44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 5, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, that is quite the question. We very much want this to be unanimous. It seems there are still items where the text is not yet definitive. We know that words have meaning and that they can sometimes lead to something other than what was intended.
If the text of certain sections is problematic, let us debate it and make it clear in committee. That is all we ask. I think that the official opposition party should agree, without unreasonably prolonging debate.
The Bloc Québécois was never very happy with the idea of time allocation, even though we found it was necessary in the case of former Bill C-10. However, since certain sections of the former bill were corrected in this version, I would really like the official opposition to provide positive and constructive comments so that we can send Bill C-11 to committee and study it properly.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Repentigny for her speech and for her passion for Quebec culture in particular and cultural diversity in general.
I think we are at a point where the web giants have to participate in the cultural funding and production ecosystem, especially the francophone one. For years now, these digital broadcasters have been left alone, and it is as if we gifted them billions of dollars.
We agree that Bill C-11 is an improved version of Bill C-10. However, does my colleague not see a problem with the discoverability of content? You can have the best Quebec, French, Italian or Spanish films, but if only American productions are streamed and people cannot find Quebec songs, there is a problem.
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Madam Speaker, indeed, we also see problems with discoverability. In this respect, however, an amendment proposed by the Bloc Québécois to the former Bill C-10 was incorporated into Bill C-11, and it addressed more than just discoverability.
That is why I commend the collaborative work we did with the government in this regard. Everything proposed by the Bloc, including discoverability, was added to the bill. That is why we are eager to support it.
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Madam Speaker, it was good to hear what my colleague, who, like me, is a member of the environment committee, had to say about rulings of the CRTC. As someone who also believes so much in culture, I am interested to hear from the member about how French culture would be improved by this bill. What sorts of things does the member think would happen because of it, compared with the things we had prior?
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Madam Speaker, I commend my colleague, with whom I sit on the standing committee on environment. His question is similar to the one posed by the hon. member for Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie. That is exactly what we want to improve.
I will give you a few figures. On digital platforms, French-language works represent 2.7% of the 10,000 most popular songs. If the giants of this world—all foreign, by the way—participate financially, it will help promote francophone culture.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity to discuss Bill C-11 on online streaming. This is a modest beginning that will address certain aspects of what I call “living with the digital giants”.
I would like to give a shout out to the artisans in Abitibi—Témiscamingue, in particular Rosalie Chartier-Lacombe’s team at the Petit Théâtre du Vieux Noranda, who is currently hosting the Avantage Numérique forum with a view to positioning the croissant boréal, a broad area of francophone identity and culture, as a centre of excellence for creative energy, expertise and talent.
Today’s new bill acknowledges that the growth of streaming services has radically transformed our way of watching television series and films and listening to music. It also acknowledges that certain foreign companies stream in Canada with no regulations or obligation to contribute to Canadian and Quebec stories and music. They distribute them with impunity without paying royalties.
Like many Bloc Québécois members who have spoken about this bill, the Bloc Québécois is in favour of Bill C-11. We have been discussing the reform of the Broadcasting Act in Ottawa for more than 30 years.
I want to mention the Yale report, which was produced by the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel. Bill C-11 is a first response to this report. The Yale report was very well received by Quebec’s cultural community, which wanted measures to be adopted quickly.
If someone says that the fox has gotten into the henhouse, it is obvious that the warning should be taken seriously. For more than 20 years, the web giants have been slowly choking the life out of Canadian and Quebec productions, as well as our written and visual media. We will agree that it is high time we did something and responded in such a way as to give Quebec and Canadian companies some elbow room.
The airwaves are a public good that must serve the people. In the coming decades, we will have to be able to recognize ourselves on these airwaves.
We know that the issues go far beyond financial considerations. The funding will have to be increased to ensure that Quebeckers and francophones in other provinces are better served in terms of less tangible aspects that are just as important, such as the protection of the French language and, of course, Quebec culture. Indigenous peoples are also facing similar challenges to their culture and language.
