I'm still not sure why there is a need to set a quota for content. Or for the state to subsidize it.
Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.
Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?
>Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade.
For a US company.
Canada has long had laws making sure content in Canadian isn't drown out by external cultures and to keep some business at home. It's not exactly a complicated motivation, nor is "just out-compete the entire planet" a reasonable suggestion for that goal.
Canadian here. This isn't about subsidizing content, this is about censoring content that the Canadian government deems to be "not in the Canadian spirit". This is about treating anyone with a larger audience (youtube, insta, etc) as a broadcaster and making them follow strict government rules.
As another Canadian I believe this is a pretty strong miscategorization of the bill, this bill is extending the practice of CanCon to online platforms that would, from given comments, require various algorithmic recommendation tools to highlight content that the CRTC marks as being Canadian.
There are some concerns around censorship here (that the Canadian government may decline to mark videos highlighting controversial topics as being Canadian) but it'll honestly just shift those videos out of this preferred requirement.
Most services currently offer some regional and language preferences so this doesn't seem like a huge technical requirement but it is quite possible it'll hurt smaller platforms disproportionately more than larger ones - most regulation, even very warranted stuff, tends to increase the barrier to market entry.
I think this is a pretty fair way to approach trying to supplement the economy and retain more productivity within the country as we're trying to pay off the debts we've racked up during covid, it'll help boost the take home of artists and independent creators without leaving a large line item supporting the arts for the CPC to cut if they regain a majority. But that's totally just my opinion.
How is this fair at all? It's not fair to consumers whose prevailing choices are regulatorily subverted. It's not fair to media producers who are now penalized for not being Canadian, nor is it fair for media platforms who now have to invent some special process for Canadian users. By what definition is it fair to force foreigners to fund your own nationalist political goals? Why should anyone care that the current Canadian government supposedly can't even muster enough democratic support to enact and maintain a lasting budget item to sponsor its own agenda?
Canada is the market that it is - it's your decision as a business to voluntarily enter that market and the GDPR has shown that regional policies like these can be sanely implemented. As someone who can see the problems this country is trying to fight through during the pandemic, I think it's reasonable to reinvest in our economy and this will, essentially, work out sort of like a tariff. It's likely the cost of consuming these services will slightly rise but in exchange we should see more money staying domestic.
And hey, politics is hard.
As an example of domestic prioritization, Canada prepaid for a whole lot of vaccines (enough for everyone to be vaccinated three times over - so six shots) but when push came to shove the US horded their supply to inoculate citizens first. I think it was a grave error for the government to turn to the private market to purchase those doses instead of investing in expanding domestic vaccine production back in April 2020 but I can't really hold it against America for ensuring the safety of their domestic population first - it's not like you're doing anything overtly malignant like marking up the prices per dose or refusing to release the vaccine globally unless folks sign on to unbalanced trade deals.
Canada controls and provides the Canadian consumer market - we value supporting local content and want to make sure our artists are able to make a living because, honestly, we really value the arts up here - whether they're the group of seven or putting together tutorials on how to make a DIY rocket in your backyard on youtube.
> As an example of domestic prioritization, Canada prepaid for a whole lot of vaccines (enough for everyone to be vaccinated three times over - so six shots) but when push came to shove the US horded their supply to inoculate citizens first.
There was no "hoarding" or "export ban"; The Trump Administration was simply smart and bought the doses when potential vaccines were still early in development, long before FDA approval. Manufacturers are simply fulfilling their contractual obligations to ship the dose to the first investors.
Canada could have done the same, giving more money to promising tech earlier, to get the doses earlier. Instead, Trudeau spent 44 million dollars [0] gave months [1] of work to CCP controlled CanSino vaccine. It, unsurprisingly, failed spectacularly.
> we value supporting local content and want to make sure our artists are able to make a living because, honestly, we really value the arts up here
Then why are special laws required at all if people really want that content and are interested in buying it? There's no special laws that says that people MUST by iPhones, they simply do because they like the product.
