Michael Geist: The CRTC Slow Train

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  0:02  
The sound of podcast, the show about podcast and broadcast starts now.

Matt Cundill  0:13  
I'm a graduate of the political science department at Acadia University, 1992 I found myself drawn to public policy for Lord knows what reason in the early 1990s I blame Professor Ian Stewart who lured me into this area of poli sci at Acadia. I already had my eye on working in radio, but an understanding in public policy led me to an understanding of why we have CanCon rules of what was 20% then 30% then 35% and for some stations, 40% in my time, I've written a few applications to the Canadian radio and Telecommunications Commission and appeared once in a hearing in 2004 so from my experience, I know that there's a lot that goes on at the CRTC. And also from my experience, nothing seems to emerge from what goes on at the CRTC. Is it all their fault? No, generally, it's the government in power that sets their course over the years. Most of what has and has not happened has left me shaking my head, especially when it comes to keeping broadcasting vibrant in Canada, these things that they've been doing for the last five years of bringing broadcasting regs up to 2025 standards, while trying to get big tech to pay their fair share and adhere to past broadcast laws. It reminds me of the first day of school where the gym teacher tells the class to line up alphabetically by height, except nobody figures it out. So today, I've asked Professor Michael Geist from the University of Ottawa to join me to peek inside some of the things going on these days at the CRTC. We're going to talk about Bill C11 and Bill C 18, that's the one that led to Facebook blocking the sharing of news on their services, and we'll take a look to see what impact this is going to have on broadcasters and journalism and content creators in Canada. Now, my apologies to the big chunk of the audience from the United States and abroad who will find this doesn't pertain to them at all. I wish I didn't have to do this episode either, but I'm glad I did. And now Professor Michael Geise joins me from the University of Ottawa. What drew you to becoming involved in the landscape of public policy as it pertains to media? 

Michael Geist  2:25  
Yeah, that's a good way to start. You know, I think that my interest and focus was largely on internet regulation, and as the internet gradually assumed a bigger and bigger role when it came to media, it was certainly that aspect was hard to avoid. And listen, I live in Ottawa, where there's a nice intersection between some of the technology, media and then, of course, public policy, government, and so in some ways, it was a bit of a natural fit. And I guess I've long felt as an academic that there's an important role to be played, of course, in the classroom and with conventional research that I do, but I also want to speak to broader audiences and try to have an impact beyond scholarship and so the advocacy and public policy kind of

Matt Cundill  3:10  
fits nicely there. Why is the government having so much trouble? I guess we can pinpoint this around 2000 why are they having so much trouble with the internet and trying to regulate it and find answers for it, because it feels like 25 years of just fumbling and not really doing anything of value.

Michael Geist  3:29  
Yeah, well, I mean, I don't think there is a single answer. I think we probably have to think about different blocks of time. I think in the the early days, don't think the internet was particularly well understood. Nor do I think many politicians necessarily thought it was particularly important. I think it's important to recognize that many of the political leaders tend to be older than the audience that would listen to this, and that's true at every stage, right? So even if you've got now many members of parliament to cabinet ministers who are well versed in the Internet and the digital world may have grown up with it to a certain extent. The reality is that, certainly in the early days, many, I don't think, totally got it, and so there was a bit of a heads off approach, in part, just because there wasn't a whole lot of interest. It took a long time to get people even interested in some of these issues. We then went through a phase where much of the emphasis was coming from the larger lobby groups. And so copyright was a big issue for a time, and you had some of the conventional large US copyright lobby groups that were dominant as part of the discussion and were looking to have their way. And in some ways that was that, combined with some of the telecommunications, internet cost issues, things like people may not remember this, but usage based billing, UBB and net neutrality were the sorts of things that began to galvanize people online, and it served as a bit of a wake up call for the government, I think most recently, because that's what's on people's minds. Now, I think that we've gone through a stretch where it was a combination of virtue signaling from the government. Combined with, you know, this make web giants pay vision. So they had sort of embraced innovation, until suddenly they found that there were some harms that were taking place online. And many were saying, Well, one way to do this is make these big companies start to pay. And so that seemed to drive much of the policy. And so, as you say, We fumbled a little bit sort of era after era, so to speak, when it comes to some of these digital issues.

