YouTube has long been a popular destination for sports content. From game highlights to athlete interviews to sports news coverage, fans come to the platform to stay up-to-date on all the sports they know and love, and in Canada that sport is often hockey. Meanwhile, Sportsnet - the home of hockey in Canada - continues to innovate with their live hockey rights by delivering content to fans in new and unique ways across multiple platforms.
YouTube has long been a popular destination for sports content. From game highlights to athlete interviews to sports news coverage, fans come to the platform to stay up-to-date on all the sports they know and love, and in Canada that sport is often hockey. Meanwhile, Sportsnet - the home of hockey in Canada - continues to innovate with their live hockey rights by delivering content to fans in new and unique ways across multiple platforms. 

That’s why we’re thrilled to share that YouTube and Sportsnet have teamed up to bring even more hockey action to Canadians. 

Throughout the 2021-2022 regular NHL season, hockey fans can now ‘Watch a Leafs Game with Steve Dangle’ every Saturday night on the Sportsnet YouTube channel. Viewers will also enjoy several only-on-YouTube features as part of the livestream, including the live chat feature and in-game polls, allowing fans to interact with the host and each other throughout the game. Fans who missed the livesteam will also be able to watch it back, any time on the Sportsnet YouTube channel. 

Renowned by hockey fans for his exuberant reaction videos, and fresh weekly video series’ like Hat-Picks, Dang-Its, and Trade Trees, Sportsnet’s Steve Dangle has built a dedicated, loyal community of followers on YouTube like few other sports content creators. The debut of ‘Watch a Game with Steve Dangle’ throughout the 2021 NHL Playoffs generated nearly 5 million views on YouTube. This season, Watch a Leafs Game with Steve Dangle will air 23 times throughout the regular season, during every Saturday night Leafs game on Hockey Night in Canada on Sportsnet. All livestreams begin at 7:00 p.m. eastern time. 


GAME SCHEDULE 
  • Saturday, Nov 20, Pittsburgh @ Toronto 
  • Saturday, Dec 4, Toronto @ Minnesota 
  • Saturday, Dec 11, Chicago @ Toronto 
  • Saturday, Dec 18, Toronto @ Vancouver
  • Saturday, Jan 1, Toronto @ Seattle 
  • Saturday, Jan 8, Toronto @ Colorado 
  • Saturday, Jan 15, Toronto @ St. Louis 
  • Saturday, Jan 22, NY Islanders @Toronto 
  • Saturday, Jan 29, Toronto @ Detroit 
  • Saturday, Feb 26, Detroit @ Toronto 
  • Saturday, Mar 5, Vancouver @ Toronto 
  • Saturday, Mar 19, Toronto @ Nashville 
  • Saturday, April 2, Toronto @ Montreal 
  • Saturday, April 9, Toronto @ Philadelphia 
  • Saturday, April 16, Montreal @ Toronto 
  • Saturday, April 22, Toronto @ Florida 

HOW TO WATCH 
  Posted by Soneeka Patel, Broadcast and Sport Partnerships Lead

Posted by Mladen Raickovic, Head of Global Partnerships, Google Canada




When we launched the Google News Initiative in 2018 with a mission of helping to create a sustainable landscape for journalism, the news industry and the world were in very different places. Now, more than three years later, we are reflecting back on what we’ve accomplished together with Canadian news organizations, nonprofits and journalists while at the same time deepening our commitment to helping newsrooms solve challenges. 



Reporters and editors around the country told us that using technology to build digital journalism skills to adjust to the digital age and combating misinformation are critical priorities. That’s why we’ve expanded our News Lab trainings in Canada and have committed to training 5,000 journalists over the next three years on digital skills for the newsroom.



The COVID-19 pandemic has placed increasing pressure on the business side of newsrooms, impacting their ability to cover essential stories for their communities. That led us to create the Journalism Emergency Relief Fund, putting much-needed funding of $1.5 million into the hands of over 230 local Canadian newsrooms. The COVID-19 pandemic was also the impetus for the Support Local News campaign in the U.S. and Canada, which encouraged people to support their local paper. 



In 2019, we held our first North American Innovation Challenge which supported four Canadian news organizations in understanding their communities and developing new publishing business models. And we’ve just announced the winners from our third North American Innovation Challenge, out of the 25 projects selected, 7 are with Canadian newsrooms. Winners include Energeticcity.ca, a local news organization in Northern BC, which will focus on helping rural media operators connect with their audiences, and Metroland, which will address the deficiency in news coverage of and for Indigenous people in Ontario. 



Throughout, we strive to ensure that our work touches a diverse group of publishers and audiences. We have recently announced the Global News Equity Fund, a multi-million dollar commitment to driving transformational change with a focus on diversity and equity. The fund will provide direct financial support to news organizations that are owned by or serve underrepresented communities around the world, and it is our hope that it builds upon our existing work of supporting underrepresented publishers and communities. 



