44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 30, 2023 10:00AM
- Mar/30/23 2:21:33 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, today, the government took unprecedented action by censoring debate on its bill to censor what Canadians can say or see on the Internet. It gives a woke agency here in Ottawa the power to to control Quebeckers.
It is hard to believe, but the Bloc Québécois is in favour of giving Ottawa and the federal government greater censorship power. Only the Conservative Party is opposed.
When will the government stop its attack on freedom of expression?
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- Mar/30/23 2:22:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, there is no culture without freedom of expression, just to point out the disinformation from that member.
He says that all artists support this, even Margaret Atwood. No Conservative has said that this bill represents creeping totalitarianism. It gives the power to a woke agency, the CRTC, named by Liberals, to manipulate social media algorithms in order to shut down voices it does not want people to hear.
When will the government realize that Orwell's 1984 was not an instruction manual?
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- Mar/30/23 2:23:34 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, therein lies the problem. The government will get to decide what is the right side of the debate and shut down everyone it considers to be on the wrong side.
Let us be clear that this bill does not hurt big tech. It will still monopolize all of social media. Its platforms will still dominate. It is just that government bureaucrats will be able to manipulate the algorithms to shut down the voices of individual Canadians. Top experts on freedom of expression online say that and so does Margaret Atwood, who calls this “creeping totalitarianism”.
If the Prime Minister is not afraid of debate, why is he so determined to shut it down?
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- Mar/30/23 2:25:26 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we are in favour of freedom of speech; it is very simple. Big tech has no problem with this bill. It will keep making money hand over fist because of its oligopoly. The government does not want to break up that oligopoly. It has been sucking up to big tech for the last eight years. What it wants to do is to shut down debate.
Canadians want the freedom to express themselves without government control—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Mar/30/23 2:26:01 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a book and it is still legal, at least for now.
When will the government stop its attack on freedom of speech and freedom of expression?
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- Mar/30/23 2:26:50 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, we do for now. I want to assure the member that as long as we have free speech, I will keep beating that party in debate after debate.
Let us turn to another falsehood the government spread. It claims that its carbon tax would make everybody better off, but now the government's own Parliamentary Budget Officer has revealed that Nova Scotians and Newfoundlanders, just like people right across the country, pay about $1,500 more in carbon taxes than they get back in rebates. This directly contradicts the government.
Why has the government misled the people of Atlantic Canada with this sneaky tax?
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- Mar/30/23 2:33:09 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, the government says to the people, “Believe not your eyes”. When we look at page 3 of the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report today on their carbon tax, it says that the net cost for a Nova Scotia family when this carbon tax is implemented is $1,513 more in carbon tax costs than in rebates. For Newfoundlanders, the number is $1,300 in net costs.
If the government is so proud of driving up the cost of gas, heat and groceries for Atlantic Canadians and consumers everywhere, why has it worked so hard to mislead everyone about the real cost?
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- Mar/30/23 2:34:35 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, notice he is not even contesting the facts now.
After falsely stating for half a decade that Canadians will be better off with the carbon tax, the government is now admitting what its Parliamentary Budget Officer reported. This is that, on average, Newfoundlanders and Nova Scotians will pay approximately $1,500 in net additional costs above and beyond any phony rebate they get back. Worst of all, it has not even worked. It has missed every single emissions target.
Why will the Liberals not ditch this tax plan and come up with a real climate plan?
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- Mar/30/23 2:35:52 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, for the Emergencies Act commission, the government named a Liberal staffer as the independent commissioner. For the foreign interference rapporteur, it named a member of the Trudeau Foundation and the Prime Minister's ski buddy. Now it needed someone to be an ethics commissioner, so it named a Liberal minister's sister-in-law to that position of independent Ethics Commissioner. This is the same minister who has already been found guilty of violating the law.
When is the Liberal government going to run out of family and friends to name as independent officers?
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- Mar/30/23 2:37:14 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, one can almost imagine the conversation between the Liberal intergovernmental affairs minister, who was found guilty of breaking the ethics law, and the Prime Minister, who has twice been found guilty of breaking the ethics law. One can imagine them saying, “How are we going to quit getting found guilty? I know, we'll appoint my sister-in-law as the Ethics Commissioner.” What a plan. It is foolproof.
The problem is that pretty soon they are going to run out of family and friends. After they do, how are they going to avoid their next conviction for breaking the law?