Matt Cundill  5:24  
And you were one of the first to speak up and say, Well, if you're gonna try to make these digital companies pay, and I'm thinking here, I believe it's C11, you know, which has really sort of affected meta properties that you can't really post a link online. But C11, of course, was born out of C 10 that had been around for a while. And again, I think this is really very, you know, that reputation of sort of fumbling it, but you gave them a warning and said, If you do this, they're just going to, you know, take their product and go home, and they don't really care if you post news, because it's the cat videos that get all the clicks anyway. So how did we wind up not being able to post something as simple as a news article to Instagram and Facebook.

Michael Geist  6:04  
So first off, that's actually C 18, as opposed to C11. It's, you know, and it's easy to get the two of them confused, in part because they were part of a trio of legislation that the government anticipated bringing forward, and they were all premised in many ways, on this, that same basic principle. So it's, I think, easy to jump around between them. But you know, the government's introduction of C 18, that online news bill, which sought to emulate a similar approach in Australia, was, I thought, pretty predictable in its outcome. And you know, to that earlier question of, you know, How come we've struggled when it comes to digital policy in some ways. See, 18 is a sort of a perfect example of legislation that was largely driven by lobby groups, in this case, some of the larger media entities that put a lot into this form of payment. They saw, sort of this big pot of gold at the end of that rainbow, and thought that this was just going to generate a ton of cash. Government being excited because they knew there were issues. Generally speaking, most members of parliament want the media to succeed. We do see sometimes some of the tension that might exist, but the reality is that, particularly in each individual riding or constituency, those those MPs are pretty sensitive to the media coverage that they are able to get in the way they're able to reach their constituents, So there certainly was some attention paid there, and no one really bothered to sort of try to game out, well, how might these companies react to this? And it really were, of course, just two. I mean, there's legislation literally targeting two companies, in this case, Google and meta. And if you took the time to try to understand the business models of each of those respective companies, it should have been apparent pretty quickly that there was some amount of value to Google, and so Google would probably try to find some way to make this work. There wasn't an unlimited amount they were going to pay for links, because that really did undermine the core way that company functions in terms of capturing links and sending it out. But nevertheless, there is clearly value to them in having as comprehensive search engine as possible. And that doesn't even bring us to AI. So Google, I think, was looking for some sort of out, even though, quite clearly legislation premised on paying for links was going to be a problem in the case of of the meta properties, Facebook and Instagram. I mean, it's just different. It's a social media company in which news coverage is, in many respects, the worst kind of content for them. You know, their goal is to get people on the platform spend as long on the platform as possible so they can deliver as many ads as possible and capture as much information about those users as possible so they can deliver more relevant ads. I mean, that's at the end of the day, what social media company is about from a commercial perspective, and when people post links to news, they send people away from the platform. This is not a good thing if your goal is to keep people on your platform. So this notion that somehow meta couldn't live without Canadian news never made any sense from a commercial perspective. And the idea that somehow they were bluffing about the prospect of walking away from news just never made really any sense. I mean, the unwillingness of both politicians and frankly, the industry to take what meta had said pretty consistently from the moment that legislation was introduced, in some ways, just highlights that there are some people who, I guess, are in a bit of a bubble that don't take the time to fully understand the Internet, or at least the commercial business models that underlie some of these services. And clearly, they got burned at the end of the day.

Matt Cundill  9:33  
Well, I want to stick with the news for just a sec here, because I do feel like Canadian news is disappearing like under a game of three card monte. We've got, you know, big corporations, whether it's, you know, bell or Rogers and chorus, and they're saying, well, news loses money, but they, all they've done is just sort of moved it off onto a separate line on a separate spreadsheet, because the rest of their traditional properties aren't making money. I mean, if you just, you know, consider the NFL football. We're now at a point. Or that NFL football and Thursday night football and Monday Night Football are now being broadcast at times where local news used to be, and I'm pretty certain that their promise of performance is not really being held. I feel news is a huge victim here in all this well,

