44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 9, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the member is one of a number of Conservatives who continue to do a disservice to the people of Canada by trying to give some false impression. In no way whatsoever would this prevent or limit an individual from being able to upload what they are doing with their cat or dog, or whatever else they want to be able to upload.
This legislation would not be not infringing upon their freedoms or their rights. They would be able to watch what they would like to watch.
The Conservative Party needs to have more integrity on the honesty file, and I would suggest to us that, at the end of the day, what it is doing is spreading misinformation, which is creating a great deal of anxiety among a number of people. This cannot be justified.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the leader of the official opposition for his careful articulation and his commitment to killing Bill C-11.
He mentioned the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and how freedom of expression would be eroded by Bill C-11. On the Government of Canada's own website, it says, “The Supreme Court of Canada has maintained that the connection between freedom of expression and the political process is 'perhaps the linchpin' of section 2(b)... Free expression is valued above all as being instrumental to democratic governance.”
My question to the Leader of the Opposition, who is committed to killing this bill, whether now or when he is prime minister, a day I look forward to happening very soon, is why would the Liberal Prime Minister actually want to bring in this type of censorship? Is it because he admires communist dictatorships?
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Madam Speaker, can members imagine going to a restaurant and ordering a burger, but instead of a burger, they are served a salad, and when the server is asked why a salad was received, they say it is because of a new government rule that salads need to account for a certain percentage of meals eaten in Canada? That would be ridiculous, one might say, and if one wants a burger, one should get a burger. Nobody would accept something like this when they went to a restaurant, so why would they accept it when they browse the Internet?
That is the essence of Bill C-11, a solution looking for a problem that does not exist and the latest attempt from the Liberals to stick their nose in where it does not belong to limit the freedoms of Canadians.
Madam Speaker, I hope the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent would share a burger with me because I will be sharing my time with him.
Right now, Canadians get to pick the things they see online through their very own viewing habits, searches and choices. If Bill C-11 passes, the videos they watch on YouTube, the movies they stream on Netflix and the podcasts they listen to on Spotify would all be subject to government regulations requiring the promotion of certain content. It would deem the content we can and cannot watch. Of course, the government cannot explain what that content is. It has not answered that question.
By putting the rules for what this bill is calling “Canadian content” in the hands of government and unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, the Liberals would be free to amplify the voices they like and silence the ones they do not like. Do we know why this would be? It is because they appoint the body that does that and the head of the CRTC, and they do so without telling us what kind of content, of course.
Let us face that Bill C-11 is just another attempt to drastically expand the size and scope of government, to control what Canadians think and to limit their fundamental rights and freedoms of what they get to see online. No government should ever be given the additional powers to censor and regulate what Canadians say and see, especially of the entire, infinite and unending Internet.
The bill states that any content that generates revenue, yes, even cat videos, would be subject to regulation that would be under the control of the CRTC. It lays out the very path for hiring the Internet czar who would do that, who would give the purview of that to somebody else, an unelected bureaucrat appointed, of course, by a government that wants the control.
This is a debate about amendments, specifically on the issue of censoring user-generated content. That is what regular people put online. The government was really never going to consider that amendment because it took it out of the bill to begin with. I will tell the House why.
Here is the response to trying to get user-generated content out of the mix. It is in amendment 3, and it is part of what we are discussing here. The government states it:
...respectfully disagrees with amendment 3 because this would affect the Governor in Council’s ability to publicly consult on, and issue, a policy direction to the CRTC to appropriately scope the regulation of social media services with respect to their distribution of commercial programs, as well as prevent the broadcasting system from adapting to technological changes over time....
That is the government's response. The rationale behind the rejection for content creators finally says the quiet part out loud. It finally said it. It is right here. For a government that claims user-generated content was never going to be part of the bill, it took out that amendment and then rejected the fact that the amendment would have been put back in the bill. It says the opposite right in the rationale. The government wants the power to direct the CRTC on user content today, and it wants the power to do it in the future.
Regulatory power over user content is confirmed in that explanation. It covers YouTube videos, podcasts and any other content on platforms we do not even know exist yet, because that is what “adapting to technological changes” means. The government has regulated something that does not even exist yet.
There we have it. A statement we heard from the minister on this point is the exact opposite of his response in the House, his response in committee and his response on television, which makes it the opposite of the truth. He will also ensure that we are the only country, the only democratic country in the world, where this is a thing. We are the only country to engage in this form of regulation of things we would put on the Internet. It leaves absolutely no doubt in the minds of anybody who has read this legislation. For people like Margaret Atwood, Senator David Adams Richards and purveyors of cat videos from coast to coast, there is absolutely no doubt that this is the government's plan. The government just said the quiet part out loud: Platforms are in, and user-generated content is in. Anything else is simply untrue.
We have so many philosophical issues with this bill. I could stand here all day talking about them, but I want to touch on some very practical ones, such as the mandate of the CRTC. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data added to the Internet every single day. Do people really believe that the Liberal government or that any bureaucracy, especially a bureaucracy within the government, could handle the responsibility of regulating that? The Liberals cannot get us passports in a reasonable amount of time. They cannot do what they are saying they can do.
