44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 9, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I want to add my voice to that of my colleague from Drummond and salute the millions of people watching us on the parliamentary channel. I hope you were reassured. I am not referring to the Speaker when I say “you”, but to the millions of spectators.
I thank my colleague for his brilliant speech. He did not lead Drummond to victory in its rivalry with Saint‑Hyacinthe, but he is making it more competitive. It is an old rivalry between two Quebec towns.
I believe it is clear to everyone that we need to support our artists and compel digital giants to obey the law and the regulations. In other words, they cannot be sovereign powers. When you establish yourself somewhere, you must respect the customs and the laws of that place, and you must protect the culture.
The stumbling block is the issue of freedom of expression. Many people are concerned and there has been a great deal of misinformation. For a long time there has been what is known as alternative media. In recent years, alternative media or media supported by such powers as China, Russia and others have made their presence known. Their content may be questionable, but there should be no issue with access to it and the right to consume it.
Can my colleague from Drummond, who has studied the issue in depth, reassure us that the bill will in no way restrict access to alternative news online? I believe that is what people are concerned about.
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Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby on his speech.
In his speech, he talked a bit about certain artists. I was also listening to my colleague from Kingston and the Islands talk about the Tragically Hip. We could talk about Rush, Bryan Adams, the Montreal band The Box, from the 1980s and 1990s. Goodness, there are tons of many Canadian artists who broke through and went on to have great careers.
Thanks to these pioneers who benefited from measures that were implemented to promote and highlight Canadian content and francophone content, especially in Quebec, an entire industry developed, and now it is flourishing and reaching audiences around the world.
Without the discoverability measures that were put in place in the traditional media to allow Quebec and francophone content to grow, it simply would not exist. I know that my colleague talked briefly about this earlier in his speech, but I would like his thoughts on the potential that this new bill holds for all creators, including digital creators from Quebec and Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind” is a quote from musician Jim Morrison. Bill C-11 aims to do exactly that. This far-overreaching bill gives control to the government to decide what online media is and is not shown to Canadians.
Famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood said it best, “All you have to do is read some biographies of writers writing in the Soviet Union and the degrees of censorship they had to go through - government bureaucrats.... So it is creeping totalitarianism if governments are telling creators what to create.”
Art is subjective. The Liberal government will stop at nothing to control what Canadians see online.
If Bill C-11 passes, it kicks open the door to government censorship, empowering the Liberals to strengthen voices they deem good and silence those they deem bad.
Conservatives trust Canadians to choose what they want to watch online.
Enough is enough. Let us stop with the controlling legislation and kill Bill C-11.
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Uqaqtittiji, the NDP supports an amendment that would ensure it is the CRTC, not the cabinet, deciding what kind of content media can produce. Can the member explain why this is not a form of government control that other parties are talking about?
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Madam Speaker, it is great to be here this afternoon, and I hope all of my colleagues are having a productive day.
I rise today to speak in support of Bill C-11, the online streaming act. This important piece of legislation will level the playing field by requiring online streaming services to support Canadian artists and culture, just as Canadian broadcasters have been doing for decades.
As we have all heard many times, the last time the Broadcasting Act was updated was over 30 years ago, in 1991, when yours truly just finished high school, I believe. Since then, the way content is broadcast to audiences has changed dramatically, but our system is stuck in the 20th century and needs to be updated. After over a year of thorough study in both Houses of Parliament, the finish line, yes, is in sight.
Conservatives have recently started claiming that parts of this bill have not yet received the appropriate scrutiny by parliamentarians. I beg to differ.
With all due respect, I fail to understand how they can genuinely suggest that this bill has not been studied enough. At every step of the process, they have attempted to delay and distract from the issue at hand, which is bringing the Broadcasting Act into the 21st century to support Canadian artists and creators.
To show just how much this bill has been studied, let us take a trip down memory lane. On February 2, 2022, Bill C-11 was tabled in the House of Commons. Second reading debate started on February 16, 2022. Over the course of five days of debate, we heard over 15 hours of speeches from 48 members of Parliament in all recognized parties, including 29 Conservatives.
Conservatives then claimed that they did not have enough time to debate but then moved concurrence motions that blocked their own ability to speak and debate on the bill. They did this during the previous iteration of the bill in the last Parliament and on Bill C-11 in this Parliament, when they cut three hours of debate time and prevented their own members from having the opportunity to speak. I note the irony. Ultimately, these obstructionist tactics have only hurt the Canadian artists and creators that the online streaming act, Bill C-11, seeks to support.
Fortunately, Bill C-11, finally—
Mr. Ron Liepert: Because of the unnecessary election fiasco.
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès): Order.
