Heritage committee to ask Guilbeault for draft policy directive for CRTC, summon Zuckerberg

MPs on the House of Commons Heritage Committee said Friday they want to see the first draft of the directions the CRTC is going to get from Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on how it should regulate streaming giants like Netflix Inc. Under the government's proposed update to the Broadcasting Act, known as Bill C-10, foreign streaming platforms would be brought under the regulatory framework of the CRTC, though it will be up to the CRTC to determine the precise regulations within nine months of receiving an order-in-council from the government. Now MPs want to see the draft of that document. The approach has drawn criticism from some, who have characterized the order-in-council plan as merely a "temporary" solution. The committee also voted to request that Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg appear before it to testify on the recent conflict between his company and the Australian government over the compensation of news organizations. Last week, Guilbeault said his government would not be deterred from pursuing similar legislation by Facebook's move to block Australian news on its platform. In May 2019, Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg had been issued with summons but did not appear before a so-called Grand International Committee on disinformation and fake news, which was meeting in Ottawa. (The social media giant instead sent Kevin Chan, Facebook's head of public policy for Canada.) Earlier in the committee hearing, MPs heard pitches for relaxed Canadian content regulations from Corus Entertainment Inc. on how to amend Bill C-10 to benefit the company. Corus's executive vice-president of broadcast networks Troy Reeb told MPs that "going forward, all players -- foreign and domestic, digital and traditional -- must have a more flexible, less onerous set of obligations than Canadian broadcasters have now." He also called for the bill to decrease regulation requiring roughly 30 per cent of revenue to be spent on Canadian content for traditional broadcasters, while creating some regulations for the streaming giants, to "meet somewhere in the middle." "Give us more flexibility to compete on an international scale and offset some of what the producer would worry they might lose in the short term from Canadian broadcasters by providing them much more from the internet broadcasters," Reeb told MPs. In September, Corus CEO Doug Murphy said at the BMO Media & Telecom Conference that the COVID-19 pandemic had created a "crisis" for Canadian programming. “So that’s one crisis I am not going to waste and I’ve had many discussions with the folks in Ottawa about: this is the time to make change. The COVID crisis has modernized the Broadcasting Act for us,” Murphy told investors in September. (Organizations representing creative groups have pushed back against the proposal to decrease Canadian content regulations.) Reeb also urged MPs to abandon an effort to amend the bill to include the so-called "terms of trade" regulations that would govern the deals signed between content producers and broadcasters. "We are also strongly encouraging this committee not to amend the bill to empower the CRTC to regulate private dealings between broadcasters and producers," Reeb said. "That kind of amendment would further benefit producers who are now enjoying record profits, at the expense of Canadian broadcasters who are seeing record declines." The Canadian Media Producers Association has repeatedly called for the enshrining of terms of trade regulations with both the CBC and private broadcasters. Last year, the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review panel recommended that any update to the Broadcasting Act give the CRTC the authority to “regulate economic relationships between media content undertakings and content producers, including terms of trade; and resolve disputes between media content undertakings.” — Reporting by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca and editing by Charelle Evelyn at cevelyn@hilltimes.com

Heritage committee to ask Guilbeault for draft policy directive for CRTC, summon Zuckerberg

News | February 26, 2021

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Heritage committee to ask Guilbeault for draft policy directive for CRTC, summon Zuckerberg

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