44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 13, 2022 11:00AM
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, 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, 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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Madam Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for her very good question.
With only 5% of content coming from francophone creators, we have work to do and progress to make. With Bill C‑11, we are updating the CRTC program and focusing on racialized people, members of the LGBTQ+ community, indigenous peoples, francophone creators and people with disabilities. This bill will open up the CRTC to accommodate more people.
The act has not been updated since 1991. I had hair back then. That is an indication of how old the framework under which the CRTC operates is. It is time to update it in order to help francophones, francophiles, the franco-curious, anglophones and people across the country who simply want to create good content, and to ensure that the platforms pay their fair share.
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Madam Speaker, exceptional disruption requires exceptional measures. That is why we are here today. We have had dozens of hours of debate on this bill. The Conservatives continue to decide that they do not want to move forward. They will not even let the bill get to clause-by-clause. This is something we almost never see in this place. They will not do the work at committee. It is what their constituents sent them here to do, which is to debate, improve and move forward.
They simply will not let the CRTC go from 1991 to 2022. It is beyond the pale. It is unparliamentary. They are simply obstructing the work of Parliament. That is why we are here.
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Madam Speaker, that is the question: why? Why would the government not just be open and transparent and release the policy directive?
Bill C-11 would provide the CRTC with a significant of regulatory authority, but without the direction from the government, we do not know how the CRTC will interpret that regulatory authority, and we will not know until after we have already been forced to vote on this bill. That is the issue.
If the government wanted to be open and transparent, it would table that document today, as it did with Bill C-10. The question is, what is the government trying to hide?
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Madam Speaker, let me say what the Conservatives would have done. We would have done what we promised in our election platform. We would have updated the Broadcasting Act, while also respecting digital-first creators and those Canadians who want to excel here at home and around the world. We would have worked with the creative industry, including and especially those who are using new technologies. We would have worked with them to ensure that the major foreign streamers invest in Canada and pay their fair share, but we would have done it in consultation and co-operation with the industry to ensure that users who upload user-generated content are not subject to CRTC rules.
That is what we would have done, and I am proud to say that is what we are fighting for at committee on this bill.
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Madam Speaker, my question for the member is around this issue of whether or not something gets captured by the CRTC.
I understand it states in the bill that anything that generates direct and indirect revenue would now be regulated by the CRTC. Pretty much every piece of content that is put up on the Internet has an advertisement beside it. That advertising generates revenue based on the content. The government claims user-generated content is not included in the regulation, but it is hard to see how it is not when it is generating revenue through advertising. I wonder if the member could comment on that.
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Madam Speaker, the member for South Shore—St. Margarets is absolutely right. Right there in black and white, it states that direct or indirect revenue could be captured by the CRTC. When we are talking about indirect revenue, it encompasses all of those aspects, whether it is a brand deal with a supplier, direct advertising on the video itself or indirect advertising by the site itself. That has the potential to capture everything. In fact, the chair of the CRTC himself mentioned to the committee that yes, there was a possibility for the government to regulate the content that is uploaded by users. It is clear. It is there in black and white.
We as Conservatives are going to work hard, as we always do, on making sure the amendments are there to protect those creators and those users who want to upload their creative talents onto the different platforms so they can share their talents globally.
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Madam Speaker, I am trying to get a better grasp of the question. It seems to relate to Bill C-18 on news content, the bill that will force web giants and traditional media to negotiate together and ensure that compensation is provided for the content used and paid for by traditional media.
I saw somewhere in Bill C‑11 that schools, for example, do not have to worry because they are exempt. I believe, although I am not certain, that this does not really have to do with community media.
Another clause in the bill states that it will not apply to a service that is too small. The CRTC will not have time to regulate the thousands of websites belonging to creators. Let us face it, the CRTC does not have the capacity to regulate all of that.
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Madam Speaker, I always enjoy listening to the member's speeches. He has that marvellous mellifluous form of delivery and he is very engaging, but I found a big contradiction in what he said today. He talked about how the CRTC cannot seem to get anything done, yet in the same breath he said the CRTC will regulate everything in our lives.
It sounds to me as though there is a lack of coherence in the Conservative message, and I would like a comment from the member on that.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting about the CRTC. I asked a question of Bell, the owners of CTV. I asked how much it pays for American programming, because every night on television from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. there is American programming and very little Canadian content. It did not answer how much it spent on American content, although it said that when it goes to Hollywood to bid on programming in the fall, it is being challenged now by Netflix, Amazon and others. How could it be challenged in the United States by these streamers when we, all along, have gone there, filled our American basket and brought things up to Canada to produce no Canadian content?
