Or is it?
By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – Another meeting of the Transport and Communications Senate Committee brought an Aboriginal perspective on C-11, the Online Streaming Act, from the Indigenous Screen Office (ISO, represented by its co-executive director, Jesse Wente; above), the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta, an assistant professor in Indigenous Communication Arts at the First Nations University of Canada and an Aboriginal digital content creator. To complete the picture, we heard from the Music Publishers Canada.
Beyond the expected message on the need for better reflection of Aboriginal languages they spoke about the importance of telling Aboriginal stories in English for those who do not speak any Aboriginal language fluently.
Case in point Bert Crowfoot, the CEO of Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta told the committee that “My mother was Saulteaux and my father was Blackfoot so they spoke to each other in English and all the ten kids spoke English.” This illustrates the complexity of the implementation of the new legislation.
We also heard Wente tell the committee that the ISO had a four year partnership with Netflix to fund two streams they offer: “One stream is for mentorship, which is really a career development, professional development opportunity.”
“The second one is perhaps my favourite part of the partnership, which is the cultural mentorship. This was a direct response to what we heard from our community in that, when telling Indigenous stories, there are often steps that need to be taken that aren’t usual for other stories. There might be protocols, elders might need to be consulted, there might need to be knowledge-keepers or story-keepers, you might need to access the land — all sorts of things that require additional development time and resources to undertake.”
They also have a partnership with Amazon. “We have found these new streamers to be very receptive in a way that we have often struggled with traditional broadcast entities based in Canada,” he went on.
Later, Senator Jim Quinn, recently appointed to the Senate by the Trudeau government asked the first panel if they thought it would be a good idea to have committees in both chambers review the Cabinet direction to the CRTC that would follow royal assent, with a few witnesses and a very quick process, he said.
When Bill C-10, the predecessor of C-11 was discussed in the House of Commons, in the previous session, the government had table a proposed CRTC policy directive that was discussed.
But, for C-11, the government has chosen not to make it public. We think this is a legitimate concern on the part of Senator Quinn and not a stalling tactic.
In any case, the timetable for both C-11 and C-18 (the Online News Act) have been disrupted and barring a significative show of good will, the clause-by-clause process will not be completed this session, therefore creators and news organizations will have to continue to wait.
Next meeting will be tomorrow evening with CRTC representatives coming to conclude the study… maybe.