We also developed the GNI Ad Transformation Lab, a program to support Canadian and American publishers serving underrepresented communities in their transition to digital. The first round of the Lab helped 28 Black and Latino publishers advance their digital businesses and build digital advertising capabilities required to achieve growth today. The application for the 2022 Ad Transformation Lab is now live. The application window will close on Monday, November 29 at 11:59 p.m. EST. We encourage news organizations and publishers who serve diverse and underrepresented communities in the United States and Canada to apply.



We recently made a conscious effort to broaden our support to focus on local and emerging news organizations. Publishers have shared with us that adapting their business models to digital is immensely difficult. So together with industry associations and thought leaders worldwide we are bringing the Digital Growth Program to Canada to help news organizations accelerate growth in advertising and reader revenue and strengthen their core foundations in audience development, product and data. The feedback we received from partners also encouraged us to grow our investment in our audience insight tools, including our recently launched, News Consumer Insights.



Additionally, we are supporting aspiring news entrepreneurs through efforts like our Startups Boot Camp, an 8 week program in partnership with LION publishing designed to help participants with hands-on coaching and support to launch or develop a news offering. Applications have just closed for this upcoming all-Canadian cohort, and we cannot wait to see the news products that this group brings to market. 



We’ve also just announced The Data-Driven Reporting Project, a partnership between the GNI and the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. Medill will run The Data-Driven Reporting Project, which aims to address the inequality of resources for local newsrooms and freelancers when doing essential data-driven, investigative reporting. The project is committed to awarding $2 million to journalists working on document-based investigative projects that serve local and underrepresented communities throughout the United States and Canada. Learn more on how and when you can apply.



This is just a snapshot of our work. Over the last three years we’ve accomplished a lot, but there’s much more to do. Achieving a healthy, sustainable and diverse news industry isn’t something Google or any single entity can or should do alone. This is a shared responsibility across publishers, companies, governments, civic society and more. Today we remain as committed as we’ve always been to playing our role in supporting Canadian newsrooms of all sizes for years to come. 



Posted by Mladen Raickovic, Head of Global Partnerships, Google Canada

This blog was guest written by Ann Maje Raider, Kaska Elder and Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society Executive Director

More than 20 years ago, a small group of Indigenous women in northern Canada created an organization to address the impacts of abuse committed by residential schools in the region. I am honored to have shared in the humble beginnings of our organization which has since grown into a significant social movement. Known today as the ...
Editor's Note: This blog was guest written by Ann Maje Raider, Kaska Elder and Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society Executive Director

More than 20 years ago, a small group of Indigenous women in northern Canada created an organization to address the impacts of abuse committed by residential schools in the region. I am honored to have shared in the humble beginnings of our organization which has since grown into a significant social movement. Known today as the Liard Aboriginal Women’s Society (LAWS), we offer leading-edge social development services to Kaska communities in southern Yukon and northern British Columbia, addressing barriers to economic empowerment including gender discrimination, cultural displacement, addictions and violence.

Over the next 20 years we intend to deepen the impact and reach of our services, creating a Centre in the form of a virtual hub to vastly improve services and support for Indigenous women. Using culturally informed training and mentorship, the Centre will strengthen access to safe, culturally appropriate practices that enable Indigenous women to recover from violence, realize their economic potential and improve their quality of life.

It is with this Centre in mind that we submitted our ideas and plan to the Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls, and we are gratified that our project is one of 34 global projects selected for funding out of nearly 8,000 applications globally. In addition to funding, we will participate in a four-month accelerator program led by Google’s Accelerator and Women Techmakers communities and Impact Challenge partner Vital Voices to move our project forward.

The LAWS Centre Project is focused on transformative action enabling Indigenous women to reclaim power and place through a multi-faceted, community-led approach, drawing on cultural and critical expertise, and built upon three core principles: Empowerment: The project opens pathways to economic independence for Indigenous women through the sharing of traditional knowledge, through specialized training in leadership and in culturally grounded responses to gender-based violence, and through a skills and knowledge transfer process, empowering Indigenous women as their own trainers.
Indigenous Women-Led: The project will provide diverse opportunities for Indigenous women to engage in training design and delivery, by and for Indigenous women and survivors of violence.
Paradigm shift: Led by Indigenous women/LGBTQ2S, the project intends to decolonize and transform the service field at multiple levels, understanding violence using the response-based lens, addressing racism and promoting justice-oriented and dignity-driven responses to the needs of Indigenous women and girls.

The assistance of the Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls will enable the LAWS Centre Project to support Indigenous women, who are amongst the most marginalized in Canadian society, and help them overcome socio-economic barriers. This assistance comes at a crucial time and will be used to create an intra-community support system marked by Indigenous women supporting other Indigenous women.

As Indigenous women, we already have the power and solutions to transform public policies that will enable us to achieve our economic potential – the power and solutions borne of our cultural knowledge developed over a millennia and awaiting recognition and implementation by and within current colonial systems. Our ancestors and our cultural knowledge guide us and show the way forward for ourselves and for future generations to rise up and thrive.

