44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 29, 2022 10:00AM
- Mar/29/22 1:25:35 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, my petitioners are seeking for the government to cease and desist its ostracism of those who are mandated, through a petition that says that Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's Bill of Rights, and our history of sacrifice in defence of liberty demand that we respect and uphold the conscience rights of all Canadians, and that the Prime Minister has encouraged hatred and contempt toward the individuals exercising their constitutionally protected rights. Therefore, they would like the government to cease and desist this dehumanizing behaviour of refusing to let people leave the country by plane if they do not have their shots.
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Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise on behalf of the constituents of the beautiful riding of Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke who value freedom and diversity of thought.
Recently, there has been an outbreak of diversity of thought among my Liberal colleagues. I know that can be scary for some of them. To reassure them, I will heed the call to unity and try to lower the temperature on this very important debate about Bill C-11, which is the online streaming act.
This may disappoint my biggest fan, the member for Winnipeg North, but he will be delighted to learn that I have saved a special section just for him. When a similar bill was first introduced last Parliament, I went on my Facebook Live show, The GNN, and described it as a serious threat to freedom of expression. I stood in the House and described it as a serious threat to freedom of expression.
The media, to be fair, and much of the public shrugged off these concerns. As outlined in my first speech, this bill would have little effect on popular mainstream expression, other than to make it more expensive. The threat to freedom of expression with this bill comes from the impact it would have on smaller, less popular minority expressions. It was only when the government members of the committee, in a coalition with the NDP and the Bloc, removed the legislated safeguards on user-generated content that everyone online became aware of the threat this legislation posed.
Fundamentally, Canadians understand that if the government has the power to regulate, promote or demote their online expression, then that expression is no longer free.
My Liberal colleagues will raise a hue and cry, and claim the Prime Minister does not want to censor Canadians' cat videos. That is true. The Prime Minister does not want to censor cat videos; he wants to tax them. The Prime Minister wants to tax Canadian and foreign artists not covered by the current Broadcasting Act. He wants to tax them and give that money to the powerful media and cultural lobbies. Of course, arts groups that profit off this bill support it. It is the artists who do not have a powerful lobby organization who pay this new CanCon levy.
This legislation proposes to take money from digital artists and redistribute it to the government's preferred analog artists. This is just as the government takes income tax dollars from new media journalists and gives them back to the horse-and-buggy media.
The government really wants to tax Netflix, but does not say it wants to tax Netflix. In order to pull off this tax without saying “tax policy”, the government is changing the very meaning of broadcasting. This takes us to the heart of the problem. The Broadcasting Act, by its very nature, places restrictions on Canadians' right to freedom of expression.
I want to repeat this in order to be absolutely clear. The Broadcasting Act is designed to limit and regulate freedom of expression. The reason it has not been struck down for violating the charter is because those limits are reasonable.
My constituents know I will defend their freedom no matter what, but they understand there can be reasonable limits. The Broadcasting Act is an example of this. It places limits on Canadians' freedom to broadcast their expression. The reason for this is the technology. If all Canadians with electricity and an antenna were able to broadcast their individual expression on whichever electromagnetic frequency they chose, everyone would cancel one another out and no one would be heard.
By the nature of the technology, the freedom of one person to use a particular frequency impacts the freedom of everybody else to use that frequency. Broadcasting technology, by its nature, requires broadcasting regulation. Without broadcasting technology using limited public air waves, the federal government has no legal right to regulate the content that carries expression from Canadians or to Canadians.
Our predecessors knew that having control of Canadians' expression over public airwaves was something best kept at arm's length from cabinet, so they set up the CRTC. The Broadcasting Act regulates expression. It is baked into the legislation. It is what the CRTC does. Streaming is not broadcasting. The freedom of one Canadian to stream content does not limit the freedom of any other Canadian to stream other content.
As we much appreciate Canadian authors and Canadian painters, we do not legislate the content of book stores or art galleries to promote their expression over foreign expression. It is not because a foreign author or painter has freedom of expression, but it is because Canadians do.
