44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 27, 2023 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the member mentioned the talk we heard in the debate about level playing fields. Could he comment on whether an unfettered Internet is the most level playing field that could ever possibly exist?
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Madam Speaker, at the beginning of his speech, he expressed pleasure at hearing Orwell quoted to him from Conservative benches, so I will maybe continue in that vein.
He was certainly my favourite novelist of the first half of the 20th century, although he did spend most of his career writing and criticizing socialism and its excesses. In 1984, the main character worked in the “Ministry of Truth” and sat in his cubicle deciding what people could see and what information they would have access to, which seems rather relevant to this debate.
We might as well be honest here with each other about what the bill does. It expands the powers of the CRTC to influence and control what people find, see, hear and post online. Could he comment on the expansion of the powers of the CRTC?
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Madam Speaker, I am happy to join this debate, mostly to refute some of the claims that have been made by Liberals and the NDP about the Conservative position on this bill.
During debate on Bill C-11, the Liberals and the NDP have falsely claimed the Conservatives do not care about Canadian artists and that we do not care about Canadian culture. They have accused us of spreading misinformation and are insisting, falsely, that this bill is somehow necessary to protect Canadian culture.
I want to clear the air on the first part. I love Canadian culture. I am fascinated by all things Canadian, and I love travelling to new places in Canada. I love its land and people, and I am always fascinated by how Canada's history shapes its culture. I have always read Canadian authors. I have always listened to Canadian music. In my formative years, the eighties, most of my favourite bands were Canadian. In my university days in the early nineties, I went to countless live shows with emerging Canadian artists.
I have been buying Canadian books, Canadian albums and Canadian concert tickets for decades, but this bill is not about ensuring the health of Canadian culture. This bill is about giving extraordinary powers to a federal institution to influence what Canadians find, see, hear and post on the Internet.
This bill would give the CRTC powers that do not belong in a free and democratic society. This bill gives the CRTC the power to compel web platforms to favour some content over other content depending on the CRTC's preference, not the consumer's preference. This government interference with consumer preference naturally conjures up all kinds of thoughts of governmental control over the arts and access to information from both real history and literary dystopias.
When the Conservatives, or anybody, suggest that this bill is on a spectrum of governmental control that might include Goebbels' ministry of public enlightenment, the Soviet censorship system or Orwell's fictitious ministry of truth, Canadians and Conservatives who have engaged in this debate are merely raising the same concerns raised by experts, eminent Canadians and Liberal-appointed senators. These points have been made by academic experts like Michael Geist. They have been made by eminent Canadians like Margaret Atwood and David Richards. The latter happens to be a Liberal-appointed senator. They have been made by the former CRTC chair Peter Menzies.
We are raising the points made by contemporary professional digital content creators who have come to committee to say they are desperately worried that this bill is going to destroy their livelihoods. We are not making this up. This bill gives power to the CRTC to create winners and losers. It directs the CRTC to separate content the CRTC thinks Canadians should find, see, hear and post from content the CRTC thinks Canadians should not be able to find, see, hear or post. The Liberals and the NDP are welcome to make the argument that it is a good thing for the CRTC to differentiate between what Canadians should find and what they should not find on the Internet. They can make that argument, but they cannot argue that this bill does not do exactly that. That is the point of this bill.
What about Canada's 50-year history of mandatory Canadian content for broadcasters? We have heard lots about this in points when members are refuting Conservative speeches. The Liberals say that this bill is just evening the playing field by treating the Internet like old-fashioned TV and radio. Are we seriously talking about evening the playing field?
The infinity of the Internet is the ultimate level playing field. Nothing has been done to break down barriers between artists and their audience like the Internet. When the Liberals say this bill is levelling the playing field, what they really mean is they want to make the Internet every bit as uneven as the playing field the CRTC already regulates.
Once, the Soviet Union took a very dim view of western music. It banned not only American and British artists but even Canadian artists, like Rush, which was banned in the Soviet Union. It also banned the entire genres these artists popularized. There was no rock and roll, no jazz, no blues and nothing that could be associated with decadent capitalist western culture in the Soviet Union. If someone was living in the Soviet Union, all they could get was Russian classical music performed by trusty state-sanctioned and state-funded orchestras. Imagine being denied the Beatles because they did not fit in with the government's bureaucrats' ideas of what a model citizen should enjoy.