Michael Geist  10:14  
I don't think there's anybody that disputes the fact that there has been a struggle commercially for many of these companies to adapt, and that news pays a price. The challenge, of course, is what to do about it. I think we have some models out there, some companies village media, of course, comes to mind, but there are some others that have succeeded in local markets. They tend to be digital only to be sure. They tend to have looked at a market, tried to identify the size of that market. What's out there? You know, essentially, how much commercial revenue are they likely to be able to generate, how much interest, how many new stories are they able to generate? Can they, you know, pay their people and can they sort of bring that market in using some of their existing platforms, so that they gain some efficiencies there? This is a new way of doing things. There's been, I think, a tendency to ignore some of these good news stories. No pun intended. In fact, I recall, at the Senate hearing on this issue in village media, for example, appeared, one of the senators got up and said, Well, aren't you happy that many of these news outlets are closing down because this opens up new markets for you? And you know, I think the owner of village media, Jeff Elgie, was pretty appalled by the question. It was like, No, our goal is not to see local news sucker here. We think there's commercial opportunity, and we're going to try to pursue some of that, but it highlights just how poorly understood some of these issues are. There's a bit of flailing. To be sure, I think there have been some successes, even from a government policy perspective. You know, some of the grants around the local journalism funding, which has gone far beyond in terms of length, how many years the government initially envisioned it would last, I think, highlights that funding for actual journalism, as opposed to funding these entities, is a place where there is the potential for intervention for government, but where you get government Seeking to position itself as sort of the banker or the facilitating financier of some of these entities through regulation that raises, you know, significant concerns, and they're, they're not trivial, you know, you can't, on the one hand, be a government that says we're committed to an independent press, and at the same time be the ones that are paying the press. And, you know, I think that that goes some way to undermining some of the confidence that exists in some of our media. And I think, frankly, the liberals knew it. They were very reluctant to dip their toe in this water. And once they did, they went for the full dunk. And I think, frankly, made a mess of things. Yeah, well, I'm

Matt Cundill  12:39  
harkening back in my mind, to that conversation between Evan Solomon and Stefan gilbo on a Sunday morning, and it was question period, and they were talking about, well, you know, in the end, are journalists going to need licenses in order to apply for this funding? And I think he said yes, and stepped in it. And I think he set the whole that was Bill C 10, and he set the whole thing back at least two years with that comment.

Michael Geist  12:59  
You're right. Yeah, no, that was C 10, the predecessor of Bill C11. So that was the streaming side. But in some ways, you know, that was for the government, supposed to have been the easiest of the three pieces of legislation they had planned. So they planned for streaming news and then online harms. And they thought the streaming one would be a walk in the park, and it probably would have been but for the decision to then move into the prospect of user generated content regulation, and once the government said we're moving beyond conventional broadcast the internet space, and we're moving it and we're potentially bringing in some of these regulatory measures in a way that will affect podcasters or Tiktok ers or YouTubers, well, that had the effect, certainly, I think, of raising awareness, and not in a good way, of that legislation. And qibow, I think, proved to be a very poor communicator. Ironically enough, debating about communications issues, really poor communicator. I don't think he understood the file all that well, or, at a minimum, had a hard time explaining what the government's objectives were, and why, frankly, they were taking some of the steps they were taking. And it may well be that there simply wasn't a good answer. You know, in that case, they had excluded social media from the legislation and then made very late in the day the decision to roll back an exemption that they'd established there And and frankly, it was largely driven by a couple of lobby groups, primarily music groups out of Quebec, that were concerned that they weren't going to be able to maximize the revenue generated from this legislation. And that's not the story the government wanted to tell, and so they struggled to tell a good story, and ultimately resulted, as you say, at least a couple of years worth of delay. And that legislation now finds itself before the courts where it's being challenged, the CRTC is thinking about it. And so I remember keyboard with that, I think probably in that same interview, or certainly around the same time, was talking about, we think there can be payments here by the end of the year, and we're talking about many, many years before anybody sees a dime out of this legislation, starting from that time. Right? So I mentioned Bill C11

Matt Cundill  15:01  
earlier, because that's the one that used to get my blood boiling, because that's the online streaming act, and that's where my business is is largely and it started to include social media, then would include Tiktok, and then YouTube, and then didn't include YouTube, and we're gonna legislate podcasts. And I'm like, Well, how does that work in RSS? And it was really an example of how the people writing the legislation didn't understand, you know, I think, how the content was distributed and the usage of it all. And a very strange path for that piece of legislation.