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- Mar/30/23 5:52:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength”. Those are the words that repeat again and again throughout Orwell's legendary Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book is not just about massive government control by Big Brother over the citizenry. It is also about how such control is enabled by the abuse of language.
We can always smell a rat when words are used to mean something other than what they say, and this bill is filled with such false words. Let us start with the very premise. The government purports to apply the Internet to the Broadcasting Act or to apply the Broadcasting Act to the Internet, even though the Internet is not a broadcast instrument. Television and radio are broadcast instruments; online streaming is not. This might seem to be merely a matter of words, but then we go through the semantics and we catch other nice little white lies.
For example, the Liberals use the term “Canadian content” in their talking points and their press releases. Supposedly, the entire raison d’être of this bill, its reason for existing, is to promote Canadian content. Which two words appear nowhere in the 50-page bill itself? It is the words Canadian content. Not only is such content not defined, and it is impossible to define it, but it does not exist in the entire bill. Therefore, we have entire apparatus of bureaucracy that would have tentacles across the entire World Wide Web within Canadian borders tasked to do something that the bill says does not even exist. Why is this important? It is important because if the bureaucracy in question has its powers circumscribed to defining and promoting Canadian content, but there is no limit on what Canadian content actually means, then we give that agency limitless powers to control what people see and hear online.
What is Canadian content? Is it posts about maple syrup, beaver tails, hockey and maybe lacrosse? No, that is not in the act. Is it music made by Canadian musicians? No, it is not necessarily; in fact, many Canadian musicians are no longer considered Canadian because their record labels have been sold to foreign entertainment companies. Is it books that are written by Canadians? No, that is not the definition either. We have absolutely no idea what it is. In fact, we can be very sure what it is not.
Here is an example, and this will send my opposition, because they will be in the opposition soon, friends across the way into a fit of rage. Obviously, the Canadian commentator who is most widely viewed and listened to around the world today is, of course, Dr. Jordan Peterson. That is just a numerical fact when we look at the view counts that he has garnered. I see the rage across the way among those who think he is anything but Canadian. Sure, he was born in rural Alberta. Sure, he was a professor at the University of Toronto before he was censored there. However, he surely cannot be Canadian: He does not use the right pronouns, he does not mouth the right talking points and he does not meet the current government's view of Canadiana. This Prime Minister has described people who disagree with him as un-Canadian. Surely, the bureaucracy that he appoints would have to agree.
If the association of psychologists, which gives out licences to practise in Ontario, does not believe that his views permit him to continue to practise in his field and if a university is effectively banning him from teaching his classes, what would stop yet another powerful bureaucracy from saying that this man is not Canadian enough to be considered Canadian content and therefore should not be found online by Canadian users? The answer, of course, is that nothing would stop that from happening when they give the power to the state to control what people see and say online.
The government members across the way would say not to worry; that the bill does not apply to user-generated content, once again with the fancy, confusing words.
To use real language, “user-generated content” is “stuff people post online”. The Liberals say the legislation would not apply to that, unless it does. Let me read the section of the bill: “specify that the Act does not apply in respect of programs uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service, unless the programs are prescribed by regulation”. We have to make sure to read the fine print.
Later on, the bill would specifically exempt user-generated content. This is the stuff that everyday Canadians post every day. The Liberals say the bill would not apply to any of that, unless it is posted on a platform that uses it for revenue generation. Are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the charity business, or do they generate revenue off of the posts that go online?
Do members know about that thing called “advertising”? That is revenue. Literally every single post that every Canadian puts online is used to generate revenue for an online platform. Therefore, everything that is posted online is captured by the essence of the bill. These are more weasel words. If they were going to regulate everything everybody posted online, and they believed they were justified in doing so, why would they create an exemption that does not apply to a single, solitary post? Of course, it once again is a use of Newspeak, putting in words that say exactly the opposite of what they mean.
I want to quote Michael Geist, who is no Conservative. He is a former critic of mine, actually, and not traditionally a friend of people on this side of the chamber. He said:
To be clear, the risk with these rules is not that the government will restrict the ability for Canadians to speak, but rather that the bill could impact their ability to be heard. In other words, the CRTC will not be positioned to stop Canadians from posting content, but will have the power to establish regulations that could prioritize or de-prioritize certain content, mandate warning labels, or establish other conditions with the presentation of the content (including algorithmic outcomes). The government has insisted that isn’t the goal of the bill. If so, the solution is obvious. No other country in the world seeks to regulate user content in this way and it should be removed from the bill because it does not belong in the Broadcasting Act.
