44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 13, 2022 11:00AM
Pursuant to order made on Thursday, November 25, 2021, the division stands deferred until Wednesday, June 15, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.
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- Jun/13/22 11:53:52 a.m.
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The House will now suspend to the call of the Chair.
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Madam Speaker, in relation to the consideration of Government Business No. 16, I move:
That debate be not further adjourned.
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- Jun/13/22 12:01:52 p.m.
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Pursuant to Standing Order 67.1, there will now be a 30-minute question period. I invite hon. members who wish to ask questions to rise in their places or use the “raise hand” function so the Chair has some idea of the number of members who wish to participate in this question period.
Seeing the interest in asking questions, I will be notifying members when their time is coming up, so I would ask them to limit their questions and comments to one minute. That way, we can hopefully get everybody in on the debate.
Resuming debate, the hon. member for Red Deer—Lacombe.
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Madam Speaker, I am going to be speaking directly to the camera and to Canadians at home so they can hear the question I am about to ask the government.
The motion that was just moved is a motion called “closure”. It is that the debate on Government Business No. 16 not be further adjourned, which means it is closure. What the government is doing through this motion and through Government Business No. 16, which we are debating today, is having a closure motion on a time allocation process, which means we will time-allocate time for Bill C-11 in committee to come to this House, time-allocate report stage in this House and then time-allocate third reading of that bill in this House. Anybody who is following Bill C-11 knows of and has great concerns about the censorship of the Internet in that bill, so what the government is doing today on a censorship bill is moving closure on a time allocation motion. They are censoring the censorship of their own censorship bill.
That is what is happening today. Why?
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member knows very well that there has been extensive debate on this bill. There were more than 15 hours of debate at second reading, where we heard from 48 speakers, the overwhelming majority of whom were Conservative speakers, and there has been extensive debate at committee, 21 hours. The reason we are here today is that the Conservatives have been filibustering so much that they will not even let the bill get to clause-by-clause consideration, and they literally filibustered their own motion in committee.
They do not want to debate this bill; they just want to block it. They are fundraising off of fearmongering. We are going to make sure that broadcasters pay for great content in Canada. That is what this is about.
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Madam Speaker, we have seen what has happened at committee. I have seen it first-hand. It is unbelievable. We had the witnesses selected; then the Conservatives started filibustering the witnesses, including the CRTC chair and the minister, refusing to let them come to committee. Then the Conservatives filibustered some more and basically stopped all the committee's functions.
As members know, the job of the committee is actually to improve the bill. There were a number of intervenors. The vast majority of those who came forward at committee were in support of the bill, but they wanted to see improvements, and Conservatives are refusing to allow those improvements to be adopted.
I want to ask my colleague why the Conservatives are blocking everything and why they do not do their job as official opposition and actually improve the bill. That is the reason we are here.
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Madam Speaker, the Conservatives have had dozens of hours to debate this bill, and so have other members. Conservatives have been filibustering and have been blocking, and they do not want to see this bill move forward.
Just one of the benefits of Bill C-11 is that we would be updating the mandate of the CRTC to include specific focus on supporting francophone, racialized, indigenous, LGBTQ+ and disabled creators in Canada, and this means a portion of the contributions from broadcasting and streaming platforms would be directly supporting the development of these creative platforms and of people in the ecosystem who have been shut out.
As such, it is up to the Conservatives to tell Canadians why they are blocking legislation that would help creators who have been disadvantaged since the Broadcasting Act was first in place in 1991. Why are they not doing their job and making the bill better, instead of blocking it at committee?
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Madam Speaker, I would ask the minister why his government is blocking the release of the policy directive that they will issue to the CRTC.
We are waiting to hearing how the Liberal government will force the CRTC to implement the measures contained in Bill C-11. I note that on Friday the minister said he would not rush this through the Senate in order to allow the Senate lots of time to debate it. The bill only came to the heritage committee on May 17. Now the government is rushing it through both the committee and the House.