Editor's note: More about the Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls
The $25 million philanthropy challenge was launched in March with a challenge to submit the boldest and most innovative ideas to create a more equitable economic reality for women and girls.

Google.org partnered with a women-led panel of experts, including leaders like Rona Ambrose, and gender equity-focused organizations Vital Voices and Project Everyone to evaluate proposals based on four key criteria: innovation, impact, feasibility, and scalability. The selected organizations have outlined projects that will help women and girls, especially those in geographically, economically, or socially marginalized populations, reach their full economic potential.

For more information about our project, other Google.org Impact Challenge for Women and Girls recipients, please follow this website link.

At YouTube, our mission is to “give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Implicit in that mission is a sense of responsibility to our community: our users, our creators, and our advertisers. Responsibility is our number one priority at YouTube, and we want to protect our community while enabling new and diverse voices to break through.
At YouTube, our mission is to “give everyone a voice and show them the world.” Implicit in that mission is a sense of responsibility to our community: our users, our creators, and our advertisers. Responsibility is our number one priority at YouTube, and we want to protect our community while enabling new and diverse voices to break through. 


The Government of Canada is drafting legislation to address “Harmful Content Online” and we are committed to helping them achieve that objective. Everyone deserves to feel safe online. At YouTube we feel a deep responsibility to keep our users safe and remove content that violates our policies. Part of that responsibility includes working together with governments and other stakeholders to get regulatory frameworks right. 


It has been encouraging to see so many voices contribute to the government’s consultation, and transparency around this issue is incredibly important. That's why, like so many others, we are taking the step of publicly releasing our submission made to the Government of Canada. You can read our entire submission here. 


YouTube has existing, robust policies in place for content hosted on our platform, including prohibitions on hate speech, terrorist content, nudity, harassment and incitement to violence. Through the Global Internet Forum to Combat Terrorism (GIFCT) and the Technology Coalition we work closely with government partners around the world to tackle illegal content online. We understand the calls for increased transparency and it is why we publish quarterly reports of how YouTube deals with content that violates our Community Guidelines. There are more than 20,000 people across YouTube and Google working to tackle abuse of our platforms and keep our users safe. You can read more about our approach to moderating content online here. We are committed to sharing our experiences and expertise to offer constructive recommendations to the Canadian government as it develops this new regime. 


Our starting point is that we believe the same standards should apply to expression in online and offline environments. As currently drafted in the Government’s proposal, what is legal to say offline may not be permissible to share online. We believe it is critical that content regulated by the proposed framework be precisely defined and limited to illegal content in order to avoid undermining access to information; restricting the exchange of ideas and viewpoints that are necessary in a democratic society; and creating a legal framework that could be used to censor political speech in the future. 


There are aspects of the Government’s proposal that could be vulnerable to abuse and lead to over removal of legitimate content. Some categories of content, such as defamation, are highly dependent on context and require nuanced decision making. We need to take the time to properly review and assess these types of content. The government’s proposal contains a provision that would require platforms to take down user-flagged content within 24 hours. YouTube receives hundreds of thousands of content flags on a daily basis. While many are good-faith attempts to flag problematic content, large numbers of them represent mere disagreement with views expressed in legitimate content or are inaccurate. As pointed out by Emily Laidlaw and Darryl Carmichael, from the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law, user-submitted flags can be used as a tool to harass and infringe on the expression of others, and would “disproportionately impact marginalized, racialized and intersectional groups.” In other words, the proposal could harm the diverse voices we hope will thrive on YouTube. 


We act rapidly in responding to user flags; however, it’s essential to strike the right balance between speed and accuracy. User flags are best utilized as “signals” of potentially violative content, rather than definitive statements of violations. In Q2 2021, 17.2M videos were flagged by users. In that same period, we removed over 6.2M videos for violating our Community Guidelines, and of those removed, 296,454 were first flagged by users. 


We’re also strongly recommending that the legislation does not impose a requirement for proactive monitoring —a system where content is pre-emptively scanned for potentially offensive material before it can be posted. The European Union has already taken a strong stand against proactive monitoring. The EU Commission stated that requiring monitoring “could disproportionately limit users’ freedom of expression and freedom to receive information, and could burden service providers excessively and thus unduly interfere with their freedom to conduct a business.” Imposing proactive monitoring obligations could result in the suppression of lawful expression (potentially including content that is intended to educate and inform the public about societal challenges) and would be out of step with international democratic norms. 


We appreciate the opportunity to share our submission with the Government and with Canadians. Many have voiced concerns with the proposal and while we share some of those concerns, we also believe that there is a path forward. We’re at the table, ready to work hand-in-hand with the government, civil society, and Canadians on this critical issue. We all deserve to feel and be safe online. 


Posted by Jeanette Patell, Head of Canada Government Affairs & Public Policy at YouTube