In Quebec, this raises quite a few questions, which is why we need to be vigilant and thorough in order to protect and better serve the Quebec nation. Bill C-11 addresses the question of Canadian ownership in a very different way than did the Yale report in its recommendations 52 and 53.
For more than 90 years, successive governments have always been in favour of Canadian control over communications, and the Yale report supports that position.
The space we are officially giving to foreign companies right now must also be regulated so that they do not have an advantage over our own companies, which have served us well over the years. This is a risk, and I want to stress that it must be controlled, monitored and handled very thoroughly.
To date, there have been numerous reports in the media, and several groups expressed they would like to see this bill pass.
Bill C-11 improves funding for new Quebec productions, and the industry desperately needs such funding. No one is questioning the benefits for producers in Quebec’s cultural sector, and I, too, am very pleased. That was the main component of the Bloc Québécois’s platform for the arts and culture sector.
In this context, Bill C-11 is the first in a series of three bills that will pave the way for the long-awaited reform, with rules that will regulate the business models of online streaming companies.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage recently tabled a second bill, Bill C-18. This bill will enshrine principles that will guarantee the newspaper industry sources of revenue based on the reuse of the news items they produce and ensure compliance with the principles of Quebec’s cultural sovereignty in the dissemination of information. I hope that Bill C-18 will be passed quickly and that there will be a place for regional media.
It will be hard work to analyze all the repercussions of the changes proposed by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, for the simple reason that we will have to know the government’s broader intentions, which we do not. Right now, the government has decided to separate the elements of this reform into several bills. There is therefore no overall vision, and we are taking small steps forward. This creates expectations in the industries affected by changes that are not all being introduced at the same time. We do not know what is in the other bills.
Are we pitting Quebec and Canadian companies against each other at the expense of the development of essentially American companies? The devil is often in the details.
At the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology, we have been hearing testimony for several years about how we have to give businesses the tools they need to have free rein within the same ecosystem. The Yale report recognized that vertically integrated Canadian businesses have very specific needs and that those needs will have to be carefully studied so that we can understand them and give Quebec and Canadian broadcasters a leg up.
One thing that keeps coming up when we talk to Quebec and Canadian broadcasters is the regulatory burden and the costs that broadcasters have to bear.
It is important to understand that Canadian broadcasters are not opposed to the broadcast policy per se; they have been clear on that. What they pay goes into the public coffers and does not necessarily support broadcasters.
For example, it was recommended that we review the licensing fees imposed on Canadian broadcasters under Part II of the act. Imagine if Canadian businesses had access to that $110 million paid annually to the federal government to produce first-run content. Let us therefore hold foreign broadcasters to account.
There have been a multitude of mistakes made over the past 30 years, and the successive governments let their guard down with respect to the fundamental issue of cultural sovereignty, which essentially makes us who we are.
Like many players in this sector of the economy, we should have no doubt or hesitation when it comes to setting a higher bar for foreign corporations. It is high time to have another look at the weight of the regulatory burden borne by Quebec and Canadian corporations.
I would like to quote Alain Saulnier, journalist and former director of French information programming at Radio‑Canada. He said, “I am not convinced that everyone has grasped the significance of this domination, the extent to which we have allowed the invasion and destruction of part of our way of life, our democracy, our economy, our culture and our language in the case of Quebec. My plea is to resist.” I had the opportunity to serve with him on the board of Juripop, and I would like to take this opportunity to send him my regards.
I will now talk about the transparency of the CRTC and about representation. That is another problem.
The CRTC has come under fire for the lack of transparency in its decision-making process. The guidelines that the government will issue to the CRTC for monitoring new foreign broadcasters must be made available to the public. Any challenges they launch must be made public. We must also take advantage of this reflection process to ensure that Quebeckers who are familiar with Quebec culture and the traditional Quebec news industry are involved.
The same would hold true for indigenous culture. If it can be done for the Supreme Court, I do not see why it cannot be done in this context. This is about having a safety net for Canada's and Quebec's cultural sovereignty.
To conclude, I would like to say that protecting Quebec culture is at the very core of my commitment as a member of the Bloc Québécois.
