OTTAWA — Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez tabled a bill Wednesday afternoon to bring streaming services such as Netflix under the supervision of the Canada Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. The successor to last year’s controversial Bill C-10, the Online Streaming Act would require online-only content distributors to meet Canadian-content requirements and contribute to producing original content in Canada. Here’s what you need to know:

What’s the point of this: Revenues have been declining for traditional broadcasters already subject to those rules, the government said. “The support system for Canadian stories and music is at risk,” states a briefing document explaining the bill. “Online streaming platforms who broadcast in this country should have an obligation to support Canadian music and stories in a fair and equitable way.”

Besides that, the act revises sections of the Broadcasting Act to focus Canadian-content contributions on Indigenous programming and on “greater investment for the benefit of linguistic and cultural minorities.”

“Canada’s strong culture is no accident,” Rodriguez said in a news conference. “We chose to be different from our neighbours to the south. We chose our cultural sovereignty.”

The broadcasting system and its Canadian-content requirements have supported cultural products from Drake to “Anne of Green Gables” to “Schitt’s Creek,” he said, but that system is getting weaker. “Our bill claims this space and makes sure that online services contribute to Canadian culture.”

How we got here: With support from the NDP and Bloc Québécois, the Liberals got such a bill through the House of Commons before the last election, but it died with last August’s election call; senators had consigned it to study by a committee that never met.

Conservatives objected to the previous bill (it was numbered C-10; the new one is C-11, and yes, that will be confusing) as a tool for “a massive abuse of power.” David Adams Richards, a writer and Liberal-appointed senator, said it “[subjected] freedom of expression to the doldrums of governmental oversight.”

The bill didn’t need fixing, he said—it needed a stake through the heart.

Streaming services generally didn’t like it, either: Google, which operates YouTube, warned that if Canada required Canadian content to get signal boosted in Canada, other countries could follow suit, and that would work to Canadian content-producers’ disadvantage. And individual streamers worried about whether they would personally be required to meet new CRTC standards.

With Bill C-10 vaporized by the election call, the Liberals promised if re-elected to present a new version within 100 days of naming a new cabinet. They met that deadline with hours to go.

What’s the same: The major elements of the new Online Streaming Act are the same as the former Bill C-10. It would still “add online undertakings—undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet—as a distinct class of broadcasting undertakings,” making them subject to CRTC oversight, with all that entails.

It would still emphasize the importance of support for minority communities of all kinds in Canadian content, with a particular focus on Indigenous people and cultures.

And it would make other housekeeping updates to the Broadcasting Act, as C-10 would have.

What’s different: The new version makes an emphatic distinction between streaming services and people creating content, incorporating amendments to Bill C-10 made after the Liberals first introduced it. Services are covered by the new rules but individual streamers are not.

“We took stock from the work done in the last Parliament, we listened to concerns, especially around social media, and we fixed it,” Rodriguez said. 

“No cat videos,” he added. “Only the companies themselves will have responsibilities.”

Fresh language specifies that the CRTC is not to pay attention to content that doesn’t make any money—in which “neither the user of a social media service who uploads the program nor the owner or licensee of copyright in the program receives revenues.”

It includes a new section excluding entities that aren’t primarily in the broadcasting business—companies posting videos about themselves or their services, for instance, plus educational and cultural institutions like museums and theatres.

What happens next: Since the previous bill passed the Commons with two other parties’ support, this one won’t likely have much difficulty. Whether it can get through the Senate—where senators knew what they were doing when they sent its predecessor to die in committee—is another question. Fundamental questions about Canadian culture and how to protect it are the sorts of issues the Senate likes debating, and David Adams Richards is still a senator.

And critics of the previous iteration are mobilizing. “The federal government’s new censorship legislation, Bill C-11, still allows bureaucrats to regulate user-generated content online, including on social media,” warned the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in a news release as soon as the legislation was made public Wednesday.

YouTube Canada was more restrained. “Our focus will always be acting in the interest of the thousands of Canadian digital creators and the millions of Canadians who use YouTube every day,” its head of government affairs Jeanette Patell wrote in an email. “We think the government shares this interest. We are still reviewing the impacts of the legislation on our platform, and look forward to working with them on this important issue.”

The Canadian Media Producers Association, which represents production companies, said in a statement that it would consult its members on details but urged that the bill be passed swiftly.

Rodriguez also said he’ll write to the chair of the CRTC to ask the commission to review and update its definition of “Canadian content” to make sure it’s still current.