Senate Hearings on Bill C-18 – Hearing 2 Appears to Be Missing

We tried to continue with our analysis of the Bill C-18 Senate Hearings. However, it appears that hearing 2 no longer exists.

We are moving on to hearing 2 of the Bill C-18 Senate hearings. Well, we at least tried to move along to the 2nd hearing, but it appears that the hearing has vanished completely.

For quick reference, here are the hearings we covered in the past already.

Past Hearings Covered

Hearing 1 – Heritage Ministry officials / Lobbyists / Konrad von Finckenstein

Now, you might recall that it took a bit for the witness schedule to appear for this hearing, but we did finally get that list. That witness list was, of course, the following for April 26, 2023:

Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada

Sue Gardner, Member, Policy Committee Internet Society Canada Chapter
Lawrence Gibbons, Group Publisher Star Observer
Chris Gogos, Publisher of Neos Kosmos and Director of the Independent Multicultural Media Association Star Observer
Matthew Hatfield, Campaigns Director OpenMedia
Randy Kitt, Media Sector Director Unifor
Emma McDonald, Senior Policy Adviser Minderoo Foundation
Philip Palmer, President Internet Society Canada Chapter
Rod Sims, Professor, Australian National University As an Individual

It was gearing up to be an interesting hearing, but when we looked today, there was no reference to the hearing even available. For SenVu, it would have been TRCM 51, but there is no recording. Likewise, the past schedules now no longer contain any reference that this hearing even existed at all.

Obviously, we have no idea what the cause of this is. In the past, when a hearing was cancelled, the entry remained. When a video was taken down for whatever reason, we still had an entry, but an error message that the video doesn’t exist. It’s possible that the hearing was cancelled, but we have no real way of knowing what happened. Hopefully, if the hearing was cancelled, that the witnesses would get reshuffled around so they can still have their comments heard. In the mean time, it looks like Week 1 ultimately only has one hearing available to the public.

So, as of now, in the absence of something changing with this, you are basically caught up with all the hearings to this point as far as we know. Sorry this posting doesn’t really add much to the debate, but there’s nothing we can do about it.

Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.