Broadcasting is undoubtedly the most effective tool for dissemination and helps define our national identity. Technology is evolving, and the rapid adoption of online content by a greater number of consumers means we need to reflect on rules that allow players in the production industry to operate freely and ensure that creating Quebec content in French remains viable.
We cannot afford to not overhaul the rules governing this digital space. As with other bills that affect Quebec culture, our study of the Broadcasting Act reform needs to be done with Quebec in mind.
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Madam Speaker, I suspect that the member opposite, like all members of this chamber, would recognize that through time and technology there have been great advancements. The Internet is one of them. The amount of streaming we have today in comparison with even just a few years ago has dramatically increased. There are so many opportunities for the amazing talent in Canada, and this bill, at least in part, will help facilitate the expansion and support of a very important industry.
I am wondering if the member can emphasize the importance of ensuring that the House of Commons passes this legislation before we break toward the end of June.
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Madam Speaker, this bill should have been passed last year. We will do everything in our power to get it passed quickly this year. Talking about the Broadcasting Act makes me think about how the act has not really changed in the time it has taken the Winnipeg Jets to go away and come back again.
This is about fighting foreign productions. If we want to keep money here in our own homegrown productions, we have to change our laws so that it is not just our people who get taxed and penalized for investing in our culture. That, to me, is basic.
I urge my colleague to give this some thought on his side so we can make this reform happen quickly.
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Madam Speaker, making sure that the tech giants properly pay their share is a fundamental issue, because the tech giants are not just letting people make their own choices as they claim. They are actually the deciders: They are the arbiters of what we see. That means they play an editorial role. They promote certain content and demote other content. We have a right in our country to make sure that the content that is created here is remunerated, by these massive profits that they make, to create and build.
I would like to say to my colleague that this is not about protecting a regional culture or a local culture. This is about our international potential, because the artists from Quebec and Canada have an international ability. What we need is a system that pays into the artists and the creators so that we can build that system and create a vital, international arts community.
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Madam Speaker, I essentially agree with my colleague from Timmins—James Bay.
To quote a friend, using the current legislation is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. That has to stop. Funding for our Canadian and Quebec productions is vital to the survival of our culture. At the moment, the philosophy of moving forward in baby steps is preventing us from having a comprehensive vision of an industry that has been regulated for over 30 years, in other words, since before the advent of the Internet. As we know, however, culture is being consumed more and more online.
Is there a way to encourage Quebec and Canadian broadcasting platforms rather than platforms like Netflix, Apple and Disney?
It is a valid question, and it is our duty to provide answers.
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Madam Speaker, I have spent some time perusing Netflix.
I have access to a wide range of American, British and Korean TV shows and films, but it is impossible to find films from Quebec, Canada or France.
In my colleague's humble opinion, what will this legislation do to change that?
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Madam Speaker, that will send a clear message to our artists, producers and creators that our governments believe in the film industry, in the production industry in Quebec and Canada.
That will be essential to creating jobs in these areas of expertise. We agree that these areas were hard hit by the pandemic and that they need a breath of fresh air and a pat on the back. This will also benefit our viewers, people like me who mainly want to watch Quebec content, reflecting our culture.
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Madam Speaker, one of my colleagues from the Liberal Party earlier talked about how times have changed in Canada and that we have all of these new technologies that, when we originally thought about looking at broadcasting in Canada or content creation in Canada, no one ever really could have thought about. He is right. The problem is that what Bill C-11 does is kind of like trying to play an MP4 on a VHS machine: It is just not going to work.
For someone who is trying to understand what the bill does and has heard a bunch of different sides on the Internet and whatever, I found one really good, succinct explanation of what this does. The real motive of the online streaming act is simple. Streaming platforms, and creators on them, are bringing in more and more revenue, and legacy media wants a piece of the pie. Legacy broadcasting media companies, such as Bell Media, Rogers and Corus Entertainment, have built a comfortable and oligopolistic domestic market in Canada during the broadcast era and dominated the media landscape for many decades. However, the old narrow system is not working any more. Television broadcasts have been on the decline since 2014. People do not use cable TV or listen to radio to the same extent.