Although Bill C-11 is certainly not promising to ban foreign content from Canadians, it is proposing to gently suppress foreign or unregistered Canadian content in favour of content approved by bureaucrats at the CRTC. Let no one doubt who leads these bureaucrats. The Liberals always appoint their own when it comes to boards and commissions, including at least one defeated Liberal candidate sitting as the current CRTC commissioner.
That leads us right to the heart of why it is wrong to treat the Internet like 1970s radio and television: There is simply no way that a bunch of bureaucrats hand-picked by the Liberals can be arbiters of who and what is Canadian content. Despite what the Liberals and the NDP, and particularly its House leader, have been saying all night, there has never been a golden age of Canadian content regulation. Back in the eighties, people knew that when a song or TV show came on that nobody actually liked, it was on just because it ticked the boxes and was Canadian content. In the seventies, a checklist system was made whereby if something ticked enough boxes, it was in and was Canadian content. However, this system was always fraught with problems, like system gaming. We have heard about this tonight. Do members remember when Bryan Adams was not Canadian enough to be considered Canadian content? He was a Canadian who lived in Canada, in Vancouver, but other songs recorded by American bands in Vancouver could qualify as Canadian, maybe if the record producer slipped in a writing credit.
Bureaucrats with the power to censor, subsidize or otherwise make choices on behalf of consumers are the worst arbiters of good taste. That is why the Soviet Union could never make a decent pair of blue jeans. It is true. If we put bureaucrats in charge of something like this, they are not going to come up with what the people really want. That is why my favourite Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler, once called the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council “mediocrity's holy trinity”. That is what he called them.
With all due respect for the Canadian artists who have testified at committee that the old rules helped their careers decades ago, I think some of them are being too modest. The Tragically Hip owe their success to their incredible talent as songwriters and performers and how hard they worked in their formative years. The Canadian content system may well have helped them, but their connection with Canadians and Canadian audiences seemed inevitable to me, just like a generation earlier when Rush produced their own album. They found an audience in Cleveland on the radio and then made their way back into Canada and throughout the world.
Bill C-11 would treat the entire Internet like it is 1971 again. The government wants to treat Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, paid streaming services and every other thing we can find, see, hear or post on the Internet like the system it is comfortable with, the one that has been around for 50 years before any of these things were invented.
The Liberals and the NDP say that opponents of the bill, from Conservative politicians to academic experts to eminent Canadian artists, are all wrong and that none of us understand. The Liberals and the NDP say that this is not about freedom of expression, censorship or regulating cat videos, but about making the web giants support Canadian artists. If that was true, why did they not say so in the bill and accept the amendment that would have truly created the exemption for user-uploaded content? They could have done that, but they chose not to because they want a bill that expands the powers of the CRTC.
The bill would not modernize the Broadcasting Act. It is Canada's first Internet regulation bill. It is wrong, and it should be defeated.
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Madam Speaker, it was actually because of interventions by this member earlier in debate that I chose to mention his city's great band. There is a real Canadian value on display, which is a modest understatement. I really believe that band was so talented and connected so well with Canadians that it could have succeeded under any set of rules. That is why I mentioned them. Other Canadian artists will find their way as artists. Their talent is irrepressible and it cannot be denied.
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Madam Speaker, I guess this member is sort of a part of the government, or his party is governing with the Liberals. Why did the government not exempt user-generated content and the uploading of user-generated content? This is a big bill, and I am not going to oppose everything that is contained within it. I am not going to suggest that every motivation behind the tabling of this bill was wrong, but the bill is unsupportable to the extent that it would grant new and extraordinary powers to the CRTC that do not belong in a free and democratic society. I, frankly, do not see how this bill, if passed, would necessarily solve the problems that the member suggested. It would take away all kinds of opportunities for other Canadian content creators to find an audience through an unfettered Internet.
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Madam Speaker, I would invite the member to listen more carefully then, because I did not say many of the words that she put in my mouth, and she did not notice or note any of the words other than a couple that she picked here and there. I said quite the opposite of what I think of Canadian content. I talked about the regulation of Canadian content, and I oppose it in this bill.
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Madam Speaker, we have heard a lot tonight about creating even playing fields, but Bill C-11 is about doing the opposite. It would make the field less even, take us backward and jam the Internet into a 1971 system around Canadian content.
I wonder if the member could comment on whether he agrees that there is nothing more even than the playing field of an unfettered Internet.
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