Catching Up on MediaPolicy.ca: Filibuster and Closure of C-11

June 11, 2022

The Conservative filibuster of the Heritage Committee hearings on C-11 continued throughout the week. CPC committee vice-chair John Nater MP served notice the filibuster would continue into the Fall. I wrote about that here.

Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez spoke to the Committee (he was denied the previous week by the filibuster) and revealed some new information about the $1 Billion injection of foreign streamer cash his Department projects.

The Liberal, Bloc and NDP MPs remained tellingly serene throughout the week and on Friday morning the Liberals responded with a closure motion introduced into the House of Commons providing for one nine-hour day of Committee debate (June 14^th) on amendments —-Committee meetings normally last two hours—- before C-11 is returned to the Commons for Third Reading. 

With C-11 as a springboard, the Conservatives kicked off a summer membership recruitment campaign with a rhapsodic video starring Andrew Scheer MP entitled “I’m not sure how long the government will let this video stay up.”

The tragedy of the filibuster after 10 days of Committee hearings is that the amendments, some of which I profiled in Monday’s post, will receive inadequate debate and be available only to Canadians who tune in to ParlVu. 

I also had a volley and response debate with C-11 critic Leonard St. Aubin that began with my proposal to split the difference on regulating user generated programming but ended up being a discussion of the conundrum of Canadian broadcasting economics. Mr. St-Aubin’s first and second replies are here and here.  

Enough of C-11 for today and on to the FaceGoogle Bill C-18: you can read a typically incisive article from former CRTC Chair (former Competition Bureau Commissioner, former federal judge, etc.) Konrad Von Finkenstein itemizing all the things he think might go wrong with the Bill.

For Rogers-Shaw followers, there is an excellent business feature published this morning in the Globe and Mail covering Québecor CEO Pierre-Karl Péledeau’s bid to buy Freedom Wireless and emerge as a fourth national wireless carrier.