Hon. René Cormier: I rise to speak to the time allocation motion. I’m not doing so thinking of the government nor the Leader of the Opposition. I’m not doing so thinking of the Leader of the Government in the Senate nor the chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications. I’m not doing so to convince or prove to anyone in this chamber that I’m an independent senator. I’ve spent part of my life defending my identity and it is not in this chamber that anyone is going to impose an identity on me that I don’t identify with.

When I think about the people in my province and in Canada, I have much more important work to do. I rise thinking about the artists and the cultural sector that participates, thanks to their creations, in their vision of the world and their humanism, the economic, cultural and social development of our country and the development of our culture in the world.

The points raised over the past few hours have highlighted anew the important issues around modernizing the Senate. The need to modernize our institution becomes apparent when we end up in situations like this and I thank all those who elevate the debate constructively.

I rise as a senator with a background in the arts and culture, but above all as a member of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, which studied Bill C-11 and was first to tackle this bill in the pre-study that began on May 31, 2022.

The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications heard from 138 witnesses and held 31 meetings, including nine meetings for clause-by-clause consideration. We spent a total of 67.5 hours in meetings. This made it possible for the committee to carry out an exhaustive study, and I weigh this word carefully. We heard the testimony of content creators, broadcasting experts, representatives from academia and former presidents and commissioners of the CRTC; associations representing artists and workers in the music and audiovisual sector; associations representing the interests of Indigenous, Black and racialized people; persons with disabilities; and official language minority communities.

The Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications did a considerable amount of work, and I was impressed by the work of the committee members, the expertise around the table, the diversity of viewpoints, the pertinence of the questions and the value of the changes. I thank all committee members for their remarkable work.

In addition to the work that was done upstream and during the committee study, my team and I received numerous calls and emails from concerned artists, associations in the audiovisual sector, directors and producers in the music and music publishing sector, in both anglophone and francophone communities. They all asked us to pass Bill C-11 quickly.

As evidence of that, I will repeat the short sequence of public testimony that Senator Dalphond highlighted in one of his speeches last week, which speaks to the sentiment of the cultural sector around Bill C-11.

On March 31, after the other place adopted the message proposed by the government, Bill Skolnik, the co-chair of the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expression, said, and I quote:

In a climate of acrimony and misinformation, we salute the work and courage of the elected officials who, for the past two years, have tirelessly supported the cultural sector and ensured the sustainability of our cultural sovereignty.

Hélène Messier, the other co-chair of the same organization, said, and I quote:

Over the past few months, Senators have conducted a rigorous analysis of the bill and made some improvements. We salute their work, but invite them today to take note of the decisions of the elected officials and to move the bill in its current state towards Royal Assent as quickly as possible.

At a time when The Globe and Mail recently published an article saying that Bill C-11 is likely the bill that’s been studied the longest in the history of the Senate, I can’t help but commend the patience and resilience of those in the arts and culture community who are affected by Bill C-11 in some way. We can’t leave Canada’s music and audiovisual communities out in the cold. That is not an option. They have waited far too long for this bill.

Every week that Bill C-11 isn’t passed means that the CRTC has one less week to begin its work of consulting stakeholders. It will take the CRTC about two years to complete this monumental work. Once these consultations are complete, the mechanisms that will allow platforms to contribute to Canadian content and its discoverability will finally see the light of day. In other words, that is when our artists and cultural community will finally be able to benefit from this bill.

Acadian culture forms the core of my identity. Acadian music has been my livelihood and is what has allowed me to stand before you today. It has shaped my people, the Acadian people. The music industry in Acadia has developed through the initiatives of a structured set of networks and professionals who have discovered and supported Acadian talent.

I’d like to quote a passage from a book entitled L’état de l’Acadie, which gives an overview of Acadia today.

At a time when the music industry has been completely transformed and online listening is leading to a drop in revenues and jeopardizing the ecosystem of the music industry, particularly that of the most fragile players who perform in francophone minority communities, the solution undeniably lies in regulations that promote a more equitable sharing of revenues among the various components of the music industry.

Bill C-11 is the starting point of an important societal and cultural project. The time allocation motion was carefully considered and I believe it is supported by solid arguments. I believe that I’ve expressed in this intervention the reasons why I find six hours to be insufficient. When we’re in the process of creating something, we reach a point where we’ve asked ourselves questions, where we want to go further and we want to delve even deeper. However, when we create something and think of the public waiting on us, we say to ourselves that it is time to adopt this creation, in this case Bill C-11. Thank you.

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