Michael Geist  15:31  
Yeah, it sure was, because, as I say, I had concerns about it from the moment it was introduced. In part because it was trying. I thought, to treat the internet much like cable TV, and I was concerned about some of the kinds of things they had in mind for the traditional large streamers. And some of those issues are now, as I say, playing themselves out in court. But at least in that initial conception, what they called user content, whether that's podcasters or tiktokers or YouTubers, were excluded, and they made very late in the day, a decision to roll back that exclusion. The way legislation works is it gets sent to a House committee that studies the legislation. They call a bunch of witnesses, and the last stage in the committee process is something called clause by clause, where they literally go clause by clause in that legislation, people can propose amendments, and they think about it that way. And so during that process, so the witnesses are now all done, the government decided to remove that exemption. And you know that that, as I say, lit a spark, I think, certainly under me, but for many, many people about what was taking place, and I think you're right, that as as this played out over both that legislation, which ultimately died an election call, and a lot of the opposition that took place, and then gets reintroduces Bill C11, and you get a new heritage minister, Pablo Rodriguez, who insists that they've addressed the concern. But, you know, I think a fair reading from just about anybody was that it was still there. And part of that, I think, stems from a failure to fully understand how content is distributed, the role that some of these players play, and the fact that it was a pretty straightforward, plain reading. And I think the proof that at the end of the day, even the government surely knew that there was a problem, is that after the legislation passes, with the approach that the fix that is not a full fix. There was an attempt to actually provide a full fix at the Senate that the government rejected, but once they pass it, then they sent a policy direction to the regulator, to the CRTC, and the government can basically order the CRTC to interpret legislation in a particular manner. And so that's called the policy direction. And this policy direction tells them make sure you exclude social media. Well, you wouldn't need that if you had drafted the legislation appropriately in the first place, but they simply didn't.

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Matt Cundill  18:13  
tell me about your appearance in front of the CRTC because I saw someone who appeared to deliver some common sense and defend the end user, and that most of the legislation had been written really without the end user in mind. And I'm going to summarize your words the way they landed with me. And I said, you guys can do this all day and all you want, but it really doesn't make a difference if nobody is going to watch or consume any of the stuff because of the way you've regulated it. I felt that there was a lot of you tried to point them in the right direction, and they were skeptical.

Michael Geist  18:46  
Skeptical is being kind Yeah. So I did appear, I have to say. And it surprises some people, because I have appeared a lot before House of Commons had said at committees, 50, 6070, times, kind of thing. This was my first time appearing before the CRTC. And obviously I've watched many of them, so I generally knew what to expect. But one of the reasons that generally eschewed the actual formal appearances is that I have some amount of skepticism about the way the CRTC or the commission incorporates the advice and expert testimony that it is receiving from anybody outside the traditional stakeholders that have long dominated CRTC hearings. And I think the evidence there is when you take a look at CRTC decisions after they have heard from everyone, and invariably, they barely, if ever, cite evidence from anyone other than the traditional large players and other groups that make a habit of regularly appearing before the CRTC. So even going there and appearing as a witness, it's a little bit fish out of water, even for the commissioners, because it's you're not there, in the same way that a bell is there, or an actor is there, or whoever. Someone. The other traditional players are who know the commissioners well, but more than that, have their role to play, and that role is well understood. And it seems to say the commissions often struggled with that. I think back to when open media, the digital advocacy group, first appeared before the CRTC. It's well over a decade ago now, and it was on net neutrality, which is where that organization really made their first mark. And I remember the vice chair of the CRTC largely questioning, well, who are you people and who's funding you? And you know, basically, why are you even here? And we need to know more about you before we can take you seriously. Now, when I appeared, I mean, I think they knew who I was in terms of some of the stuff that I had written and said, but there was a lot of skepticism with my basic take, which was, you know, you're in the midst of trying to address how to interpret the Broadcasting Act. The Broadcasting Act doesn't exist effectively if you don't have an audience. And the end of the day, taking a public interest approach, where the audience matters ought to be central to the kinds of things that you do. And there is a former chair of the CRTC, Jean Pierre Blais, who had made the Commission's mission putting Canadians at the center of their communication system, is the way he described it. But those days, it feels like are long gone. And that's not to say that there aren't commissioners that are concerned with public interest concerns and the like. But certainly the message I got from a number of the commissioners was, you know, a healthy dose of skepticism that that would be a core part of what they would consider they viewed their role as basically the engaged in the transfer of funding from one group to another, and they had to sort out how that happened without really thinking more broadly about Well, who else is involved in this? Why is this the best mechanism to address some of the broader policy concerns that are out there?

