The Online Streaming Act is controversial in a number of ways, but the National Post is attempting to warp the debate.
The Online Streaming Act is controversial for a number of reasons. It downranks Canadian content in favour of government certified speech on social media, raises subscription rates of streaming services in Canada, drives investment out of the country, compels other platforms to leave Canada altogether, and invites trade retaliation from the United States for violating CUSMA/USMCA. While this isn’t a comprehensive list of reasons why the Online Streaming Act, it certainly covers most of the major criticisms.
As many of you are no doubt aware, I’ve been following these debates quite closely and covering them since the very beginning to a very highly detailed level. So, I’ve grown quite accustomed to the many intricacies involved in this debate simply because I’ve been covering this debate quite extensively. Now, raise your hand if you know how racism and identity politics was a major point of contention of this debate outside of the cultists that have taken over X/Twitter. Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, me neither.
Of course, this absence of turning this into yet another avenue of the fake culture war bullshit would not go unfilled and the National Post is there to ensure that this happens. After all, there’s always room in every debate for more dog whistling for racists across the country. The article can be found here and the first few paragraphs are actually not really wrong. However, the article takes a turn at this paragraph:
The CRTC is making the corporations pay up because it wants to do their charity work for them. The five per cent cut they’re asking for will be distributed to industry groups that exist largely to advance identity interests on the screen.
You can really tell just with this paragraph alone just how much the words are just dripping with racism. The entire point of the Online Streaming Act is to prop up legacy media players because they have completely and utterly failed to adapt to a modern internet age, even with 40 years notice. It demands that legacy media content be unfairly promoted over hard working independent Canadian creators (along with everyone elses content) on online platforms while furnishing those same media companies with a chunk of money that would otherwise be going to those Canadian independent content creators. This basically ensures that legacy media companies can be freed from the burden of having to attract an audience because whatever shortfall they encounter would just be backstopped by money siphoned off from others and redirected to those players in the first place. Where in the heck does race politics crop up here? Heck if I know.
Yet, for the National Post, this whole debate has everything to do with race and little else. To back up their claim, they offered this as proof of it in the very next paragraph:
For audio-visual online streamers like Netflix and Youtube, that five per cent cut will be distributed as follows: two per cent to the Canada Media Fund, which the Liberals saddled with diversity quotas in 2021; 1.5 per cent to the Independent Local News Fund, which at least is a hodge-podge of local TV stations; 0.5 per cent to funds supporting creators who are Black, people of colour or disabled; 0.5 per cent to official language minorities; and 0.5 per cent to Indigenous creators.
For audio-only broadcasters like Spotify, the breakdown is slightly different, with a smaller emphasis on diversity.
It’s really difficult to really know where to begin with this. First of all, the CRTC has the final say on who gets the funding stolen from platforms and taxpayers. Second, this is not the smoking gun that this is all about race that the author would have you believe. After all, a major chunk of that is going to large media companies in general. That’s what the breakdown shows. Third, the breakdown shown here is not even that accurate. If you look at the actual CRTC announcement, the true breakdown is this:
Specifically, the contributions from audio-visual online streaming services will go to the following funds:
- 2% to the Canada Media Fund and/or direct expenditures towards certified Canadian content;
- 1.5% to the Independent Local News Fund;
- 0.5% to the Black Screen Office Fund, the Canadian Independent Screen Fund for BPOC creators, and/or the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund;
- 0.5% to the Certified Independent Production Funds supporting OLMC producers and producers from diverse communities; and
- 0.5% to the Indigenous Screen Office Fund.
So, in reality, with respect to the third, fourth, and fifth points, it’s not going to a certain category of people, but rather, to specific organizations. So, to say that black people and the Black Screen Office is the same thing is completely ridiculous. This just shows how much the author of this article is being a dingbat.
Of course, these misleading statements made by the National Post author serves as the basis for launching into more speculation:
The deal Canadians get so far isn’t a good one: we pay more in ever-increasing subscription fees for services that are now being made to prop up identity-centric content to whom most Canadians don’t relate. Some companies, like Netflix, were already doing this — but at least they were doing it voluntarily. Now, it’s compulsory. And it’s also costing us: naturally, some of these big streamers, such as Google, have launched court challenges to dispute the new regulations.
The CRTC has already decided that “reflecting “ the diversity of Canadians requires the enforcement of diversity quotas in the case of CBC, which is now required to spend a certain share of its content budget on projects and creative teams that check diversity boxes. It wouldn’t be a surprise if this flower-arranging exercise ends up being required for the rest of the Canadian internet sometime after its 2025 consultations.
Um, no. Just, no. There’s no such thing as “diversity quotas”. The only quota that actually exists is whether or not there is a sufficient amount of “Cancon” being aired. Basically, government certified speech that identifies the content as being “Canadian”. Ask any radio producer if they have to fill out paperwork to state how much Canadian Content aired and they are all too happy to tell you about those stories. I know because I worked in a radio station once and that was the only thing we had to really worry about. Yes, diversity was encouraged, but it wasn’t a case of “you either air this amount of diversity content every day or your license gets revoked”. Same thing with television. There might be the addition of locally produced content on smaller TV stations over top of that, but that’s pretty much it.
What’s more, there isn’t some push to have the entire internet have “diversity quotas” either. At most, within the Cancon system, there might be encouragement to produce diversity related material, but there’s no hard quota of such a thing. Basically, whatever content that is within the box of government obligated promoted material might have something related to diversity crop up. That’s it.
Even if there was some sort of “diversity quota” that the CRTC wants to enforce on “the rest of the Canadian internet”, there would be precisely zero way to enforce that in the first place. This is because the internet is global and the Online Streaming Act affects specific platforms. I know it’s hard for some people to understand, but Facebook is not “the internet”.
Finally, the argument that this kind of content is content for “whom most Canadians don’t relate” doesn’t hold water. According to the most recent census, 9.4% of the Canadian population is first nations, 23% of the population is immigrants. About a quarter of the population have a disability. 16.1% of the Canadian population is part of a racialized population (4.3% of the population identifies as black). 4% of the population identify as a non heterosexual person (3% are non-binary). The Canadian population, in general, is a diverse one. This is nothing new and the National Post author needs to get over themselves and accept this reality.
Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory laden “article” continues on with this:
There’s a principle problem here: this government has taken affirmative action too far — having mandated diversity hiring in some areas of academia, it’s now moving on to media. In both cases, discrimination becomes the standard in spending and hiring, robbing other worthwhile projects and people of fair consideration.
The modern mainstream media, everyone. The medium where racists and bigots regularly get platformed and use the names of large media companies as their personal megaphone to sew seeds of hate and bigotry. Oh well, not even close to the first time right wing extremism was promoted by mainstream media. So much for the platforming of right wing extremism is just an Elon Musk and X/Twitter thing.
At any rate, this is a pretty asinine attempt to try and warp the debate surrounding the Online Streaming Act into another vector to inject the standard culture war bullshit the far right keeps trying to push in everything. There are very legitimate concerns surrounding the Online Streaming Act and its implementation. This attempt by this individual working in the mainstream media to try and pollute it with racism and bigotry is unacceptable and should be called out. Further, I think the National Post should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this to get published in the first place. Unfortunately, this is the mainstream media we are talking about, so the mainstream media feeling any hint of shame has a snowballs chance in hell of happening.