We cannot pass legislation that limits or restricts Canadians' access to artistic expression. We cannot pass legislation to regulate any expression that does not infringe on the rights of other Canadians' expression. If the House proceeds with this fundamentally flawed legislation, it will be infringing on the rights of Canadians. Most Canadians will not notice the infringement beyond paying higher streaming bills. Netflix and Disney can afford to hire Canadian lawyers and lobbyists and have lunch with the chair of the CRTC. They will be fine.
Majority expression in a democracy is rarely threatened. It is the minority expression that suffers. For example, what about the foreign-language streaming services? Take the streaming service TFC, which is based in the Philippines. It streams thousands of movies and televisions show in Tagalog, and TFC accepts Canadian credit cards. The riding of Winnipeg North has 20,000 people who speak Tagalog at home. The member for Winnipeg North may want to be absolutely certain this legislation will not cause the TFC to block the Canadian Internet from accessing its service. TFC may have no choice.
Under this legislation, TFC would need to either produce Tagalog-language movies and shows in Canada or pay into a fund to support English, French or indigenous movies and shows. Netflix is already producing movies and shows here. Netflix can afford to spread its CanCon levy across five million subscribers. Can TFC afford to spread its CanCon levy across 20,000 constituents in Winnipeg North or, more importantly, can the Tagalog community in Winnipeg North afford the CanCon levy?
That CanCon levy has to come from somewhere. It can come out of the pockets of hard-working immigrants in Liberal ridings, or it can come at the expense of writers, actors, musicians, costumers and set designers in the Philippines. How does this possibly sit well with my colleagues across the aisle? It just cannot be the cultural special interest groups, who do a lot more than just sip champagne at galas in order to keep the Liberals in power at election time, so it must be about the money. It always is.
The fact is that the bill would exempt user-generated content unless it makes money. It strongly suggests that it is just a tax grab, with a side order of censorship, but in the interest of promoting listening among parties, I want to acknowledge that for some of my colleagues, in particular those from Quebec, this bill is about protecting Canadian and Québécois culture. Quebec is an island of French in a sea of North American English. In the age of broadcasting, Canadians mostly tolerated CanCon rules as the bargain for protecting Canadian culture. In the age of the Internet, we do not live next door to the United States. We live next door to everyone online. We have to turn our cultural policy inside out. We have to stop protecting our culture from the world and start promoting it to the world.
My colleagues have not noticed that the world wants more Canada, and I am not just talking about the maple leaf flying in the streets of capitals across the world as a symbol of freedom. While Canadians have been binge-watching Lupin and Squid Game, people from Albania to Zimbabwe have been streaming Kim's Convenience and Schitt's Creek. Canadians are expressing themselves. This legislation threatens that expression. That threat falls primarily on minority expression, and it is what the Broadcasting Act does.
This legislation is regressive protectionism. It looks backward and inward. The members opposite still cannot see the risk this bill poses to their constituents before they vote, so they should go out and speak to them; not to the lobbyists or the special interest groups. They should ask their constituents how much they spend each month and what they would be forced to give up if the price went up by 10% or 20%.
I plan to vote against Bill C-11, because I have listened to what my constituents are saying. I hope my Liberal colleagues will listen to the minority-language voices in their ridings, because they have just as much right to expression in their language as they do.
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Madam Speaker, I found it interesting that the member opposite had to go to my colleague's speech to generate a question. Maybe the member was not listening carefully. I said that the point of this bill is to raise revenue for Liberal special interests. It is not the government's intent to have censorship with this bill. The censorship is just a by-product of using the Broadcasting Act.
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Madam Speaker, I did not quite get the question, but the member was talking about the Broadcasting Act and protecting language and culture, which the Broadcasting Act does because there are limited channels in broadcasting. If it were a free-for-all and any Canadian could get on a broadcast channel and start broadcasting, we might have a problem. However, this is about online streaming, and when we stream online, we are not preventing anyone else from viewing what they are watching on TV. In fact, more people have the opportunity to see different shows that may not make the cut on regular network channels.
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Madam Speaker, the focus of the censorship is to reduce the ability of minority cultural groups to speak on the Internet. Netflix can afford to pay extra fees, and I am sure in return it gives generous money to certain Liberal parties. We are concerned about people such as those who live in the riding of the member for Winnipeg North. The Tagalog from the Philippines will not be able to afford what maybe Netflix can.
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