What about the idea that the government needs to save the industry? Of course, that is ludicrous. The minister says that the investments in Canadian production that would further our culture are somehow in need of his rescue. Again, that is the opposite of an actual fact. My colleagues will tell me that I am engaging in disinformation, but that is just not true.
Huge investments are being made, and if we looked a little further than traditional broadcasters, or where they have traditionally been made, or if we talked to anyone else other than the unions that will lose control over that funding, we would know that statement is not true.
The Motion Picture Association of Canada told a committee in the Senate that it spent over $5 billion in 2021 on investments in just one year. That is more than the $1 billion the minister is talking about when he talks about what Bill C-11 would bring in. That $5 billion is more than $1 billion, and that is in a single year by a single industry association.
What about the fact that Canadian creators have not asked for this? In fact, many of them have spoken out against it. Those are the ones that have had tremendous success, the ones that will be held back by this bill. Creators in this country who, without the government, have reached unimaginable heights, both within Canada and especially outside of Canada. They have been ignored.
It is not about culture, and it certainly is not about funding. It is about control. It is about doing anything possible to increase the size of the Canadian government and reduce the freedoms of what we see online, of what ordinary Canadians see and put online. These are ordinary Canadian citizens, and the government will stop at nothing to do more of that no matter how much the facts do not line up, how much it cannot answer questions about what Canadian content is and who will regulate it, or how it simply misleads the House in telling us that the CRTC has no role in this.
The Liberals jammed this bill through the House of Commons once already, but the Senate found so many issues with it that it conducted the longest committee study ever on a piece of legislation and proposed 26 amendments. That is, of course, after the Liberals took out the amendment that would leave out user-generated content, while telling the Canadian public that was not true.
Just like putting lipstick on a pig, it leaves us with a pig. Putting amendments into Bill C-11 just leaves us with Bill C-11, a bill that, at its core, restricts, infringes and penalizes. It is a bill that can only be fixed by voting it down and making sure that it never sees the light of day. A Conservative government in this country would have never introduced it, and if members of the House make the mistake of passing it, we will repeal it.
We do not need a government deciding what we can and cannot watch. We do not need a government to pick the winners and the losers. We do not need a government to get more involved in the lives of Canadians. It is involved enough, and we see how that is going in this country. We need a small government that makes room for bigger citizens where government is the servant and we, Canadians, are the masters.
We are upholding the heritage that Canadians have given the world, that successful creators have put out there. We are here today to stand against Bill C-11, a bill that goes against the principles of freedom, the values that have been the bedrock of our country for 150 years, and the heritage that the heritage minister should be protecting.
Freedom is the very opposite of this bill. He should not be focusing on arbitrary roles. If he did, he should be able to at least explain them in the House, in committee or on television. He should instead be focused on growing the power of people right here in Canada and letting them decide what they can see on the Internet.
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Madam Speaker, there is absolutely nothing within this legislation that takes away a person's freedoms or their rights. They can choose to watch whatever they want on the Internet. The sad reality is that the Conservatives know that, but they do not have a problem spreading misinformation.
Will the Conservative Party of Canada be honest with Canadians today? Given what it is saying about Bill C-11, is its intention to withdraw the Broadcasting Act? After all, the very same principles have been applied, in good part, through the Broadcasting Act for decades now.
The Conservative Party does not support Canadian content. It has made that abundantly clear. Are the Conservatives going to get rid of the Broadcasting Act? Are they going to get rid of CBC? Is that what their real intentions are?
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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It was a rookie mistake, Mr. Speaker. I apologize, wholeheartedly.
The point is that there is nothing at all within the legislation that would infringe upon a person's rights and freedom, and yet the Conservative Party members continue to go out and spread information that is not accurate and it is causing a lot of anxiety in our communities.
Could the member cite something specific within the legislation that clearly says that it is an infringement on a person's rights or freedoms?
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Madam Speaker, as I indicated earlier, nothing in this legislation threatens Canadian freedoms and rights, and that has been very well established. The Conservative members know this, yet they continue to give a false impression.
Given that we have a minority government, we are very dependent on opposition parties. Whether it is the Bloc, the Green Party or the New Democratic Party, we are all saying the same thing: There is no infringement on rights and freedom of speech. However, the Conservatives continue saying that.
I wonder if they applied the same principles to the Broadcasting Act that they are applying today, or going back to the traditional act, where there were Canadian content mandates, for example. Is it the Conservative Party's policy today that it would also get rid of this so that there would not be a level—
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Madam Speaker, there is nothing in the legislation that would prevent Canadians from uploading or watching whatever it is they want to watch. There is nothing in this legislation that would impede the rights or freedoms of Canadians, contrary to what the Conservative Party continues to espouse.
The issue is for me is why the Conservative Party continues to not want to support Canadian content by modernizing the act. He talked about the old system versus the new system. We would be modernizing the act, because 1991 was a long time ago. There were not any iPhones. There was not any Facebook. The need to modernize the act is there today.
Does the Conservative Party believe, ultimately, that—
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