Mr. Francesco Sorbara: Madam Speaker, the committee gave our colleagues the opportunity to study the bill with much closer scrutiny. That study lasted 12 meetings, where the committee heard from 80 witnesses and received 52 written briefs, but do not worry; the Conservatives still managed to delay and distract. They filibustered during the meeting at which the minister was supposed to appear and they filibustered the committee's clause-by-clause consideration.
They can try to deny it today, but the member for Lethbridge admitted it herself. She said, and this is a direct quote, “I did filibuster at committee”.
Fortunately, our colleagues in the Bloc and the NDP have decided to join us in modernizing Canada's broadcasting system through Bill C-11, and 38 amendments passed at the heritage committee, which included amendments from all recognized parties. Despite the Conservatives' best efforts, the bill made its way to the Senate.
Very well. At this point, I think it is valuable to remind my colleagues that the Conservative Party of Canada is the only political party recognized in both the House of Commons and the Senate. Senator Leo Housakos, the proud Spartan, who is both the Conservative critic for the bill in the Senate and the chair of the committee that reviewed it, is a regular in “Kill Bill C-11” videos posted by the Leader of the Opposition on social media.
Ironically, those videos, I might add, would not be impacted whatsoever by this bill, no matter what he claims. The best word to describe the Senate committee's study of Bill C-11 is “robust”.
Starting in June 2022, the committee spent over six months reviewing the subject matter of Bill C-11, hearing from 138 witnesses over 40 meetings. The members did not mishear me. I said 40 meetings, dedicated to considering the subject of this very important bill. Senators spent nine of those meetings in clause-by-clause consideration of Bill C-11, including three-hour meetings, making it the longest clause-by-clause consideration in Senate history.
The bill emerged with amendments from all recognized parties and groups in the Senate, of which we are pleased to support close to 80%.
Here we are, over a year later, hearing the Conservatives urging us to send the bill back to committee, after over 100 hours of committee study, over 200 witnesses and dozens of written briefs, including from Telelatino in Toronto. I know that the folks at Telelatino produce great ethnocultural broadcasting, and they are in support of this wonderful bill.
This does not even include the countless hours of debate and study of the previous version of the bill that contributed to the online streaming act. As it stands, this bill has amendments from all recognized parties and groups in both houses of Parliament. It has truly been a group effort, and the future of Canada's broadcasting system is better for it.
The Conservatives are now bringing up Quebec. It is great they are finally paying attention, but they must have missed the two unanimous motions passed by the National Assembly to support the Broadcasting Act and the entire Quebec cultural industry pushing for the bill's swift passage.
The reality is throughout this process there have been endless opportunities for Conservatives to work collaboratively to defend Canadian artists and creators. Every time, they have chosen to side with foreign tech giants to maintain the status quo.
On this side of the House, we believe in doing more for Canadian culture, not less. We know in the prior Conservative administration how much less its members did for Canadian artists and culture and how they cut spending on Canadian culture, artists and content creators. We will not do that and we have not done that. We will continue to support the Canadian arts sector, culture sector and content creators.
I know this has been brought up many times throughout the debate, but there is an urgent need for this legislation. It cannot be overstated. The integrity of Canada's arts and culture system is at risk. We owe it to the tens of thousands of Canadians working in the arts and culture sector across the country. We have done the work as parliamentarians and now it is time to pass Bill C-11.
Many of us watch streaming services that provide content over what are called non-traditional methods. My wife and I really enjoy Ted Lasso, and the third season of Ted Lasso is coming out on March 15. We very much enjoy it. It is very well written. It comes across on I believe Apple TV+ and we pay a monthly fee for that. That content provider would now be subject to the Broadcasting Act, and it should be, much like Canadian broadcasters have been subject to the Broadcasting Act for decades.
Finally, to end off, the Broadcasting Act has not been revised since 1991. I wish to applaud all members of both the House and the Senate on those committees who have worked so judiciously, even when their opinions did not converge, to be unified and even when they disagreed vehemently and passionately from potentially different ideological bents on how they view the Broadcasting Act and how they view the CRTC. However, they did the work Canadians sent them here to do, and particularly in the House of Commons. They did the work their constituents elected them to do judiciously and diligently to bring forth the best possible legislation with regard to the sector we are talking to, which is broadcasting and updating the Broadcasting Act after three decades, or since 1991.
I look forward to questions and comments from my colleagues and I hope everyone is having a wonderful and productive day and week.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to say from the outset that I will be splitting my time with the member for Nunavut.
I am pleased to rise in this debate, and I will try to talk about Bill C-11, instead of all the other kinds of things not related to Bill C-11 that seem to have found their way into the debate today, because it is very fundamentally important to our Canadian identity. The way we learn to understand our country and ourselves depends on the stories we tell each other, the movies we watch and the music we listen to. Therefore, it is very important that there be a space created in this cacophonous world media that is emerging for Canadian content. Otherwise, we will lose our identity as Canadians.