Rather than building competing online services on terms that attract people, those legacy media giants want a cut of the profit from streaming services that are increasingly popular in the 21st-century media market. That is really what we have here. Let me be clear: The lobbyists for legacy media are all over this, as are the lobbyists for streaming services. They each want Parliament to do what is in their best interests. It is our job to come up with what is in the best interests of the Canadian public, and the bill does not get it done.
I fully support diverse voices and new emerging artists creating content in Canada and frankly, on many platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, we have content influencers who do not need to get a grant from the government to have a platform. They do not need to break in through the door of Bell Media to get content produced. They can have a massive voice and a massive platform without going through a gatekeeper, and I think that is fantastic. However, what we have in the bill is success by the mainstream media lobbyists in ensuring that a new, emerging, disruptive source of content provision is brought into their old paradigm of operating so that they do not have to compete. At best, if the bill passes, all it does is really kind of sustain their profits in an old operating model for a few more years.
We are going to be back here in a few years anyway with new requests from them, because the pace of change is so fast. Whenever a government has to regulate to keep an oligopoly sustained, it eventually collapses. It eventually fails, or eventually the public says enough, particularly when it starts to detrimentally impact us. There is a considerable risk of detrimental impact on individual Canadians.
The government will say that individual content creators are protected from this, but they are not. My understanding is that any sort of background information, for lack of a better term, that an individual content creator puts on a platform that may be subject to these new rules, under the bill, would then be subject to either regulation or some sort of monetary penalty under the provisions of these bills. Who knows? That just is not acceptable. What we are doing is actually stifling new emerging talents who speak from new emerging voices: It is a new emerging generation, and we are basically saying that we should be propping up the old models of the gatekeepers of the past several decades through restrictive regulation that does not even come close to the universe that we are all operating in.
I am going to date myself by saying this. I grew up with The Racoons and Fraggle Rock. That is my generation. When they were producing Fraggle Rock, I do not even think that Star Trek could have thought about TikTok.
Why are we trying to come up with a regulatory model from my childhood? I would like to think I am young, hip and cool, but that remains a subject for debate that could come up in questions and comments.
In all seriousness, this bill could have been approached in a much better way. How I would have approached it, if I was the minister in charge, is to have understood the bias of the lobbyists who were coming forward to my bureaucrats from both sides of this issue: from streaming platforms and from legacy media. I would have looked beyond the near-term political ramifications of content creators who benefit from the existing system, and asked how we could ensure that those who are on all of those existing platforms are not negatively impacted, but at the same time, ensure that we are not stifling the potential of these disruptive new technologies.
Another recent analogy of this, if we want to see into the future of what this bill really looks like, is Uber. About 10 years ago, everyone was trying to get municipalities and different levels of government to pass regulations to prevent Uber from operating. That did not go so well. We have Uber, and I am glad for it. I use Uber all the time.
The reality is that when we have a disruptive technology that is popular and transforms culture, trying to stifle it with the government propping up an old way of doing things really does not work. I wish the government had gone to the traditional media and said if they felt that they were not able to compete in this environment and that there was a public benefit to us intervening, they should explain that. That is not the debate that we are having here.
The debate this bill puts forward on behalf of the government, the assumption, is that the old way is the only way and that we should be doing everything possible to prop up the old way of doing things without really forcing the old way to innovate. If Canada is supposed to be an innovative nation, the last thing we want to do to new, disruptive technology and innovation is send a signal that this is a hostile environment for new innovations to take root.
I know a lot has been said on this bill. I want to reiterate that I am concerned about the overreach of the CRTC, the main regulator here, in terms of the ability to regulate individual content. The regulator has sort of implied in committee testimony that it already has the ability to do this. It just maybe does not want to right now. That really frightens me.
That said, I also think there is a whole corollary discussion around social media platforms: how those have changed debate in this place and how they have calcified beliefs in this country. At the end of the day, we still have to ensure that Canadians have freedom of speech. How we usually square that circle is through education.
