Bryan Adams made a video with valid criticisms towards the Online Streaming Act. The Heritage Minister simply rejected reality.
Yesterday, I published and article showcasing what Canadian artist, Bryan Adams, had to say about the Online Streaming Act. In it, he pointed out the critical flaws of the “Cancon” system, how it suppresses new and emerging artists, and how the Online Streaming Act props up this very system on top of it all. This while making life more unaffordable for Canadians.
In the article I wrote how it is unlikely that the Canadian government is willing to listen to reason given their long history of ignoring creators, screwing over creators, and even attacking creators throughout the whole debate in the first place. For the Canadian government in this debate, especially the Department of Canadian Heritage, creators are a class of people meant to be crushed underfoot in the process of propping up legacy media and the past. As a result, I speculated at the time, it is difficult to see the Canadian government suddenly turning a new leaf and finally listening to Canadian creators – you know, the very people that Canadian Heritage really should be protecting in the first place as opposed to attacking.
Well, like clockwork, I found out today that Heritage Minister, Pascale St-Onge, pretty much did exactly that. In an article posted on the CBC, St-Onge just argued that undermining Canadian creators online is helping Canadian creators and that platforms are going to magically cough up the money they demand with no actual consequences whatsoever because… (vague hand-waving) reasons:
Federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge says she’s glad Adams jumped into the debate, but disputes his description of the rule as “a streaming tax.”
She says the changes are meant to help emerging Canadian artists, many of whom complain about the difficulty of finding an audience on global digital platforms.
“If you talk to them, they’re going to tell you that online streaming platforms don’t pay them enough and also that it’s hard for them to be discovered on these streaming platforms,” St-Onge said Wednesday in Ottawa.
“This is what the legislation that we passed is intended for — it’s to help local Canadian artists both get better pay and also get discovered on these streaming platforms.”
The Minister’s comments are hilariously out of touch and basically looks at all the valid criticisms and responds with the Trumpian “No U!”
The reality is that Canadian creators have long been frustrated with the current state of affairs with the Cancon system. Very often, this legacy system meant that in order to make a living, pursuing a career as a creator, creators (such as music artists) have to move out of the country and go to places like the United States to gain an audience. It isn’t until after they have received some kind of success that the Cancon system will welcome them back to Canada. In other words, the system offloads that responsibility of building up the careers of creators, then tries to parasitically reap the rewards afterwards.
There’s almost no one out there that have built up a career by exclusively being in Canada under the legacy Cancon system. This is because the legacy system is openly hostile to new talent in Canada and does everything it can to basically tell creators to either find a job or look elsewhere. This has been a massive problem for decades now. Big Canadian stars in different sectors built up a career only because the American system took them in and helped them hone their skills. It’s a deeply frustrating system, but a system that continues to exist to this day.
With the advent of the internet, however, Canadian creators have found that they don’t have to move away to the United States. Instead, they can stay in Canada and build up their careers. Whether that is making videos on Youtube or TikTok, building up their audiences through platforms like Bandcamp and Spotify, or a host of other platforms, Canadian creators have finally gotten a way to build up their careers without leaving the country for the first time in this lifetime. The legacy Cancon system, which should have been helping these creators in the first place, responded by freaking out that Canadians are now suddenly succeeding and has called for all hands on deck to shut this whole system down before any more creators become successful without their authorization.
None of this is hyperbole, either. In fact, this is the very scenario that Canadian creators discussed at length over the course of multiple hearings over and over again. Canadians finally finding not only their voices, but their audiences while still living in their home country has repeatedly been the story everywhere you look. One example is Linus Tech Tips who found his audience many years ago and has built up a major company out of Vancouver thanks to YouTube.
So, this notion that Canadian’s have somehow been silenced or undermined because of the platforms is completely bananas. If the Cancon system was truly working as it should, and the platforms are undermining the presence of Canadian creators, Canadian creators would be running towards the Cancon system in droves because that would be the only reliable way of getting their careers started. In reality, the exact opposite is true where Canadian creators are running away from the Cancon system like it’s the plague because they no that it is a non-starter for their careers and the internet provides the only real opportunities to grow their careers these days.
Hilariously, the Canadian Press itself does a sort of “publishersplaining” and tries to act as though nothing is going to come back and bite Canadians when the system is demanding hundreds of millions of dollars. They did this not by offering an alternative explanation for how that money is going to come about, but rather, use the different term of “base contribution” and saying how the system is going to make hundreds of millions of dollars… as if that is somehow going to magically make the problems go away on their own. Yes, they really did that:
A ‘base contribution’
The Online Streaming Act is currently in the hands of the CRTC, which said in June that foreign streamers must contribute five per cent of their annual Canadian revenues to funds devoted to producing Canadian content, including local TV and radio news, as well as Indigenous and French-language content.
The CRTC said the rule would apply to companies that make at least $25 million in Canadian revenue and are unaffiliated with a Canadian broadcaster. The contributions are expected to bring in about $200 million per year.
(insert audience laughter here)
Yup, you read that right from the Canadian Press (through the CBC). All of the problems will magically go away because they have BUZZWORDS! Yup, magical buzzwords that bend reality itself and creates the reality bubble where stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from companies will result in no ramifications whatsoever because…. reasons. It doesn’t matter what you end up calling this, but the reality is that this tax will cost Canadian’s. You could call it magical fairy dust and it would have the exact same impact. Trying to change the term isn’t going to suddenly make the outcome any different.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Spotify, earlier this month, has already announced that their rates are going up significantly in order to pay for all of this. On the plus side, this signals that they aren’t leaving Canada (I figured they would be one of the few that wouldn’t leave). On the downside, however, it’s going to get a heck of a lot more expensive to continue on using their services. This makes the counterpoint of “but we’re going to be making lots and lots of money!” all the more hilariously stupid. In all likelihood, other platforms that choose to stick around in Canada are likely to follow suit as well.
Some people out there think I’m being harsh when I saw legacy media companies are run by idiots. Well, when they publish laughably stupid comments like the ones above, I can, once again, point to the garbage they publish and say, “that’s the reason why I think that.”
At any rate, this stupidity is very much on brand for both the mainstream media and the government when it comes to this debate. I didn’t expect anything less and both delivered on those expectations perfectly. In the end, Canadian creators are, once again, shut out of this debate and it is creators and consumers that will pay the steep price of the Canadian government.
