Polled support for Internet regulation holding strong

Cover page from recent Léger poll

June 24 2024

The contrarian in me loves writing headlines like this.

It’s certainly not the headline the National Post chose to characterize the responses to a recent poll question. The Post headline was “Majority of millennials, Gen Z don’t support Trudeau’s internet regulation plans: poll”

The Post’s chief Parliamentary correspondent Stuart Thomson probably didn’t write that headline to his story, but it captures the gist of his coverage of the recent Léger-National Post survey on a raft of policy issues, of which one question was directed at the Liberal government’s policy of Internet regulation:

Note the last in a series of edgy questions: Do you support the government’s new rules to regulate the web, podcasts, streaming and social media to restrict offensive speech and online harms? (It’s not clear if the question refers solely to the Online Harms Act Bill C-63 (“restricting offensive speech and online harms”) or to the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 as well).

The poll doesn’t give us responses of all age groups, only the 18 to 35 Millenial/Generation Z cohort. The result is 44 per cent in favour, less than a majority. In an additional chart, the poll breaks out the shades of opinion as 14% strongly support plus 30% “somewhat agree” for a combined 44%. There are 16% who registered a “don’t know.” Going the other way, there is a combined opposition of 19% (strongly disagree) and 20% (somewhat disagree) for a final figure of 39% not in favour.

Accordingly, the straw poll for “support” of Trudeau’s policies is a thumbs up, for what that’s worth. On the other hand Mr.Thomson describes the result as follows: “The majority either disagree with the policies (39 per cent) or don’t know (16 per cent).” I can’t find an emoji that does justice to that observation.

Nevertheless the Léger survey is consistent with polling conducted by Nanos Research in April. That survey asked more questions and plumbed the public mood more deeply, as difficult as that is when asking the public about three distinct and complex Parliamentary bills.

The Nanos poll clearly asks about the full suite of three Internet bills, including the Online News Act C-18. It also found that the 18 to 35 cohort (41%) lagged behind the multi-generational results (56%) in supporting the Liberals’ overall regulation program. It identified a similar generation gap in terms of “trusting the government to protect freedom of expression in its Online Harms Act.”

An interesting finding was that the Millenial/Zeders trailed public support for specific regulatory powers to curb online harms but nonetheless demonstrated a high degree of support for take-down orders against hate content (78%), age verification for accessing porn (66%), and increased jail time for advocating genocide (59%).

The clear majority of public support (everywhere except the Prairie provinces) for the Liberal bills runs back many years through several polls, a point I make in my book Canada vs California: How Ottawa took on Netflix and the streaming giants.

One last comment: the National Post story says this:

The government has unleashed a batch of legislation designed to tighten the reins on the internet, including an online harms bill that attempts to restrict offensive or hateful speech and a bill that would bring online streaming services under the umbrella of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), which is imposing quotas for online Canadian content.

That last statement about quotas is incorrect. It’s not even a matter of opinion. The CRTC has done no such thing and in fact it has signalled it won’t.

But it’s a debate worth having.

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