At the end of April, the federal government’s beleaguered Online Streaming Act, also known as Bill C-11, passed the Senate and became law. The bill’s purpose is to subject streaming and social media platforms—a group that includes juggernauts like YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, and Spotify—to regulations akin to those that apply to traditional broadcasters. Under the eye of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), these tech giants will now be obliged to allocate a certain portion of their airtime—and money they earn from doing business in the Canadian market—to Canadian content. The project raises the fraught, familiar question of what belongs in the “CanCon” category as well as the fate of the works that don’t.
For a bill ostensibly meant to protect Canadian creators, the response from those creators suggests a certain failure on the part of legislators. “It is creeping totalitarianism if governments are telling creators what to create,” said Margaret Atwood, who often favours this talking point in response to political developments she disagrees with. Atwood had previously tweeted a link to a speech by senator David Adams Richards—another Canadian writer who opposes the bill and has won most of the country’s major literary awards. In the clip, Richards orates that Canadians have constructed “a prison of self-censorship” while “believing we are a woke society,” making a requisite reference to Joseph Goebbels that, at this point, comes off as its own kind of compelled speech. The gripe is that drawing lines around what is considered sufficiently “Canadian” is tantamount to telling writers what they should produce at all.
