Reviews | With Bill C-11, Trudeau is still trying to destroy Canadian YouTube

But Olson hardly needs my approval. As of this writing, “Line Goes Up” has been viewed over 7 million times. In the global NFT discourse, a modest man from Calgary, Alberta has emerged as a prominent skeptic.

He is also one of the very many Canadians who have found a way to thrive in the unique media ecosystem that is YouTube. The millions of views his videos regularly draw are something any mainstream Canadian journalist or artist would envy, as would the nearly 700,000 subscribers to his channel, “Folding ideas.”

I thought of Olson — and the 449 Canadian YouTubers more popular than him — amid news that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government intends to revive its stalled efforts to regulate YouTube in a more nationalistic direction. Trudeau’s project, after all, is based on a series of findings about the supposedly struggling state of Canadian digital content creators that are so insultingly at odds with observable reality that they invite suspicion of hidden, darker motives. .

Bill C-11the Online Broadcasting Act — the successor to the abandoned Bill C-10 that garnered much scorn last spring — again proposes to bring YouTube (and other similar platforms) under the authority of the Canadian Broadcasting and Telecommunications (CRTC), which will have the power to force YouTube to categorize and distribute its content as Canadian television and radio stations already do.

In practice, this means dictating “the proportion of time that must be devoted to the broadcast of Canadian programs”, as well as “prescribing what constitutes a Canadian program”. It could eventually force YouTube to bury foreign videos every time a Canadian uses its search engine, as well as force Canadian creators to fill out some sort of checklist when they upload a video to affirm that it meets to the criteria dictated by the government of Canadian character and is worthy of “discoverability” in the new search algorithm. It could even force Canadian users to automatically subscribe to channels the government deems worthy – The current obligation of Canadian cable companies to compel Canadians to subscribe to stations such as Radio Canada and the Indigenous Peoples Television Network whether they like it or not. Clause 10.1(k) of the bill grants the CRTC disturbing and unlimited power to make regulations “respecting such other matters as it deems necessary to achieve its objectives”.

All of this is done in the name of a greater patriotic good: to protect the “cultural sovereigntyand “raise our diverse Canadian voices, music and stories across Canada and around the world through a variety of services,” says the government statementalongside the more ideologically specific goal of ensuring “greater representation of Indigenous peoples, racialized communities, cultural and linguistic minorities, LGBTQ2+ communities, and persons with disabilities” to ensure that “our culture and content better reflect a Canada of the 21st century.

It’s a remarkably ignorant statement given that there’s little evidence that these lofty goals aren’t already being achieved by an unregulated YouTube.

myself a man LGBTQ2+ YouTuber who never struggled to tell “Canadian stories” on the platform – like Tristin Hopper once noted from me in the National Post“man got 250,000 views on video about canadian constitution.” Evan “Vanoss” Fong and Lilly Singh are among the most successful Canadians in YouTube’s history, and both belong to visible minorities. The Radical Indigenous Rights Activist Pam Palmater has a chain, a brazilian-canadian girl has won more than 8 million subscribers making videos where she only speaks Portuguese… the list goes on. The Canadian government itself routinely concedes this reality whenever it feels the need to assemble an elite team of diverse and interesting YouTubers for an overpriced “influencer” campaign pushing vote or vaccines or whatever.

For 17 years, YouTube has been a case study of what would happen if a user-driven streaming platform were allowed to operate in Canada without CRTC intervention. The result has been endless hours of quality Canadian content and thousands of Canadian superstars, some of whom are among the most-watched personalities on the site and perhaps some of the most famous Canadians in the world.

That being the case, Bill C-11 has earned the vicious characterization of its fiercest opponents: an act of an authoritarian-minded government seeking to better control independent media for purely ideological purposes in an unprecedented reinvention the state’s right to control online content. , justified only by a compelling assertion that politicians and bureaucrats should decide what their citizens need to see.

If passed, it will only serve to empower other regimes that believe unlimited freedom to choose what we watch and hear is a monster to be slain.