Matt Cundill  21:53  
So three things have crossed my mind since you delivered that answer. The first one is when I look at the biographies of the people who you know are at the CRTC. The word radio doesn't even come up unless it's associated with radio Canada, so Canadian radio and telecommunications, and there's hardly any experience in radio outside of you know, the odd stint at Radio Canada. That's the first problem to your point about the CRTC, listening to the interest groups. I use the example of radio and can con, which is at 35% and radio and records and the interests in the lobby groups can wrestle with that all they want, but in the end, the listeners have already said they do not like a lot of these songs that are being played and they're a waste of time. There's data, but it's not being submitted or looked at for whatever reason, and it's available. It's available. It's this is public data that is available, and it's not like any of the commissioners are gonna go, Hey, did anybody see this study over here? And you know, to include that, it sort of boggles the mind, and it takes so much time to do this that by the time they come to a conclusion and pass anything, the technology is gone, and everything that they've worked for has now become outdated. I feel that they're in a cycle of that that has been going for 25 years, which is why they have not done a radio review in so long, and they're just sort of getting to it in the last few years, and they've got a moratorium on on FM radio applications. It feels like we're

Michael Geist  23:13  
stuck. Yeah, the moratorium did not get a lot of attention, and probably should have. It's kind of wacky, frankly, to have a regulator say we're just putting a halt to the sector, or at least an aspect of the sector, it's always going to be the case that regulators in the government are going to trail technology. Frankly, it seems to me that when we try to get ahead of the game and try to anticipate where tech might go, if you don't have confidence in some of these regulators and political leaders when it comes to tech, terms of how they've regulated once they know what the tech is, because they don't really know it as well as perhaps they should, the notion that somehow they're they're the sort of people you want predicting where things are going strikes me as was what should be a bit of a non starter, but too often, Even when some things are readily apparent, or the technology or the market has basically passed by where the debate is at, and there is almost no ability, really, to pivot, actually, just to bring back Bill C 18, that news bill as, I think, a good example of that. I did a piece in the it was in The Globe and Mail just towards the very end of that legislative process around the news saying, You know what, you're passing this legislation. There is not a word about AI in it. It does not deal with artificial intelligence and the impact that is going to have on the news sector. What on earth are we doing here with legislation that seeks to talk about linking and doesn't talk about the role that large language models and AI companies are engaged in. And here we are a couple of years later, and suddenly, now, of course, you get the same lobby groups that argued for C 18 that are now arguing again. Well, well, we need to deal with this issue too. You know, didn't deal with AI, so now we need to deal with it. So there was no ability, really, to change because. They'd already made their bed in this linking legislation, and so there was no real ability to pivot at that stage. So that remains, I think, a significant problem. You know, there's there. Oh, you're always playing a little bit catch up. These things take time. And that's certainly true in the regulatory process in the CRTC. You know when, when you had someone like Yibo talk about, well, we think we can manage to get money out the door to the cultural sector inside of a year. I mean, that's someone who just has no awareness, if that, if you really believe that no awareness of a regulatory process that involves hearings and then potentially judicial reviews or cabinet appeals and other appeals, all of these processes take a long time, and that's part of the game for some of the larger players. You know, in the telecom space, the bells and Telesis of the world, Rogers, like to play the string out for as long as possible, in part because the smaller players don't have that same luxury of time. And so you see that happening in in many of the sectors, with respect to their intersection with this regulatory environment.