If the Liberals did not intend to deprioritize, silence and push down the voices of some, why would they even include these provisions in the bill in the first place? The answer is that they want to regulate what can be heard and seen. They want to create the false perception that people can speak merely because they can post things online, but frankly there is no reason to post something if no one is allowed to see it. It would be like screaming into an empty forest.
Furthermore, the fact that the government would give the power to a state regulator to alter the algorithms of the Internet is, frankly, terrifying. Who are the shady operators in the back room who would be manipulating the algorithms that bring our newsfeeds and social media posts onto our screens? What are their motives? What is their direction? None of these things are defined anywhere in the bill or by the testimony of the head of the government agency that would be charged with implementing them.
In a world where we are already overly controlled by technology, they would alter algorithms. We can think of the devastating power of artificial intelligence. We know it because there is plenty of artificial intelligence on that side. In reality, the ability of a government bureaucracy to alter those algorithmic powers is indeed an enormous and unforgiving power.
I will quote Orwell: “This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.” That is exactly what we are talking about here because algorithms determine everything that appears on our devices.
It is mathematical programming that puts those things in front of our eyeballs. Right now, that programming is determined by a raw human emotion: greed. There is no doubt about it. The social media platforms want to make money. How do they do it? They give people stuff they want to see. One might take issue with the fact that they want to make money off that, but that is just the reality. The outcome is that we see what we want.
The economic motivation for the bill is also greed. It is the greed of the broadcasting corporations that want to dominate eyeballs, but instead of dominating them by producing things people want to see, they would dominate them by having more power over the regulator that determines what people get. That is also motivated by greed. Both of these profit motives are going to exist, one in the free world where people choose for themselves and another in the coercive world where bureaucrats choose for them.
However, do not ascribe any angelic motives to the bill. It is nothing more than a dirty alliance between big government and big corporations. Big government wants to control the citizenry, and big broadcasting and entertainment corporations want to control the advertising revenue. That is precisely why Bell, Rogers and all the other broadcasting corporations have come pleading for the bill to be put forward and advanced on their behalf, not on behalf of everyday people.
Here is the decision: Do we want the content on our phones and screens to be determined by the click or by the clique? The bill proposes to have it done by the clique. All the brilliant artists whose parents are not rich enough to have agents that will promote them with news and entertainment bodies and corporations will be shut out. It will be the rich kids, whose parents dream of them being famous, who will be able to go to these entertainment companies and have the ability over the years to get record labels set up. Those rich kids always had a head start; those shut out will be the poor kids who learned how to play the piano in their basements and would otherwise have posted it online and had it go viral. They will not have the political influence in Ottawa, in the CRTC, to get themselves on the big screen. This is once again protecting the privileged behind a wall of gatekeepers.
On this side of the House, we believe in a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. We believe everybody should get ahead by their own merits, and we believe that Canadians are intelligent enough to decide for themselves.
Let me address one other issue about social media platforms. The government claims it wants to crack down on them because they are making too much money. The bill would not affect their profit or their bottom line by one penny. It proposes to keep all the content we see on those same social media platforms. Our broadcasters do not compete with social media platforms; they compete with other Canadians who are fighting for share of voice and share of eyeball.
What the bill would actually do is simply take money and opportunity away from the individual citizen to have his or her voice heard in entertainment, news, discourse and everywhere else and concentrate it once again in the hands of the politically powerful, the well-connected and those who can find favour with the government. On this side of the House of Commons, we exist to decentralize power, to disperse it among the many instead of concentrating it in the hands of the few.
That is why we rise today with such alarm that the Prime Minister would censor debate on a censorship bill. I do not know if, in the century and a half of this august chamber, it has ever happened that a government has done so. It is an appalling precedent and one that should concern every freethinking Canadian citizen.
We inherit our rights not from the state, not from a powerful government bureaucracy, but as a gift from God. Freedom is written on every human heart. We all have the ability to express ourselves culturally, politically and in every other way, not because the Prime Minister has bestowed us with that right but because we are born with it. Conservatives would make sure people have that right.
The bill is designed to take away that right and concentrate it in the hands of the few. Members should not take my word for it but listen to Margaret Atwood. Again, she is no friend of Conservatives, but she said: “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.”
Those are her words. She said “creeping totalitarianism”. If anyone else in Canada had used those terms, they would have been called an alarmist. She is part of the literary establishment in this country, possibly among the most well known. She is someone with whom I agree on almost nothing because our views are not at all aligned. However, she understands one thing and that is that the power of words can only exist in concert with the freedom to express those words.