Now that the government is not going to rush it through the Senate, would the minister at least commit to tabling, for all Canadians to see, the policy directive that it would issue to the CRTC?
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Madam Speaker, I sat with the hon. member at the heritage committee with years ago. He knows very well that policy directives are released after a bill passes.
What is dismaying for me is that the members opposite speak about democracy somehow being undermined. I have to say there is no greater threat to our democracy than when an opposition party attacks great institutions, great parts of the government and Canadian democracy, such as the CRTC, which is fully independent of government, and that is a good thing.
What the bill is trying to do is open up the creative sector to more people and make sure that streaming platforms and big tech pay into the Canada Media Fund. That is a good thing.
Delay tactics will not help Canadians. Passing this bill will.
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Madam Speaker, I too am concerned with some of the delay tactics we are seeing from some other parliamentarians here. I believe our democracy is sacred, and the governing party does have a mandate from Canadians, so it should have a place here to move on that. As members know, I have supported some time allocation motions in the past for this reason.
That said, this Motion No. 16 does not even allow all parliamentarians to put forward their amendments at committee if they are not moved by a certain time. This is now closure on even having debate on a pretty substantial motion. I wonder if the minister could share more on why such seemingly extreme measures are needed when we are not expecting an election to be called this summer. Why is the government going at this pace, given how important it is to get this legislation right?
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Madam Speaker, quite frankly, there has been debate at committee, and the Conservatives continue to block. They filibustered for seven hours in 29 hours of debate and 48 speakers. It has been a great amount of time.
While we are reluctant to be at this stage, this is critical legislation. Canadians asked us to pass it. They want us to move on this. This is going to help us shift from cable, which came to my town of Morinville in 1982. Here we are now in 2022, and we can now stream from our cars, backyards or apartments. It is a streaming world. The CRTC needs to catch up. It needs the legislation to do it. We have to get this out and we have to get this bill passed.
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Madam Speaker, none of what the minister just said is accurate.
The Senate is not going to pass this bill before the end of June. We just heard that the committee has been considering this bill since the middle of May. I have been to that committee. What the cabinet is calling filibustering is what I call debate and raising the issues our constituents are raising.
Thousands of Canadians emailed us and said they did not want to see what was called Bill C-10. The government brought it back as Bill C-11. The bill has not been fixed. They have not fixed section 4.2, which does generate the ability of the government, through the CRTC, to moderate and censor the content uploaded by users.
This motion is truly a lack of confidence in the chair of the Canadian heritage committee. This is entirely of the government's making and entirely the government's fault. This legislation has not been reviewed or debated in 31 years. There is no reason to rush it through in the next few weeks. The government is being completely inaccurate in the way it is presenting it. It is a darn shame that we will not be able to review this bill as it deserves to be reviewed, because Canadians are interested to know if they will still be able to use the Internet, their YouTube channels, their Facebook and their TikTok in the ways that they have always been able to without the censorship of government and the CRTC.
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Madam Speaker, the member opposite knows that there has been hours and hours of debate at committee. He also knows that their side continues to filibuster. The conspiracy theories and nonsensical ideas of censorship are just beyond the pale.
Quite frankly, this is one in a list of examples of the Conservatives going past opposition to obstruction, whether it is Bill C-8, the budget implementation bill or Bill C-11, the Conservatives do not want to debate; they want to obstruct the work of this Parliament.
Canadians elected us to do good work, and they know that the CRTC is independent. They know there is nothing here that is going to affect Canadians' uploading material to the Internet. This is about making sure that the platforms contribute into the Canada Media Fund, that they develop more content here in Canada, and that we open up the platforms to racialized people, LGBTQ people, indigenous people and disabled people who are creating content for Canadians. This is about moving into the Internet age, not the past, where the Conservatives are stuck.
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Madam Speaker, in my riding, the people who contact me about what is going on in Parliament are not particularly interested in the procedural games, the obstructionist tactics, the filibusters and the like. They are more interested in a thriving cultural sector for the creators we have in P.E.I., one that has been particularly hit during the pandemic and one that has great prospects looking forward.