Matt Cundill  26:01  
It's funny, you mentioned that. Well, we need to do something about AI, which is why we now have the Minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, and that is Evan Solomon, whose name has already come up in this conversation. So far, feels like a step in the right direction.

Michael Geist  26:18  
Well, I think it certainly sends a signal that this is a priority issue. I think there's some skepticism, certainly amongst those that have been looking for a more robust regulatory response, perhaps modeled on what the Europeans have been doing when it comes to AI. But Salomon, I think some of some of the initial especially some of his initial comments saying that the government may have over indexed was the language he used over indexed on regulation previously reflects at least a willingness to engage with the AI sector as it stands now and AI regulation as it stands now. So rather than say the approach that we had previously, which was, well, the Europeans did this, so let's come up with something that looks a lot like what the Europeans have been doing. Solomon is looking at a global AI regulatory environment, and he sees some European countries trying to back away a little bit from that because they think that regulatory frameworks and the costs associated with this may have a negative impact on investment in the sector. He sees a US administration on AI is taking off the guardrails, which I think raises a host of concerns, but at least from the commercial related perspective, this is who we compete with, and we're the closest neighbor. And if you've got AI companies and people that can easily move across borders or even stay here and work virtually those investment dollars can go where they want, and so that doesn't mean we could or should follow the US approach. There are serious, legitimate concerns about some of the things they're doing generally, but doing specifically on AI or not doing on AI. But at least we have to have our eyes wide open about what this landscape looks like, and then make policy choices that reflect what we want to do, which might be that we want lots of regulation and we're willing to sacrifice the commercial benefits. Or it might be that we want less regulation because we think that it's important, from a commercial perspective, to be a global player. Or it might be to say, hey, we want to try to find some sort of middle ground here where we're not the Europeans, but we're also not complete hands off in the US, and we think that might inspire confidence to provide another way. I'm not sure what we're going to do, but at least you need to have a discussion about it, as opposed to sort of blindly following what one jurisdiction or another does. Well, sometimes

Matt Cundill  28:37  
there's like a gimme, like there's some easy wins when you can get to this and tell me if this is not an easy win, and correct me. But you know, Rogers has been using AI on the air over public airwaves, and I think there should be a disclosure piece that is set. You must announce this at the top of the hour. Parts of the program were constructed using AI. I think you should do it before an ad, if an ad is voiced by someone with AI, that's just the way, I think, in particular, but, you know, shouldn't, Shouldn't that be an easy slam dunk, and something we can pass by Friday?

Michael Geist  29:11  
Transparency should be is, as you suggest, is sort of the, the easiest marker, I think, to suck, get up, get a win here, but at least begin to establish some of those guardrails or kind of principles about what it means to govern AI. And so that can include on the radio side, it can include in the print side. And we see some independently establish some of those kinds of disclosures or disclaimers about AI may have been involved in some of the stuff. Now, the truth is, AI is going to play, it feels like a significant role in a lot of different things. And so I don't know that what we want is just always reading disclaimers about all this stuff, but we do need to think about, well, what does transparency mean, both in its use, but then, of course, also transparency when it comes to some of the players themselves. What is going into those large language models? What kind of research can be done by trusted. At independent academic institutions and others around some of the algorithms, and how do we ensure that some of the concerns around bias and the like with respect to the use of those algorithms are addressed? What responsibility for some of those AI companies, when there are real harms that might arise out of some of these issues? I mean, these are the kinds of things that I think we can coalesce around some regulation, to be sure, and certainly transparency, or greater disclosure should be an easy starting point.

Matt Cundill  30:29  
I feel like there's a lot of voices that have disappeared from traditional media over the last 25 years. I'm going to use this particular subject matter because it's one that I think we can draw a little line on. And that's, you know, the rise of anti semitism. And traditional media doesn't seem to be talking about it a lot. Politicians are putting it up on x in a very lukewarm manner. They won't even use the words anti semitism. The only exception I hear over traditional media is Ben Mulroney, who gets a couple hours a day on a couple of markets, in a couple places, and if, you know, we looked in the rear view mirror, and I'm sorry to be an old man looking in the rear view mirror on this stuff, but there used to be someone in every market, you know, two or three people who'd be able to, you know, come to the table and debate this stuff on the radio, and there's just no dialog over traditional media. Everything seems to be fought out on social media, and it's just a waste of time. So that's why I think we have this sort of rise in anti semitism right now, amongst five other things.

