Trudeau government’s campaign of disinformation now as plain as the nose on Pinocchio's face
After two years of Bill C-11 propaganda and bullying, the truth about how the CRTC has the power (we told you so) to regulate your uploads on social media is finally conceded
(No paywall! The Rewrite is shareable on all platforms, including Facebook, so please help us spread the word and continue to build our base)
The Online Streaming Act is going to change your life in ways that almost all of you won’t like and - because it’ll be done incrementally by the CRTC - even more of you won’t even notice. It’s a silent killer.
We’ll have plenty more to say about that in the years ahead. What you really need to know about it today, though, is that the whole time the bill was winding its way through Parliament, the government was - bare-faced - not telling you the truth about it while working to undermine the credibility of those of us who were. Last week, the Department of Justice came clean.
The Act, aka Bill C-11, passed a year ago. It gives the CRTC, which used to be just a broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, authority over all audio and video content on the internet. All through the debate and afterwards, many of us who wrote about it and appeared before parliamentary committees to speak to it, pointed out that C-11 gave the CRTC authority over user generated content (UGC), ie., your uploaded videos on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc. and podcasts. We would literally direct inquiring journalists to the text of the bill to show that it was there; reporters would then say, “but the government says C-11 doesn’t cover UCG” while we’d point out “it’s right there, in writing.”
The government’s approach, led by then-Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, was to deny that what was clearly there, was there (Gaslighting 101). What the government was engaged in was pure propaganda - a text book example of a campaign of misinformation and disinformation that was tolerated by many (not all) of those reporting on the issue.
But the Liberals didn’t stop there. They attacked their critics and got very nasty indeed. When Scott Benzie, representing digital creators, appeared before the Heritage Commons committee, Parliamentary Secretary Chris Bittle demanded that he be investigated by the Lobbying Commissioner and the smear made headlines from coast to coast. Nothing ever came of it of course; Bittle and his government were engaged in pure guilt by accusation bullying and intimidation of witnesses. And the headlines are still there.
Once the bill passed, regulations and orders in council followed to try to make sure the CRTC - not an agency to turn down offers of fresh turf - didn’t get out of hand with UGC. Well, good luck with that.
The very first thing the regulator came up with was a decision on how much its new online serfs would have to pay to cover the cost of being regulated. And it did so based on Canadian revenue, including money earned from - you guessed it - UGC. Google paid up but cried foul and took the matter to court, basically saying hey wait a second you guys said UGC content was out of scope. In its most recent decision, the CRTC noted that it is excluding podcasts because there just isn’t enough revenue to bother with at this stage. Nothing about its wording indicated its view had been informed by Heritage Minister Pascale St Onge’s declaration that podcasts would not be regulated.
Last week, Michael Geist got a hold of the government’s response to Google’s court challenge. Click on the link for more, but here’s the whole issue in a paragraph.
“For the better part of two years, a steady parade of government ministers and MPs insisted that user content regulation was out of the bill even as a plain reading made it clear that it was in. This week Ministry of Justice lawyers provided their take, arguing on behalf of the government in a court filing that “the Act does allow for regulation of user-uploaded programs on social media services.”
So there it is. As plain as the nose on Pinocchio’s face.
Throughout their shameless campaign for subsidies, media and their lobbyists have continued to insist that they play a vital role in preserving our democracy by providing the public with the truth and protecting them from misinformation and disinformation. And yet ….. not a peep on this one. Lie to the public, intimidate witnesses and ya, no biggy, said a long list of assignment editors.
Speaking of flawed legislation, last week I wrote for The Hub on the latest development in the saga of the Online News Act (Bill C-18). It’s the bill that caused Meta to ban news links and resulted in the government agreeing with Google’s proposal that it put $100 million into a fund for media in exchange for an exemption from the Act and halting its investments in Google News Showcase.
Google got bids from two “collectives” vying to administer the loot. It chose to snub the group comprised of the CBC, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB), Postmedia, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail and many others in favour of a much, much smaller group of a dozen operators that you’ve likely never heard of. It certainly looked like somebody was reminding someone just who their daddy is.
So while it wasn’t surprising that the New Jersey hedge fund boys backing News Media Canada would be miffed at losing control of how they planned to decide who qualified for the loot and how it was administered, their public response to the snub was jaw-dropping. If you thought campaigning for the Online News Act by turning over their front pages to spread misinformation about how Facebook was “stealing” their content was inconsistent with maintaining public trust in media, prepare to wince.
The losers in the power collective fired off a request to the CRTC (which ultimately approves the deal) demanding a laundry list of regulations, the most eye-catching of which was the request that administration costs be limited to 0.5 percent of the fund. This is about one-tenth of what would normally be allocated as a minimum for fund administration.
I inquired of News Media Canada as to whether 0.5 percent for administration costs was consistent with the proposal it had made to administer the fund. No reply. With that level of transparency, no wonder they lost the bid.
Worse, in their news release about it, the big companies hid behind the skirts of spokespeople for the ethnic press and provincial weekly newspaper associations.
One can only assume that reputation management is no longer a concern.
Spare a thought for employees at Global News, where a number of people were laid off last week. Things aren’t great at Corus Entertainment, as this chart illustrates:
Thanks this week to Sue Deyell and Andrew Schultz at QR77 in Calgary for having me on their show last Thursday. Also recorded with Tony Clement for his Boom and Bust show coming up this week on the News Forum. Check it out.
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Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair and AB-NWT Commissioner at the CRTC, former editor-in-chief and publisher of the Calgary Herald and a National Newspaper Award winner. He also worked as executive director of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.
There are a couple of other big lies the government and CRTC have spread about C11. Namely, the bill is about modernizing the broadcast system and levelling the playing field.
C11 doesn't modernize the broadcast system, it modernizes the Cancon subsidy system by imposing 20th century regulations on the internet. Modernizing the broadcast system would involve broadcasters having to adopt features, like 4K, HDR, Dolby Atmos, online service cancellation, and multi language support, that streamers provide.
If the CRTC was in charge of the NHL it would say that it's not fair that Connor McDavid is so good, therefore, in order to level the playing field, McDavid will have to play with one eye covered and his skates tied together. After all, we can't allow excellence to thrive in this country.
Thank you, Peter Menzies, for your valiant and fierce truth telling. Let us not go tamely into that dark night of government overreach and bureaucratic social engineering.