Then enact a tariff. This is simply a dishonest tariff that tries to bury and hide costs. It's a tariff that you know opposition parties will have no trouble mustering democratic support in killing if it was made plain. "Politics is hard" because it turns out when you sell a tariff as something other than a tariff, it's easier to pass! Who would have thought? I should have added another sentence to my original comment: it's not fair to citizens whose democratic choice is being subverted through deliberate misrepresentation to protect an unpopular agenda.
The US has a grant for the arts, it's called the National Endowment for the Arts. Didn't need to misrepresent it to their citizens to keep it for more than 50 years. Sounds like if you really valued the arts in Canada you'd have no trouble getting your government to fund the arts too.
But sure, perhaps Canada's bad position in vaccine supply justifies unfairly penalizing foreign media. When I grew up, I learnt in school that one wrong justifies another.
But why even bother arguing about fairness. After all, "Canada is the market that it is - it's your decision as a business to voluntarily enter that market", so anything Canada does is justified.
America has a really outsized impact on western culture and has previously leveraged that (through DoD partnerships and public funding) to reinforce its view of what western culture should be like. I think it's reasonable for a country that could easily be eclipsed by the culture of their southern neighbors to make some effort to fund the preservation of things that differentiate it. The Canadian government tends to be pretty bullish on supporting cultural festivals (hence JFL Montreal being a world-wide event) and supporting independent creators through CanCon laws is just another limb of that strategy.
I feel like this bill makes more sense if you look at it from a geopolitical standpoint instead of an economic standpoint.
Economies of scale dictate that, yes, Disney and Marvel can make billions of dollars of profits year after year. And they can absolutely out-spend Canadian companies, coming from a market with 10x the number of consumers.
For comparison, you can look at Quebec. While France has a larger population than Quebec, the difference is smaller, and the cultural difference is larger, and so they punch above their weight against the rest of Canada when it comes to media because they have a drive to consume local content that isn't found elsewhere.
And so this bill is an attempt to (artificially) bootstrap that same culture in the other 75% of Canada.
> Economies of scale dictate that, yes, Disney and Marvel can make billions of dollars of profits year after year. And they can absolutely out-spend Canadian companies, coming from a market with 10x the number of consumers.
If it's just about the money then why did Parasites do so well globally? Canadians are free to sell their content in the US after all.
> And so this bill is an attempt to (artificially) bootstrap that same culture in the other 75% of Canada.
Why are folks from the 75% not interested in it? Seems they would rather buy American.
I think availability of diverse content is important. You need varying views of every situation and often times there is a bias that originates or caters to the country of origin.
American cinema is pretty bad about this too, almost every American movie based on a historical event or military engagement paints America in a favorable light and completely omits the efforts and cooperation of our allies.
If you only watched American entertainment you would come out of it thinking they are the only country fighting for the world.
How do you get a countries' culture not overwhelmed and wiped out by a foreign one when your frontier is right beside the world's biggest producer of content?
If we give up, all those small productions will never find a way to flourish, or even become a giant themselves.
> How do you get a countries' culture not overwhelmed and wiped out by a foreign one when your frontier is right beside the world's biggest producer of content?
From talking to Canadians, they pride themselves with being a multicultural society. "Protecting the nation against foreign cultures" doesn't sound very multicultural to me...
I don't really think this is true. I'm an American and most of my Youtube channels I'm subscribed are from foreign countries, and this isn't something I've actively tried and do.
This largely comes down to anti-competitive practices and relative economic output. Canada has a far weaker economy than the US - we've honestly just got a lot fewer people up here - and the US can leverage it's geopolitical power to force other countries to abide by it's laws.
If we don't blink when an unequal trade treaty opens up natural resources to private american exploitation we probably shouldn't blink when a country establishes a law that favors it's domestic product over imported.
And actually, I believe the US does dump a significant amount of money into both enforcing the "Made in America" mark on products and advertising to buy American - that too is trying to tip the balance toward consumption of a domestic product. And, lastly, unlike in America, in Canada the free market is not held as the solution to all problems - going out of your way to support and help fellow Canadians is a virtue that's widely celebrated.
Entertainment is a hugely profitable business. Disney and Marvel for instance made billions of dollars of profits year after year for almost a decade. They did it by making content that people want to watch.
Why not simply... make content that people want to watch?