Michael Geist  31:26  
Yeah. So, yeah. So I, you know, I think social media has certainly played a role the traditional media, and its willingness to speak or not speak out, or platform, some of the kinds of concerns, plays a role. You know, I think there's been more than just Ben Mulroney, but it's a smaller number of people within the media than might otherwise like it amongst the press the Globe and Mail is a good example of a place where, certainly their masthead editorials have been quite strong, speaking out on anti semitism. They've given me space on a number of occasions to write about it, but interestingly, they've had to close all comments for a while now on anything related to any of these issues, they've taken that step so, you know, and that's, of course, all under a subscription as well. So there's a lot of, I think, challenges that arise as part of all of that. I think, frankly, the anti semitism issues more than just that. I place more of the blame on there's a lot of places to go, but I would say our leaders have done, just a, generally, a really poor job here. And you know, one would hope the media would be there to amplify their message had they given a clear message about anti semitism. But you're right. Too often it has been couched in terms that, you know, all hate matters, and, of course, all hate matters. But what we are dealing with specifically is anti semitism, as by the data, certainly just a massively disproportionate amount of the hate that we do see that's reported to police, for example, is anti semitism related. And politicians should be able to call that out, and there's been a reticence to do that. September.

Matt Cundill  33:01  
We've got all the way to December to look forward to whatever's going on at the CRTC. But what are you looking forward to for the next few months? What are your expectations that the CRTC is going to be doing? Or what do you have your eyes on that you're potentially going to be podcasting and blogging about?

Michael Geist  33:16  
It's funny you should ask, because as I restart after a break in the summer, started with a look ahead for the CRTC. I think the big thing will be the results of the hearings that they held, especially around C11 on the streaming side. So a lot of lot of questions there about what sort of payments or contributions will be required. How will they deal with this issue of discoverability, this notion that somehow it's the responsibility of some of the larger platforms to, you know, increase the prominence of Canadian content, something that you can do on on a Netflix, perhaps, but, or in Amazon, but even even there, what will count as Canadian content in that context is still very much an open question. We're recording this just after the Toronto International Film Festival, and the John Candy documentary got a lot of attention. Ryan Reynolds behind it, that, to my knowledge, is not can con even though, I mean, it's got just about every indicia you could think of from a Canadian perspective. But if you've got Amazon as a backer or a foreign entity, a foreign company is one of the lead producers, then you're likely not qualifying as Canadian content. And so I certainly look for at least some initial answers from the CRTC around some of those frankly foundational questions about what counts as Canadian and how are they going to implement or operationalize what the government pulled together when it came to C11. More broadly, there are a number of major bills that are either currently in the House of Commons or coming forward, and the ones that I would call people's attention to in particular would be a bill that's about the border Bill c2 was literally the second bill the government introduced with the election of Mark Carney. But there are provisions in there known as lawful access that raise some very significant privacy related. Concerns warrantless access for law enforcement to any service provider in Canada, not just telecom companies or internet companies, but anyone providing a service. I think this is madness, and I think would be struck down by a Supreme Court, but nevertheless, that's what the government has put into place, and we are likely to see a revival, certainly, of online harms, which proved to be very controversial. How do you to the point we've been talking about earlier? How do we ensure that there's an appropriate level of responsibility by some of the platforms for some of the harms that do occur, but the same time, ensure that we preserve some privacy and speech rights that people have on those same platforms. And then there is both privacy and AI, and I'd be surprised if we see significant AI regulation, even with the easy slam dunk that we talked about earlier, although something on the privacy front seems a bit more likely.

Matt Cundill  35:46  
Professor Geist, thank you very much for taking the time today to join us and explain all this to

Michael Geist  35:50  
us. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much for

Tara Sands (Voiceover)  35:52  
having me. The sound off podcast is written and hosted by Matt Cundill, produced by Evan Surminski, edited by Taylor MacLean, social media by Aidan Glassey, another great creation from the sound off media company. There's always more at sound off podcast.com