Hon. Donna Dasko: Honourable senators, I am pleased to stand today to speak to Bill C-11, the online streaming act, at third reading.

Our chamber and our committee have been working on this bill and its predecessor for close to two years. Introduced into our chamber in the Forty-third Parliament as Bill C-10, it died on the Order Paper in the fall of 2021 and came back to us last spring as Bill C-11.

As our Senate Transport and Communications Committee began pre-study work last June, many of us, including me, were concerned that the government’s apparent desire to pass the bill urgently might result in a truncated study process. Thankfully, that did not happen. I am grateful to everyone involved for that — to committee members for pressing hard for a serious study, and to the government representative for carrying through on his promise of a fulsome review.

We certainly had a fulsome review. Our work on the bill was as thorough as anyone could hope for. The committee held 31 meetings, heard from 138 witnesses and received 67 briefs on Bill C-11. Our witnesses included experts, government officials from several ministries, current and former chairs of the CRTC and stakeholders from across the industry, including broadcasters, digital creators, platforms, arts and cultural representatives, unions and representatives from diverse communities.

Nine committee meetings were held to conduct clause-by-clause consideration. We are told that this is a record number of such meetings ever held in the Senate. A total of 73 amendments were presented at committee and 26 were adopted. Amendments were passed covering a wide range of topics, including community broadcasting, privacy protection, Black and racialized producers, Indigenous producers, disinformation, user‑generated content, independent producers, Canadian content, French-language programming, innovation, audience recognition and CRTC processes such as requirements for hearings and reporting.

The most prominent issues in Bill C-11 that received the most attention focused on the regulation of user content and the potential intrusion into viewer or listener choices if algorithms were altered for the purpose of Canadian content discoverability. But there was so much more in this bill. The challenge of Bill C-11 for me was that almost every time I studied it, I found new issues that I felt needed to be addressed.

Let me provide some examples. Rather late in the process, I came to the realization that nowhere in the bill was there a recognition of audience interests and preferences. What Canadians wanted to see and wanted to listen to was not considered to be an element of our broadcast system. As former CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein pointed out, audience interests and preferences were simply not recognized as part of Canadian broadcasting, and they were never recognized in our broadcasting acts since the beginning of broadcast legislation.

Our history of broadcast legislation in Canada is about cultural priorities, cultural protection and producers — who they are and what they should or can produce. But how could it be that we have built a broadcast system without considering viewers and listeners as one of the integral parts of our system? It’s like having a transportation system without thinking about passengers. How can we have such a system? Who is our system for? How can we not include these people in our system?

In the end, the committee voted to accept my amendment to Bill C-11 that says that the broadcasting system must, as one of its objectives, reflect and be responsive to audience preferences and interests. In a similar vein, I was pleased that the committee also voted to recognize that innovation, specifically promoting innovation, should be a guiding principle of our broadcasting system — I’m thinking especially of my colleague Senator Deacon. That, too, had never been recognized in broadcast legislation. Imagine that: We’re talking about an area where there is huge technological change, and yet we had not considered that innovation should be considered a principle of our system.

Another example of how the bill revealed issues involved the very short, innocuous-looking clause 7(7) in Bill C-11, which began with the phrase, “for greater certainty.” This clause was easily overlooked. However, witnesses came before us and sent briefings with comments that, in their view, this was the most consequential clause in the whole bill. In contrast to existing law, which gave cabinet the power to direct the CRTC in broad policy matters, it was argued that clause 7(7) would give cabinet the power to give very specific and detailed direction to the CRTC and possibly create a two-tiered system whereby those with sufficient resources would have special access to the government to make their case.

This clause proved especially vexing for us to analyze because government officials argued that the clause would have almost no impact. There was major impact on the one hand, versus no impact at all on the other, so you can see how challenging it was to actually analyze this clause. In the end, the committee voted to remove clause 7(7). I think my colleague Senator Simons is going to talk more about this.

Bill C-11 was filled with issues like these that were not always apparent and yet proved to be extremely important.

With 31 committee meetings, 73 amendments presented and 26 accepted, it’s clear that committee members devoted much thought and effort to this work. Sober second thought was clearly achieved.

One of government’s most important roles is to respond appropriately to technological change. As radio and television technology developed as global technologies in the last century, Canadians understood that our closeness to the United States, our smaller population and the existence of two official languages would ultimately mean that Canadian voices would be lost unless we took special measures. Thus, a public broadcaster was created in 1932, and the first Canadian content regulations were legislated in 1958.

As consumer choice greatly expanded via private television networks in the 1960s, cable distribution in the 1970s and satellite in the 1980s, each of these new technologies came to be regulated under a regulatory framework, adjusted each time, while keeping fairly true to the original objectives.

The assumptions behind Bill C-11 are thus familiar. Canadian culture still needs protection, our broadcasting system is built on Canadian requirements and, therefore, the new online streaming services and technologies should also be brought under our regulatory framework. After rejecting regulation of internet broadcasting twice, in 1999 and 2009, with the rationale that tech innovation in broadcasting had to be encouraged, the government has now decided that regulation is needed.

Does Canadian culture still need to be protected from outside influences? That is a very difficult question to answer. I recently came upon an Environics Institute poll from last September, which shows that Canadians themselves are divided on that question, with 44% saying that Canadian culture needs more protection from outside influences and 47% saying we need to be more open to outside influences. However, the public is more supportive of creating a so-called level playing field, with two thirds of Canadians in a Nanos poll last May saying they support the idea that steaming services should financially contribute to creating Canadian content just like Canadian broadcasters do.

When it comes to regulating new technologies, however, we cannot assume that just because the technologies of the past were brought under this framework necessarily means that this effort will be a success. For me, that is the real conundrum of Bill C-11. Even though we have studied the thing to death, called superb witnesses and made many fine amendments, in the end, we don’t know whether this approach will work or work well. Will Canadian production increase and will diverse voices thrive, as we have heard from Senator Dawson and as has been promised, including the voices of digital creators who have expressed such concerns, or will innovation and the innovators, and new services and new technologies, be stifled by these rules?

The fact that these questions cannot be answered is not the fault of the legislation. These questions cannot be answered because we cannot predict the future. We here have done our work as best as we can and we have asked all the questions we can, but Bill C-11 represents a leap. We must take the leap or not. Each of us must judge for ourselves.

Thank you.