patriotic content is seen. We'll play around with the algorithm to ensure that only the patriotic content we believe our people should see will get boosted in their feeds and their subscriber accounts, and all that kind of stuff.
This is a real old-fashioned way of thinking about Canada and thinking about Canadian culture, which I personally do not have a lot of time for. I think it is increasingly a very dated premise of thinking about culture, which most YouTubers just do not conceptualize in the same way. They don't think they're making content in order to preserve some fragile idea of Canadian sovereignty. They think they're making a cooking video, a fitness tutorial or a DIY video.
I make videos that are specifically about Canadian stuff, but there are tons of Canadian YouTubers who have been successful by just making the kind of content that they think there's an audience for. Sometimes that audience is Canadian. Sometimes that audience is international.
Canadians are very diverse people, and we have a lot of different interests. I think the great thing about YouTube and new media is that it allows Canadians to create the kind of content they want for a market that they believe exists. They sink or swim based on the popularity of that. It's true what one of the other fellows said, which is that there are a lot of failed Canadian YouTubers. There are a lot of failed Canadian actors. Nobody is guaranteed success in the cultural realm.
I think that YouTube is a marvellous case study of how you can be an independent Canadian content creator and achieve wealth, success and fame, and all of the sorts of things that creatives want, without government regulation, without subsidies, without mandates and CanCon requirements, and all of this kind of stuff.
What I am saying is that I think we need to kind of get away from this.... If old media wants to still live under that regime, that's fine. To me, as a new media creator, when I hear talk of protecting our culture from foreign domination and how we need government's sort of paternalistic hand to ensure that YouTube will be more patriotic and more Canadian, and that consumers of YouTube will only watch the right sorts of videos, that stuff gets my back up, and it gets the back up of a lot of Canadian content creators who don't want to be told what kind of content they have to make.