This bill seeks to amend and to update the Broadcasting Act. It looks at making sure there is a level playing field for the new streaming services that have taken a great deal of control over what is happening. It is a very important bill. It asks that the streaming services, which take an enormous amount of revenue out of Canada without paying taxes here, for the most part, be obliged to contribute funds so that Canadian creators can continue to create that content.
The Conservatives are focusing on people who are creating content on the Internet. However, what I am talking about is music, publishing, television and movies, and it is essential that we have that Canadian content. If we tell artists to go ahead and create Canadian content, but the money has already been sucked out of the economy that would go to finance that, then that content will not exist. It cannot exist. The money will be invested and decisions will be made by the streaming services, and they will invest those Canadian revenues around the world wherever they think they can make the most profit. This bill asks that they make an equal contribution to the revenues they are taking out of this country to make sure that Canadian content in movies, television and radio continues to exist. To me, that is the importance of this bill.
A secondary part of this bill that is very important to me is that which updates the broadcasting policy to add a requirement that when we are looking at Canadian content it includes diversity. In particular, one of the things that has never been recognized is the importance of indigenous culture and indigenous languages in this country. This bill updates the Broadcasting Act to include an obligation that the Canadian content that is being protected would be inclusive of indigenous culture and indigenous languages. I think that is a very important step forward.
It also acknowledges other forms of diversity. No one would be surprised that I belong to one of those minority communities. I think it is important that all of that diversity, whether with respect to sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnic, racial or religious backgrounds, is represented in Canadian content. This bill would update those regulations to recognize how important that diversity is to who we are as Canadians. For that reason, I am supporting this bill. I have supported it from the beginning.
Do I think the government has done the best job of communicating its messages here? Frankly, no, I do not. Do I think it has done the best job of getting this done in a timely fashion? Obviously it has not. We had an unnecessary election that caused us to start over on this bill. However, that does not make any difference to the final outcome.
We are talking about Senate amendments today. Everyone knows that I am not a great fan of that other place. Most of the time, I think the House should reject all amendments from the Senate. Very few senators even show up to vote on legislation, and they are not accountable to anyone. Therefore, I have no hesitation at all in saying that we will look carefully at amendments that come forward. However, if we in the House do not think they are good amendments, we have every right to reject them, because we are the elected members who represent Canadians in the House. I have no problem sending the amendments back to the Senate, thanking it very much, and telling it that we, the elected members, will decide on legislation.
Having said all of those positive things, I cannot avoid talking for a minute about this other world that the Conservative caucus seems to be living in. It is a world where the Internet is unregulated in a free market where quality rises to the top. I do not live in that world. It is not the real world. The web giants control the content and who rises to the top already. Through their algorithms, they determine what Canadians can see. Google decides in its search engine what will be prioritized.
I belong to the interparliamentary group working on online anti-Semitism, and we have been trying to get those web giants to acknowledge their role, in this particular case, in promoting anti-Semitism in the way that their algorithms function. We had a great deal of trouble getting the attention of parliamentarians from 12 countries to this problem, which they create through their algorithms. They say those algorithms are a business secret. They cannot share how those work. They cannot let anyone have any role in those algorithms. Those are theirs, and they make profit out of them. The bill says that, in terms of discoverability, there be a way that Canadian content created in Canada can be discovered through those search engines.
Yes, there is an intervention about content and what we see. It is not an attempt to censor. It is an attempt to create opportunities for diverse material to make its way forward through the business-controlled algorithms that determine what people see and watch now. There is no wild frontier out there where everybody competes equally on the Internet. We hear the Conservatives saying there is an attempt to censor. There is an attempt to create an opening for more diversity and an opening for Canadian content. That is not censorship.
We heard very extreme statements about Canadian content here, which would, I would say, throw the baby out with the bathwater. They are saying for all these years we have had Canadian content, which has helped Canadian filmmakers and Canadian singers establish a base that they have been able to use to go on to become stars on the world stage. They want to throw that away and say no level playing field and no resources for Canadians against the rest of the big streaming giants who are funding things elsewhere.
That is not the Canada I want to live in, and that is not the way we should approach what is absolutely a changed environment. That is what this bill tries to do. It tries to respond to that changed environment that the streaming companies have created and to make sure there is a role for our stories, our music, our movies and for us as Canadians on the world stage.
That is why I will continue to support Bill C-11. I hope the Conservatives believe what they are saying. I am not sure they do, but I hope that they are arguing from a very honest perspective. I just do not understand how creating opportunities for Canadians is censorship.
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Madam Speaker, in my riding, I have met with many news and content creators from many diverse backgrounds, and they share very important news and stories from their local communities to ensure that there is strong representation in media.
What would be the consequence if this bill does not pass, if that is something that the member has not mentioned already?
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