OTTAWA — One Monday night in October, Corey McMullan, an appliance salesman in Smiths Falls, Ont., got political on the internet.

“Do you want the CRTC to be in charge of the next few videos you see here on TikTok?” he asked his audience of nearly half a million, stalking past electric and gas ranges on display in the showroom of McMullan Appliance & Mattress. Two more quick videos followed that night as McMullan railed against the federal Liberals’ Bill C-11.

“Let me put it this way,” he said in the last of them. “I love the Tragically Hip. Rush is great. Some people think they’re a little overplayed, and maybe that’s because the CRTC tells broadcasters you have to broadcast a minimum amount of Canadian content, whether people like it or not.”

Bill C-11, called the Online Streaming Act, would put streaming video and music services under the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s supervision and give them Canadian-content mandates. McMullan had returned from an appearance at the Toronto Global Forum in mid-October—where former ambassador and McKinsey chief and current Rio Tinto chair Dominic Barton was a headliner—newly worried about the law.

McMullan was on a TikTok-sponsored panel at the event about using short videos to promote small businesses, his latest involvement in TikTok’s small-business initiatives. While he was there, he told The Logic, he talked to other TikTokers.

“I didn’t know what Bill C-11 was,” McMullan said. “A few other creators were talking about it, and then you start to get filled in on the topic. And it started to sound a little bit threatening, not as much to me, but to the other people I was with who solely make their living on having access to a global audience. I just talked to a few of them about it, and I said, ‘We should get together and make some content.’”

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez has said the point of Bill C-11 is to promote Canadian cultural sovereignty, and CRTC chair Ian Scott says the commission would order Netflix and Apple Music and YouTube and TikTok and the like to give Canadian content a boost in their display and recommendation algorithms; Conservatives have called it an attack on free speech and invoked Soviet and North Korean totalitarianism.

The House of Commons passed the bill in June and it’s now under review in the Senate.

YouTube, a Google/Alphabet property, has deployed some of its biggest Canadian stars against the bill: Brandon Gonez “interviewed” YouTube product director Todd Beaupré about Bill C-11 for the company’s YouTube Creators channel; in January, Gonez and YouTuber Lilly Singh were part of a closed-door session for Canadian lawmakers intended to educate them about how good YouTube is for Canadian creators now.

In June, BetaKit reported on a session TikTok (which is owned by China’s ByteDance) organized for its users early in 2022, in which the company warned them that C-11 could threaten a key cultural industry. Also in June, the company argued publicly that user-generated content—virtually everything it shows—should be exempted from the bill’s demands. But overall, TikTok has been less in-your-face in its resistance to the bill than some of its Big Tech peers.

It is, however, happy to help TikTokers make the case for it, the company’s Canadian director of government relations Steve de Eyre said in a statement emailed to The Logic. The company will point them to sources of information about the bill, including parliamentary testimony from de Eyre himself and an anti-C-11 campaign.

“We believe creators’ voices are critical to productive discussion on Bill C-11 and we want to help them make their voices heard,” de Eyre said. “Creators aren’t professional lobbyists or advocates, they’re Canadians who use our platform, and if we can help them speak out for their interests, we’re more than happy to.”

McMullan is an unlikely advocate for TikTok, but then he’s an unlikely TikToker in the first place. The store is the family business, to which McMullan returned in 2018 after 17 years at Cantrex, a buying group for small retailers selling big-ticket items like furniture, camera gear and appliances.

He’d been experimenting with social media marketing, with minor success.

“We were doing a lot of YouTube and Facebook content [and] we were moving into video because people really were reacting more to our videos than any other posts,” he said. “And then one day, I turned the camera around and narrated and started talking and started presenting and then everything shifted gears.”

Some of his popular videos are about a particular model of kitchen fire extinguisher (2.4 million views of McMullan using it on a burning pan in an oven in his parking lot), where to put detergent pods in a particular model of Bosch dishwasher (644,100 views), and how you can safely leave a piece of paper between the surface of an induction stove and the pot it heats (220,700 views).