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Madam Speaker, while I want to thank the member for her concerns, they are not valid. We have seen in committee people like Dr. Michael Geist and former commissioners of the CRTC. They know this is a flawed bill and they are upset that it is progressing the way it has.
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Mr. Speaker, I just want to share with Canadians what the CRTC does in its current mandate. As an administrative tribunal, it regulates and supervises broadcasting and telecommunications in the public interest and focuses on achieving policy objectives established in the Broadcasting Act and the Telecommunications Act.
Based on the assumptions being shared with us today in this chamber, is it the position of the member that the CRTC is currently censoring Canadians? Is this fear to be followed through on if this bill were to pass?
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Mr. Speaker, we should look at how the CRTC is operating right now. I will give one example. There was a piece of legislation that passed in the House well over 500 days ago to create a suicide hotline: the 988 hotline. That has still not happened.
To give huge other priorities to the CRTC, when here is a prime example of something very simple that it has not been able to do, is really difficult to understand. It is going to take on this whole other huge objective.
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Mr. Speaker, I think that we have been really clear, on this side of the House, that it does make sense, and I did reference that in my intervention, for organizations like Netflix to pay their fair share in order to pay taxes. That is completely separate from being able to change the content people see online. They are completely separate things. This is one of the reasons why we, on this side of the House, have said from the very beginning that some of these issues should be separated. Charging GST for some type of service is very different from changing, or even defining, what discoverability is, with looking at what people are able to see online and actually changing the algorithms so that what we see is what the CRTC comes up with that one should be seeing. Those are completely separate issues.
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Mr. Speaker, I am very excited about the amendments I have moved at committee. However, I would just generally say that I am not supportive of the bill in its entirety. Even if those amendments were to pass, I would not be voting for this particular bill. I think that those amendments would improve the bill. It would allow the CRTC to focus on that. However, I am looking for the government to take action on fighting online sexual exploitation. This bill is not the bill that would do that.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight once again to speak to the government's proposed Bill C-11. In the last Parliament, it was Bill C-10, and it certainly generated a lot of feedback and frustration from Canadians across the country. We have been witnessing that here again in the last couple of months with this bill in its current form.
I have been receiving a lot of emails and advocacy petitions from constituents, both online creators and those who consume the content. They are concerned about what this bill entails and, frankly, among several things I will get into, what it does not entail. I believe that kicking the can to the CRTC and other organizations is a slippery slope and not a good precedent, based on the precedents that have caused a lot of frustrations to build up over the years.
I want to note that I will be splitting my time with the member for Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
We are debating this motion tonight because of an attempt by the government and its NDP partners to try to jam this legislation through the House of Commons once again. I know there are still numerous witnesses who want to provide their perspectives and voices at the heritage committee and share the legitimate and reasonable concerns they have and the clarifications they wish to see that they are not getting from the government and its partner.
One of the problems we have that is typical of the Liberal-NDP strategy when it comes to legislation, which we are seeing in Bill C-5, the criminal justice reform legislation, is that if members do not support the Liberals and NDP on the bill, it means we do not care about racism. If members want an end to federal mandates and the chaos we are seeing at the borders and airports, it means the members hate vaccines and health care workers. Now, with the Internet censorship bill, Bill C-11, if we do not support their way and their ideas, we hate content creators and arts and culture in this country. It is an either-or, a divisive approach, but it is not surprising. It is one that we see more and more.
I will repeat what I said in the last Parliament because Bill C-11, as we have it, is very similar to what we saw in Bill C-10, and a lot of the concerns we had last time are not addressed or clarified in the bill in its current form.
Let me start with a positive in terms of agreement in Parliament. The Broadcasting Act was created in 1991. I do not remember it. I was about five years old at the time. Boyz II Men, Paula Abdul and Bryan Adams had some hits then, but since that original piece of legislation, a lot has changed in how Canadians create content and get it out there as well as in how they consume it.
We have the Internet, social media platforms, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and so forth. There is an agreement that we need to have a level playing field with these large conglomerates of a foreign nature and how they do business in this country. At the same time, we also need to make sure that we protect the individual freedoms and rights of individual content creators, like those on YouTube who have been able to explode in not only the Canadian market but also the international market with the evolution of the Internet and social media platforms.
There are serious flaws, and I have a perfect example. My colleague from Perth—Wellington, the shadow minister for Canadian heritage, raised this as a perfect example today. We all want to make sure Canadian content is created and is fairly represented on Netflix, Hulu, Crave and all the different platforms. He alluded in the chamber today to this bill not creating the specific measures to clarify some of the red tape about what is Canadian content. A perfect example that was illustrated was The Handmaid's Tale. I do not agree with Margaret Atwood and a lot of her politics, but I will admire her and give her respect as an artist and an author and for what she has done over her incredible career. A proud Canadian she is.