What will it mean to the creative sector? What will it mean to the Confederation Centre of the Arts? What will it mean to our performers? That is what people want to know. I would like the minister to speak to that.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Charlottetown for his intervention and for sticking up for the creators in his constituency and his province, who have been unduly hit by the pandemic.
As we are coming out of the pandemic and as we are trying to modernize the act and as we are making sure that creators can be part of the 21st century, we are going to make sure that islanders have access to these platforms. We are going to make sure that LGBT, indigenous, people of colour and disabled creators on P.E.I. are going to be able to get paid what they are worth and make sure that the broadcasters making money off of these great creators in P.E.I. and across Canada are paying into the system so that we can experience more Canadian content.
We have shifted away from cable. We are now onto streaming. This bill, Bill C-11, helps us to make sure that the CRTC has the tools to make sure that Canadian content continues to thrive. It is a good thing for islanders. It is a good thing for Canadians. That is why we are here today.
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Madam Speaker, I must have been naive and idealistic, to be honest, when I was first elected to Parliament. I thought we were here to make laws. I thought we were here to move Quebec and Canadian society forward. In the nine months since this new Parliament began, progress on legislation has been minimal. Between the Liberal government's closure motions and the Conservative government's filibusters, no progress has been made.
I heard a journalist on CBC radio this morning who was talking about how poor the Liberals' legislative record is. Even with an alliance with the NDP, they are not making any progress. They cannot move these bills forward.
The Bloc Québécois worked very hard on Bill C-11. The hon. member for Drummond and our party have been working on it for the past year. We were prepared to vote in favour of the bill to modernize the Broadcasting Act last year, before the election. We even tried to speed up the process, but the government called an election. Now it has cooked up a motion that is meant to get Bill C‑11 passed. The motion before us today is really embarrassing.
Is my hon. colleague not a little embarrassed by his government's limited legislative results since the election?
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Madam Speaker, as a proud Franco‑Albertan, the first to be a member of the federal cabinet here in Canada, I am embarrassed that only 5% of content in Canada is in French.
What we are trying to do with this bill is boost content from francophone creators, have content from people who are francophone, franco-queer or franco‑curious, hear the voices of first nations people who are also francophone, and have francophone people with disabilities create shows we can watch, while having broadcasters pay for all the good work of these creators.
We had this debate in committee. It is time to move this bill forward.
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Madam Speaker, fact: We have had Conservatives in this House who obviously have not even read the bill, as they are comparing it to things like the government following people on cellphones. The disinformation has been unbelievable.
Fact: We had witnesses before the committee, including the chair of the CRTC, who were filibustered by Conservatives so they could not come to testify.
Fact: The majority of witnesses overwhelmingly want to see Bill C-11 pass, but want to see improvements. They want the committee to do its work.
Fact: As we found out last Friday, even the Conservatives have submitted amendments, and the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois submitted their amendments a week and a half ago. The committee should be getting to work.
What I do not understand is that we have two block parties in this House: the Bloc Québécois and the block-everything party. The Conservatives are blocking everything that comes forward.
Why are they doing that when the vast majority of witnesses want to see this bill improved?
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Madam Speaker, I think there is a simple answer to my hon. member's question. While those on the other side pedal disinformation and conspiracy theories, they make a lot of money fundraising off of it. They are not advancing the project of the country. They are not advancing making sure we have a bill that is going to meet the expectations of Canadians.
There is a genuine problem with where the Conservatives are heading. They go down these rabbit holes of disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories and lose sight of what Canadians have asked us to do, which is to modernize the CRTC; make sure the broadcasting platforms are paying into the Canada Media Fund; and make sure that, as we stand next to the juggernaut of culture that is the United States, we can have our own Canadian voice on the international stage. When that voice is heard, co-productions with Ireland and other countries in the world will get our Canadian voice out there.
That is what this bill is about. The Conservatives can stay in their rabbit holes. We are here to advance for Canadians.
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