The government plans to release its final policy direction on Bill C-11 today just days ahead of the start of a weeks-long series of hearings at the CRTC on the Online Streaming Act (I am scheduled to appear in early December). Ahead of the release, Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge tries to re-write history, urging fast enactment of the legislation and blaming the Conservatives for the delays. Yet here is the reality: Bill C-10, the predecessor to Bill C-11, would have become law back in 2021 had the government not opened the door to regulating user content. Instead, the bill rightly became a source of concern, leading to years of legislative delays that virtually guarantees that nothing will take effect until 2025 at the earliest.
Post Tagged with: "c-11"
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 184: Philip Palmer on the Constitutional Doubts About the Government’s Internet Laws
Is the Canadian government’s Internet legislation constitutional? That question arose during the hearings on Bills C-11 and C-18, but has taken on a new urgency given the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision involving an Alberta challenge to federal environmental assessment legislation. With limits on federal powers back in the spotlight, the vulnerability of the legislation requires further examination.
Philip Palmer is a former Justice lawyer who appeared before the House of Commons committee studying Bill C-11 to make the case that the law does not fall within the scope of federal powers. He joins the Law Bytes podcast to explain why and what it might mean for the Internet streaming and online news laws.
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 181: Is this Podcast About to be Regulated by the CRTC?
Several weeks ago, the CRTC released the first set of what is likely to become at least a dozen decisions involving the Online Streaming Act, formerly known as Bill C-11. One of those decisions involved establishing which services would be required to register with the CRTC as part of new registration requirements in the law. That sparked an immediate public debate over the scope of the registration requirements and their potential applicability to podcasts. This week’s Law Bytes podcast tries to set the record straight: the registration rules – and even the forthcoming regulations – will not regulate what you can say on a podcast nor do they establish a government podcast registry. However, the registration rules and the forthcoming regulations will have a direct or indirect impact on podcasts.
Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s Internet Regulation Misinformation Problem
The temperature over the government’s Internet legislation has increased this week as many Canadians wake up to the consequences of Bills C-11 and C-18. CRTC regulations on mandated registration requirements arising from the Online Streaming Act and the possibility that Google will follow Meta’s lead and remove news links for search results in Canada due to the Online News Act have placed the spotlight on harmful effects of the government’s approach. In response, Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge has become more vocal on both social media and mainstream media in defence of the government’s approach. Unfortunately, her comments included repeated errors (suggesting that independent media has not reached any deals with Internet platforms which is not remotely accurate), maligned digital creators (saying that Bill C-11 wasn’t about them), were contradicted by the CRTC, or featured outright misinformation. I posted a pair of threads fact-checking the Minister, which are posted below. There can obviously be different views on the Internet regulation, but the Minister ought to know her file and stick to the facts.
Limiting Public Participation: Why No One Should Be Surprised at the CRTC’s Internet Services Registration Requirement Ruling
The CRTC’s decision to require registration for a wide range of Internet sites and services that meet a $10 million revenue threshold, including podcasters, adult sites, and news sites, appears to have taken many Canadians by surprise. For anyone who closely followed Bill C-11, this was entirely expected given that the bill adopts an approach in which all audio and video content anywhere in the world is subject to Canada’s Broadcasting Act. I listed many of the sites that are now caught by the regulations back in 2021 based on an internal Heritage memo that identified many that no one would reasonably describe as web giants. In other words, this isn’t an outlier. Rather, it is how the government crafted the law with a “regulate everything” default and the expectation that the CRTC would establish some exemptions. But even if most Canadians were only vaguely aware of the exceptionally broad scope of Bill C-11, they might still have missed the regulatory process that led the CRTC to establish the $10 million threshold and acknowledge that this is the first step in a bigger regulatory plan. That is because the Commission intentionally limited public participation and rejected efforts to extend the timeline for submissions on the grounds that the issue was “industry focused and relatively narrow in scope.”
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