The Handmaid's Tale, a blockbuster TV series, was filmed in part in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. One would think Margaret Atwood and filming in the province of Ontario, the GTA, would classify as Canadian content. It does not. That speaks to the need to define this content better, to set better parameters and better definitions when it comes to this. Sadly, the bill would not do that. One would think it would when we talk about the modernization that we face.
I want to specify my concerns during my time. This comes perhaps from my background before being in the House, as a mayor at the municipal level, and perhaps it is a bit affected by my experience in the past few months on the public accounts committee, which reviews Auditor General reports on programs and efficiencies and how they run.
I want to reiterate my concern with regard to the vague definitions particularly around user-generated digital content, claiming there is an exemption, but section 4.2 is there. The government says not to worry about it. The CRTC says not to worry about it. I do not think Canadians have a lot of faith in that approach to what we have.
The CRTC is a public entity, but considers itself very independent. I have a lot of frustrations with the organization that I will not get into tonight when it comes to providing Internet service to rural and remote communities. That is a speech for another night.
Particularly, what is happening is that the government's legislation is extremely vague. Conservatives have been standing up in committee and in the House, not just in this Parliament but also in the last Parliament, and I have foreseen and I am foreshadowing what I know is to come. We see it over and over again. The government says, “That is not our intention. Do not worry.” The legislation would pass and then it would go to the CRTC, after which, at some point down the road after the bill is passed, after it has come into law and been enacted, suddenly we would see algorithms or we would see content. At that point, the CRTC would say, “We are independent. There is nothing you can do. This is the law that was passed and this is the way it is interpreting it.”
The minister has tried to claim that user-generated digital content and YouTube creators, TikTok creators and Canadians who have been able to burst onto the scene, not just in this country but internationally, are free from having their content regulated. They say that they have no interest in looking at that.
If that is the case, the government should be going for what we have been advocating for: it should specifically rule it out and make it black and white. It should make it very clear so that there is not a little door poked open for the CRTC, when it is batted over there to look after, all of a sudden to decide that, in the public interest, it is going to be doing this.
This is the time for Parliament, for Conservatives, for us to stand and be on the record to say that there are amendments. There are a lot of things that need to change, but there are specific amendments at least on that. I believe that just speaks to the rushed attempt that we are seeing from the government. It speaks to the secrecy of what it is trying to do. It is trying to pass the buck over to an independent organization, one that is overly powerful in my personal view, to interpret these laws, at which point the government can later say that it was its goal but secretly it was not the government's problem but somebody else's.
It is government creep at its worst. We have seen it before. We see it at the public accounts committee, in terms of leaving it to bureaucratic organizations to organize, and the success of that.
In my time remaining tonight, I want to acknowledge some of the comments made by a Canadian YouTube creator who spoke at the Canadian heritage committee a few weeks ago, J.J. McCullough. I go back to what we could agree on: Modernization is needed for the Broadcasting Act to make sure that large companies such as Netflix pay their fair share and also create Canadian content for us to have as Canadians. J.J. McCullough noted the following, which really hit home when I heard his testimony:
The tremendous success and even worldwide fame of many Canadian YouTubers in the absence of government regulation should invite questions about the necessity of Bill C-11. An unregulated YouTube has been a 17-year experiment, and the result has been an explosion of popular Canadian content produced by Canadians of every imaginable demographic....it is important to understand that it is simply impossible to regulate a platform like YouTube without also regulating creator content.
We have seen more Canadians become known. We have seen more Canadians make a living on these platforms. What the government is proposing is not that if one does not support this, one does not care about Canadian artists. We are standing up for individual content creators to say that platforms like these have given them the opportunity to make a living, to get known and to get Canadian brands, Canadian stories, Canadian music or other things we could name out there.
Our colleagues will stand up for those individual creators in making sure that we get the government to better define the very slippery slope it is on, not just with Bill C-10 in the last parliament. It is repeating the same mistake with Bill C-11.
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Mr. Speaker, in the last Parliament, I had a petition on my social media for Canadians in my riding, particularly in my region, who were concerned about the overreach of the bill and the vague definitions. It was a slippery slope that did not go through.
It is not a fake outrage. There are many things that the government, the NDP, the Bloc and others could do to give further clarity to the definitions, give specific exemptions and eliminate proposed section 4.2 regarding individual user-created content, and they choose not to. They are fuelling the rage by not listening to those who are opposed to the bill, who have reasonable suggestions that could better define and narrow the scope of what the CRTC's mandate is in doing this. They are ignoring it, and the language of false anger on this is something that only adds to that.
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