I think this bill is a giant mess. The concept behind it, of how we promote Canadian content and artists, is something that is worthy of study. That is something I am interested in and I am supporting, but on this bill itself, every person in here has said that it needs to go back to the drawing board.
With that, I move, seconded by the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent:
That the motion be amended by deleting all the words after the word “that” and substituting the following: “Bill C-11, An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts, be not now read a second time, but that the order be discharged, the bill withdrawn and the subject matter thereof referred to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.”
Let us go back to the drawing board. Let us take the concept, let us study it, let us work across party lines and come up with something we can all support, rather than ramming something down people's throats. Frankly, this is trying to play an MP4 on a Betamax.
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The amendment is in order.
Continuing with questions and comments, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage has the floor.
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Madam Speaker, in her speech, the hon. member mentioned that traditional media does not want to compete with digital players. However, they have been forced, through the years, to compete.
Traditional media has obligations under the Broadcasting Act to Canadian culture and to the production of Canadian culture. Why should traditional media, traditional Canadian companies, have to contribute to Canadian culture when massive foreign companies, such as the American company Google or a massive Chinese company like TikTok, not have any obligations to compete in Canadian culture?
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Madam Speaker, the reality is that if Bell Media, Rogers or whatever had the libraries that Disney+ and others have, we would not even be having this debate.
If they had that library of content, they would be like, “Yes.” That is the reality. The reason the government has to put this bill forward is that Bell, Rogers, etcetera are not competitive with the streaming services because they do not have the content that Canadians want to watch. There are many Canadian influencers who are producing content on Google, Alphabet companies, of which I believe YouTube is one.
I just kind of disagree with that notion. We should just call a spade a spade, and say whether this bill is in our best interests. I am sure there were some great steak dinners bought by Bell Media for a lot of people. God bless Bell Media, but we also have to make sure this is for Canadians. If somebody did not get a steak dinner, maybe they should just support my motion.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her speech. There is a lot of talk about this bill and she is asking that it be reworked. Is she prepared to work with us?
She quickly touched on the issue of local news, something that is important to me. Back home, local media outlets got in touch with me about this bill. The Bloc Québécois really wants to ensure that the bill is in line with our proposals on everything to do with local, community or independent media. The bill has to be able to help them. We know that local media are under threat and that they often pay the price for web giants like GAFAM. My colleague mentioned how quickly technology evolves. We have to make this legislation as flexible as possible. That is the type of constructive improvement we can make. Does she want to work with us on this type of improvement?
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Madam Speaker, I could not agree more with regard to local media coverage, particularly as a western Canadian. I know it is very important for Quebec to have coverage from a Quebec perspective and Quebec news. It is the same thing in western Canada. We actually do not have our voices covered in the same way either. Local media is important to me, but this bill does not do anything to support that. In fact, some of the government's policy, like picking winners and losers in print media, has actually stifled regional papers from being able to compete.
If there is a spirit of collaboration here, we should all just take a pause, support this motion, send this back to committee, send a nice, robust report back to the minister, reintroduce the legislation and come up with something that makes sense in 2022.
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Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my hon. colleague. I felt like I was stepping back in time, because when I first came here I was a digital idealist. I believed that we should not be picking winners and losers. I believed that we had all this innovation out there, and what we got were Facebook and YouTube, who have an economic power that is so powerful it is unprecedented. In fact, economists are calling it the kill zone of innovation, saying that they are so powerful they are actually stifling the development of other forces that could compete against them.
We have to deal with issues like antitrust. We have to deal with actually making them pay taxes in areas where they have not paid any taxes at all. We have to deal with the algorithms that have distorted content and conversation. They are culpable because they are serving our media services, and they are telling us what we are seeing.
I would like to ask my hon. colleague about holding the big companies, like Facebook and YouTube, accountable for the power that they are yielding—
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- May/5/22 4:07:56 p.m.
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We have to allow the hon. member to answer. The hon. member for Calgary Nose Hill has time for a brief answer, please.
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