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The Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11, just passed the House of Commons without the CRUCIAL amendment that would protect your posts from being regulated by the CRTC as ‘broadcasting.’
Very soon the CRTC could have sweeping new powers to regulate your videos, podcasts, and pictures on online platforms.1,2
The Senate’s final vote is our last chance to protect our content. Email the Senate to stand firm on behalf of Canadians and reject the House’s decision.
Our MPs just undid all the hard work fixing C-11 our Senators have accomplished. Last November, Senators Julie Miville-Deschêne and Paula Simons proposed and passed Senate amendment 3, which would have significantly improved the bill by narrowing C-11 to target on professional audio content, excluding the majority of our user-generated content from CRTC regulation as ‘broadcasting’. 3,4,5 It was a slam-dunk amendment that would have achieved the primary goal of Bill C-11 – revenue for traditional media ecosystem Canadian creators – while explicitly carving out everyone else’s user-generated content. If the government had no intention of regulating our user posts, why not pass the amendment?
Without the Simons-Dechene amendment, Bill C-11 is a deep risk to the future of Canada’s Internet. Our government is telling us to trust their intent, and that limits on the CRTC will be applied later by a policy direction from the Minister.6 But a policy direction is not legal protection, and can be changed at any time: we need strong protections in law that will safeguard our posts and our ability to freely view the content we want.
Our message is clear: our posts are not broadcasting and shouldn’t be treated as such. Without the Simons-Dechene amendment, Bill C-11 MUST NOT PASS.
We sent over 100K messages to the Senate demanding they fix Bill C-11 to respect our feeds and our choices – and they listened.7 Now we need you to help stiffen their spine and stand up to the House to keep protecting our rights.
Email the Senate demanding they say NO to any version of Bill C-11 that regulates user content as broadcasting!
