With support from the New Democrats and Bloc Québécois, the Liberal government got its bill imposing Canadian-content rules on streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube through the House of Commons. Bill C-11 heads next for the Senate. (The Logic)
Talking point: A previous version of Bill C-11 died in the Senate with the last election call. This one is scheduled for committee hearings this evening, which its predecessor never got. Streaming companies have been fighting the bill, warning it could hurt Canadian content creators if other countries copy it with similar rules privileging their own online streamers. Despite Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez’s insistence that the point is to regulate commercial content, not videos of your cat, the chair of the CRTC has said publicly that C-11 would give the regulator the power to apply CanCon standards to the cat videos, too. Independent senators might give those objections sterner scrutiny than MPs did.