'He's in our hearts': Family and friends still seek answers one year after Nathan Wise’s disappearance
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Online streaming giants YouTube and TikTok are asking Canadian senators to take a sober second look at an online streaming bill that they say would cause significant harm to Canadian digital creators.
TikTok executive Steve de Eyre said in a Senate committee meeting on Wednesday evening that the federal Liberals' Bill C-11 doesn't just fail to protect digital creators from regulation, but makes them collateral damage.
He said the Senate should more explicitly exclude user-generated content from the bill, which was designed to modernize Canadian broadcasting legislation and bring online streaming platforms into the fold.
Senators should also consider rules around how Canadian content is identified, he said, saying much of the content that Canadians create on TikTok wouldn't qualify as such.
The onus could end up on users to prove how Canadian they are, meaning that "established media voices and cultural voices" with more resources could end up at the front of the line, said de Eyre, who is the company's director of public policy and government affairs in Canada.
YouTube executive Jeanette Patell told senators that the bill gives far too much discretion to Canada's broadcasting regulators to make demands around user-generated content.
She said the provision that the regulator can consider whether someone has directly or indirectly generated revenue from the content would affect "effectively everything" on the platform.
"This is a global precedent," said Patell, who is YouTube's head of government affairs and public policy.
She warned that if other countries follow suit, Canadian creators, for whom 90 per cent of YouTube views come from outside the country, will have a harder time getting noticed. "There's nothing like this in the world for open platforms. It really puts the international audiences of creators at risk."
Patell also warned that the regulator could require changes to the company's algorithms, echoing concerns that music streaming giant Spotify raised during a hearing last week.
That fear is based on committee testimony from Ian Scott, the chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
Scott told senators in June that the regulator could ask platforms such as YouTube to "manipulate" their algorithms to produce particular outcomes.
At a meeting last week, Spotify's head of artist and label partnerships for Canada, Nathan Wiszniak, said that affecting the way the platform generates recommendations for individual listeners would go against its raison d'être and could create negative feedback for the songs that are being recommended.
"Asking services to repeatedly bias recommendations against listener preferences strikes at the core trust we have built with our customers," he said.
Some Quebec senators pushed back on the idea that requiring an algorithm to nudge users towards Canadian content is such a bad thing.
Sen. Julie Miville-Dechêne said that the bill requires companies to choose the means to make Canadian artists discoverable. "Do you have means other than algorithm to promote Canadian content?" she asked Patell. "Why are you afraid?"
Sen. René Cormier, for his part, noticed during his own use of YouTube that the algorithm was recommending anglophone music to listen to after Quebec artist Ariane Moffatt, whom he repeatedly name-dropped. "I'm trying to understand why you can't continue with the same type of music that I'm already listening to," he said. "Why am I led elsewhere in the recommendations?"
Patell said YouTube is about "You," and that its users train the algorithm to serve their needs — so she recommended that Cormier "teach" the platform what he's looking for. When Canadians come looking for Canadian content, she said, "we absolutely want to serve that to them."
Though de Eyre said that TikTok is "democratizing discoverability," Bernadette Clement, a senator from Ontario, pointed out that "it's not democratic if people don't know how algorithms work." Patell and de Eyre responded by saying that their companies are making their source code and raw data available to researchers.
The streaming companies are recommending specific tweaks to the language of the bill that they say would assuage their concerns.
In June, before Parliament's summer break, the House of Commons passed Bill C-11 with more than 150 amendments. The Senate decided not to rush its passage and instead to take a more thorough look this fall.
If senators decide to amend the bill, it will have to be sent back to the House of Commons for approval before it can become law.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 21, 2022.
It’s been a year since Nathan Wise went missing and his family is no closer to finding out what happened to him.
Dozens of Ontarians are expressing frustration in the province’s health-care system after their family doctors either dropped them as patients or threatened to after they sought urgent care elsewhere.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
Amazon's paid subscription service provides free delivery for online shopping across Canada except for remote locations, the company said in an email. While customers in Iqaluit qualify for the offer, all other communities in Nunavut are excluded.
The fire burning near Fort McMurray grew from 25 hectares to 5,500 hectares over the weekend.
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin began a Cabinet shakeup on Sunday, proposing the replacement of Sergei Shoigu as defence minister as he begins his fifth term in office.
Police are searching for a male suspect after a man was “slashed in neck” on Sunday morning in downtown Toronto and died.
There were some scary moments for several people on a northern Ontario highway caught on video Thursday after a chain reaction following a truck fire.
Health Canada announced various product recalls this week, including electric adapters, armchairs, cannabis edibles and vehicle components.
English, history, entertainment, math and geography: high school trivia teams could be quizzed on any of it when they compete at the Reach for the Top Nationals in Ottawa in June.
An Ottawa pizzeria is being recognized as one of the top 20 deep-dish pizzas in the world.
A family of fifth generation farmers from Ituna, Sask. are trying to find answers after discovering several strange objects lying on their land.
A Listowel, Ont. man, drafted by the Hamilton Tigercats last week, is also getting looks from the NFL, despite only playing 27 games of football in his life.
The threat of zebra mussels has prompted the federal government to temporarily ban watercraft from a Manitoba lake popular with tourists.
A small Ajax dessert shop that recently received a glowing review from celebrity food critic Keith Lee is being forced to move after a zoning complaint was made following the social media influencer’s visit last month.
The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
The Regina Police Service says it is the first in Saskatchewan and possibly Canada to implement new technology in its detention facility that will offer real-time monitoring of detainees’ vital health metrics.
Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.