People keep telling me, "Why not support C-10? Won't that help you, as you're a Canadian content creator?"

No, it won't help. It's designed not to.

Big media companies are really upset about small creators. Collectively, we're taking a bigger and bigger share of people's eyeball time, which means declining ad revenues for the big incumbents.

How can they suppress that? Well, enter "Canadian content".

People say, "Listen, Runkle. 99% of your videos are talking about exclusively Canadian issues. Canadian law--what's more Canadian than that? You film in Canada, you were born in Canada, you're a Canadian citizen... what's the problem?"

The problem is that being Canadian content is very different from being "certified" as Canadian content.

Getting a video certified as Canadian content is a process requiring an accounting of where you spent your money, requiring filling out lengthy forms, possibly requiring a lawyer. It requires application time. By the rules, you cannot apply until you start filming--though you can apply for an entire season. I, and most YouTubers don't have "seasons", we just have one-off content as it's relevant. There's an exception for accredited media organizations, which again--I am not.

I don't have two weeks to wait for approval. A lot of my content is responding to things in the news, and if I wait a week it's dead content. No one will watch me for commentary on old news.

Similarly, this is what I do in and around other work--and important work, and work that eats a huge amount of my time. An hour and a half of paperwork is nothing to an incumbent media organization with a staff. To a new video maker, it's a huge time impact.

And without that, you don't get to be declared "Canadian content"--so your videos will get suppressed in favour of people who can hit that mark. YouTube will be forced to push my content down in order to push up things like reruns of Corner Gas.

This isn't by accident. Suppressing the voices of individual Canadians is part of the goal. It's a lot harder for political parties to offer incentives to individual Canadians. And major incumbents aren't likely to lobby government for anything other than the suppression of competition.