I am sure that she would vigorously debate most of the things that I say on the floor of the House of Commons, but that is only possible if there is freedom to debate. Disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy. It is the worst system of government, except for all the others, as the great Winston Churchill said. It is messy, frustrating and arduous.
Every day and every way, it would be much easier to have, as the Prime Minister has suggested, a basic Chinese Communist dictatorship where a powerful hand can decide something on a whim. That was the reason he admired it. He said they decide on the spot what to do and impose their decisions without any debate. That would be a lot easier in the short run.
Often, we are told there is too much partisanship and disagreement in Canada. There are places in the world with no partisanship and no disagreement, and they are terrible places to live. I would rather live in a place where we are allowed to disagree and speak out. That is who we are as Canadians.
The question is: Who decides? Do we allow a small group of privileged insiders close to the Prime Minister decide what we think, say and believe, or do we believe that every single Canadian is endowed by God with the ability to decide for themselves?
I believe every Canadian has that ability. That is why we will stand up every day, in every way, for the section 2(b) rights of freedom of expression. That is who we are and what we believe. It is the common sense of the common people united for the people's home, my home and our home; Canada, let us bring it home.
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- Mar/30/23 6:11:48 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, do I believe that the government wants to limit people in putting cat videos online? Of course I do not.
However, his question is very telling. I would first say that it is designed, like everything the government says, to make the people feel small and tell them that they are really only concerned about cat videos. The people of Canada are smarter than that; they are not idiots.
The people of Canada post poetry, music and beautiful stories online. They share their most beautiful moments. To distill all that down to cat videos is, once again, an insult by a Liberal snob on the common people. It is to suggest that they are interested only in frivolous and stupid things that need to be filtered out by a class of much more elite people.
We believe in the common sense of the common people. We believe they have the judgment to choose what they should post, read and do online.
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- Mar/30/23 6:13:30 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I define freedom of expression as every person being able to decide what to say, and when and how to say it.
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Madam Speaker, we caught him. Just at the end there, the truth jumped out of his lips. He said the problem is that disinformation, like the opinions expressed here today, would not be allowed if Bill C-11 were passed, which is an admission that the NDP believes government should be able to decide what is true and what is false and censor out what it does not like. That is exactly what we suspected from the beginning.
What happens when the government is a liar? The government said the Prime Minister did not interfere in the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin. That turned out to be false. It said the budget would be balanced in 2019. That turned out to be false too. Do I have to go down the long list of falsehoods stated by the government?
Now we are supposed to trust this same government to censor out what is true. I guess government members believe there should be a ministry of truth populated with people who agree with them. The only way to distill the truth is through the hot cauldron of debate, not through the clamping down of censorship. That is why we believe in allowing people to make their own decisions. Government members may think they are the watchmen, but the question is, who watches the watchmen? The only ones who can do that are the citizens.
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Madam Speaker, all of the worst atrocities in human history were committed by governments, yet we are constantly warned by the woke parties in the House that the scary thing is too much freedom, that the people have to be feared. No. Excessive power by government has been the source of every single major atrocity committed in this country or anywhere around the world. The solution to that is freedom.
What will I do to reverse this power grab? I will repeal Bill C-11 to restore freedom of speech online. I will make it my mission to transform Canada back again to the freest nation on Earth.
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- Mar/30/23 6:18:27 p.m.
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Actually, Madam Speaker, I will backtrack. It is a big group of insiders. It is a big, sprawling bureaucracy with far too many people working for it. There will be fewer people working for the CRTC when I am Prime Minister, because they will have less power and a hell of a lot less to do when I restore freedom of speech and freedom of expression online and on the Internet.
As for the definition of “woke”, woke has one purpose and only one purpose. It has plenty of pretexts but only one purpose: control. It is designed to divide people by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, vaccine status and any other way one can divide people into groups. Why? It is because then one can justify having a government to control all those groups. No more woke; we need freedom.
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- Mar/30/23 6:20:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, let us be clear. The member is not proposing to take away any power from Google, Facebook or any other social media giant. All he is proposing to do is give the government the power to manipulate the controls that those social media platforms already have.
Right now, social media algorithms are designed to give people the stuff they want to see, because that is how social media companies make money, just like a restaurant gives people the food they want to eat. The government wants to take away the power of people to choose for themselves and have government authorities decide for them.
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