Any Lobbying efforts to protect canadian musisicans from AI in ottawa?
I'd like to get involved if there are any lobbying efforts to get some rules in place about all this AI BS.
I sent an email to my own MP and Marc Miller (Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture) but I figured I'd make it into a template that others can send to their ministers. Also, for the record, I wrote this myself and did NOT use AI to make it lol 😂
Good Morning,
I am a constituent of [YOUR RIDING OR CITY].
I am concerned about the disruption by AI music generation to the Canadian music industry.
It is well documented that all the popular AI music generators have been trained on copyrighted material scrapped from the internet and without licensing or payment to the original artists. Some companies like Suno have publicly admitted to not caring about long standing conventions on copyright and paying royalties to reproduce music. Some US record labels have begun settlements with these companies. These dubious and problematic settlements do not service smaller un-labelled Canadian artists who have had their art stolen. Their stolen work is being used everyday around the world (at significant environmental cost) to reproduce their sound for the profit of users of Suno and other platforms.
Admittedly, these generators do a good job of reproducing the music it was trained on. Most users and even music professionals have a hard time identifying this content. While this music will be “good enough” for most listener, there are significant long term consequences to the proliferation of this kind of content. The use of generative AI has been found to result in de-skilling across many industries. As there is no significant market disincentive to utilize AI generation, artists who do not use AI generation face the risk of being left behind by the industry and not being able to produce music at the same rates that AI production allows. In the long term, we are heading towards a stagnant Canadian music landscape of AI generated music trained AI generated facsimiles and Canadian music producers who have lost the skills to express their creativity.
On April 20, 2026 the streaming service Deezer reported that 44% of daily uploads to its platform were mostly or entirely AI generated. It also reported that 85% of streams of this music are fraudulent. The implication here is staggering. Aside from the disturbing environmental cost required to generate AI music, the same computational (and environmentally damaging) resources are being used to falsely manipulate the algorithms in order to boost the perceived popularity of this music. This means that streamers who do not take action on their own initiative will allows their algorithms to prioritize the recommendation of AI music over that of real Canadian artists.
I hope to discuss and raise the need legislative intervention regarding the monetization and identification of un-ethically trained AI generated content. At present, Canadian consumers (while mostly disliking this content) are not capable of creating enough market pressure to de-incentivize major streaming platforms like Spotify allowing this music to dominate the content it delivers in Canada. We specifically need legislation requiring streaming platforms to:
- Identify content created by AI
- Demonetize, or divert revenue from AI generated content to funds for real Canadian artistic development
In addition we need new copyright legislation to:
- Ban AI generated content from receiving copyright protection.
- Make a clear distinction that training AI models is not “fair use”
- Require explicit consent (or opt-in) from artists to use their work for the training of AI models by services, social media, and platforms that host their art.
There is an urgent need for a solution as AI has already flooded the Canadian market. Artists across Canada have already had their work scraped, reproduced, and do not have a clear path to receiving proper royalties or payment for the profit being generated by their work. We need to do something to protect Canadian Art.
Regards,
[YOUR NAME]