McMullan’s got the rapid, high-energy delivery of an infomercial pitchman but a disarming bluntness you wouldn’t find on late-night TV. Consider his take on combined washer-dryer units, delivered in front of a lineup of them against a store wall: “If you can avoid buying one of these, do it … There’s not one manufacturer that takes pride in their single-piece unitized stackers” (97,300 views).

A year ago, an Ottawa business publication ran a story about McMullan, when the TikTok channel reached nearly 44,000 followers. Now, the appliance store’s TikTok page has nearly 405,000.

“I’m a brick-and-mortar store that really got popular. I don’t make my living on TikTok [but] it’s been really great for Ottawa customers, Kingston—like, semi-local,” McMullan said. He attributed about $300,000 of new sales to TikTok.

@mcmullanappliance The daily struggles of being a globally recognized content creator…😂😂😂 #paparazzi #photographer #photo #picture ♬ original sound – Heather 🍯

McMullan’s bit of online fame has helped create some new sidelines for the store in shippable goods, like pillows and specialty detergents and especially the fire extinguishers. He’s also a brand ambassador for companies like Electrolux.

If TikTok disappeared tomorrow, McMullan said, his ego would take a bit of a blow—he likes that people abroad watch him talk about appliances—but the hit to the McMullan appliance store would be small.

Spurred by chatting with other TikTokers about Bill C-11 in Toronto, McMullan said, he talked to some TikTok representatives, who imparted the company’s views.

“They also told me, ‘Go to this site, go to that site,’ you know, ‘Don’t listen to us.’ So I did. And then I went and read a lot of Digital First Canada. I’ve watched a lot of J.J. McCullough, who’s another popular TikToker, and I listened to a podcast last night he was on with [Sen.] Pamela Wallin. But no, no pressure to do it whatsoever.”

(McCullough is more a YouTuber; he’s posted only one TikTok, attacking Bill C-11.)

Digital First Canada, a lobby group formed to campaign against a similar bill that died with 2021’s federal election call, is partly funded by YouTube and TikTok, its executive director said in a committee hearing on the bill in May. It has no formal members, according to its lobbying registration.

TikTok paid for McMullan’s trip to Toronto for the conference, but nothing else, he said. He got a tour of the office there.

The company has never paid creators to take public positions on Bill C-11, de Eyre said.

Before a Senate committee in September, de Eyre argued that a big problem for the company would be just determining which of its zillions of short user-posted videos qualifies as “Canadian.”

McMullan echoed that concern, particularly for creators of content that’s more artistic than his: “Do we have to apply to be Canadian content?” he asked. “Like I’m not saying I would want to be, but to someone that wants [their videos] to be ‘Canadian,’ is there an application process? How does it work?”

(There are no answers to that yet, but several prominent Canadian TikTokers have talked about moving to the United States or using technical tools to pretend they’re outside Canada to avoid any such paperwork.)

If TikTok puts clips in front of Canadian users because the content comes from Canadians but those users aren’t interested in the material itself, McMullan said they’ll likely just swipe past it, making it less likely to be shown to people outside Canada.

That’s TikTok’s take, too, de Eyre wrote to The Logic, pointing to a public explanation of its algorithm: “A strong indicator of interest, such as whether a user finishes watching a longer video from beginning to end, would receive greater weight than a weak indicator, such as whether the video’s viewer and creator are both in the same country.”

Another of McMullan’s concerns is how the regulatory powers included in the bill might be used in different circumstances: “I think the bill gives them quite a wide scope, quite a wide decision-making ability in the whole process, how to interpret this going forward. Like if the government changes or the minister changes, it just seems a bit scary, and I feel like it would just take a few more words to define who’s affected and how [they’re] affected,” he said.

De Eyre told senators something similar in September—that TikTok users worry that a different government or minister or CRTC composition could threaten creators’ business models. “They need certainty and, if there is a change, that could be at risk,” he testified.

As the Senate continues deliberating, McMullan’s returned to appliance videos on TikTok, which is the material he’s most comfortable with.

“I’m not anti-government,” he said. “I’m not anti-regulation. I just feel that this seems a bit wide-scoping. I think it’s a [well-intended] bill that could hurt a lot of new-style Canadian entrepreneurs that need this global awareness.”