- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 68%
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Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite, who sits on the Canadian heritage committee with me.
She alluded in her speech to the fact that Facebook and Google will block Canadians from being able to share news links. We know that originally in Australia, the same thing was tried, but Australia granted them an exemption and worked with Facebook and Google to make sure citizens were not going to be blocked. Why did the government not do the same?
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Madam Speaker, what is clear is that we want to keep the Internet free and we do not want the government choosing what needs to be done there. To do that, the best thing to do is get rid of Bill C-18 and allow the tech giants to fund something that small media outlets could themselves divide.
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Madam Speaker, I absolutely agree with the idea that organizations must have a code of conduct. However, I think with this amendment, the problem was with students and other individuals who do not follow the same rules. I moved a subamendment, but it was defeated. I think there is a bit of a problem there.
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Madam Speaker, unfortunately, no, I do not believe the bill would do what its purpose intends.
Let us be clear: Facebook, Meta and Google have publicly said they are willing to donate funds that could be split up among smaller local news media. That would involve no government bureaucracy. It would mean the government is not picking who can be in and out. There would be nobody saying something is a violation of freedom of the press or freedom of the Internet. That could still happen, and my recommendation to the government is that it ought to happen.
That being said, I certainly do not think Bill C-18 in its current form would do anything more than give the nests of CBC, Bell and Rogers more money.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to Bill C-18, in part because there has been so much misinformation and disinformation being spread by the government, including the minister and the NDP, about the bill.
First, let us talk about the situation that brought us the need for the bill.
Across Canada, local small media organizations have been disappearing. Many of them have gone out of business, in the hundreds. Even before the pandemic they were in disarray. The idea behind the bill was to try to help these local small media organizations.
When we look at clause 4 of Bill C-18, which I will read because it is important and it is the only clause I voted for, it states:
The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of independent local news businesses.
That is the intent of the bill, and I am very much in favour of that. A lot of the local media outlets, like the ones in Sarnia—Lambton, are going out of business. Where else are we going to get the local news content that we all want to have?
The idea was to somehow create a fund that would then be shared among local media outlets. The problem started there, because then the idea was to make tech giants, the digital network intermediaries like Facebook, also known as Meta, and Google pay every time somebody shared a news link.
The Supreme Court in 2011 ruled that there was no value in sharing a link. In fact, the whole purpose of the Internet is the freedom to share information that is of interest to us and others and there should not be a value put on it. As soon as we start to put a value on it, for example, that we will only charge a value and give to the news intermediaries, it is a very short step to say that everybody who shares that is sharing something of value and why should it not happen with all of them. That was the problematic premise of the bill, which just got worse. The definitions with respect to who is included or excluded are being made by the government.
Freedom of the media is a fundamental principle in Canada. That means we cannot have the government determine who is in and who is out, who can participate in this and who cannot, yet that is exactly what has happened in Bill C-18.
To make it worse, there are so many vague definitions in the bill, which have been criticized by critics, people who are copyright experts and many others. They have said that a lot of these things will need to be clarified. The government's response was not to worry, that they should trust it because it would define them in regulations, with no parliamentary oversight. That is a very dangerous situation.
The reality is that Canadians do not trust the government. Polls of late show that only 22% of Canadians have trust in government or politicians. That is four out of five who do not trust the government to do what is right, and I am in the four out of five. There was no willingness to take amendments that would have clarified the definitions and put some of these things down, with the oversight of the different parties at committee. That was the first thing.
Then the Parliamentary Budget Officer did a study that said that with the money that Facebook and Google would be giving and the approximate volume of the different links that would be shared, there would be a certain pot of money to be shared. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said it was $350 million and the department officials said it was more like $150 million. Therefore, it is somewhere between $150 million and $350 million.
However, the most interesting finding was that the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that 75% of the money would go to Bell Media, Telus and the CBC. The whole point of this bill is to try to help the local small media outlets. If Bell, Telus and the CBC walk off with the lion's share, that leaves very little money left to share among the little ones.
Why should we be giving any more money to the CBC? The government already gives billions of dollars to the CBC. In fact, it just figured out that the CBC should not have to go looking for advertising money and, really, should be publicly funded for another $400 million.
There is CBC, which is likely to get the lion's share, already being funded and now taking away from the very individuals we want to benefit in this bill. It makes absolutely no sense.
In terms of trying to keep the government from excluding the voices it does not want to hear, we tried to bring some clarity to the definitions. At the beginning, it said there needed to be at least two journalists. Other than being recognized in the Income Tax Act, there was not a lot of clarity brought. Some of the amendments were brought to keep out foreign interference, but there were many ethnic and smaller outlets that were mom-and-pop shops, where maybe the owner was the blogger.
We were very happy to support that concept, but unfortunately it was tangled in with a bunch of things we could not support.
The government has the ability to fix that. It has since excluded any organization that does not have more than two journalists, and I think that is a problem.
The other thing is that the Governor in Council will get to decide everything, and then the CRTC, once it has decided who is eligible to play in the game, is going to provide the oversight for this process. When the CRTC officials came to committee, I asked if they had a lot of experience with regulating oversight of digital news intermediaries. They fully confessed that no, they have no experience in that area. It is ridiculous for the government to want to decide who can win and lose and play in the game and then put the CRTC, which already said it does not know anything about managing this, in charge. This is just a recipe for disaster.
Facebook, Meta and Google have been very clear that they want to help small media outlets in this country and would be very happy to donate that $350-million pot and let a consortium of small news media outlets decide among themselves how best to split it up so that there is sustainability. There needs to be fairness.
We introduced amendments at committee to include indigenous voices. I think there are other ethnic voices in our country that have been excluded by the definitions, but if we took the money and had a panel that was looking at the local small media outlets, it could be fair in making sure there was an equitable dispersion.
Instead, Bell Media, which already shut down a whole bunch of small media outlets, is going to get part of that, 75% of it. What do we think giving it more money is going to do? It is going to continue to shut down small media outlets, and it is not going to achieve the purpose of the bill.
There were concerns expressed after Australia implemented a similar legislative model. Facebook at that time threatened to shut down content. It said it did not want to participate in this. It did not want the government regulating the Internet and regulating free speech. There was a shutdown, and then there was a renegotiation and changes were made.
When we recommended that those changes be brought to the bill and that we could learn from what was problematic in the Australian experience, we learned that it was about this phrase “undue preference”, which meant it was going to be illegal in Bill C-18 for those platforms to do what they do, which is using algorithms to upvote and downvote content. They try to keep hate speech down and things that are misinformation down, and they try to upvote things that people are interested in, things that are popular, so they need to be allowed to do that.
That was another problem we saw with this bill.
Then there are the privacy concerns of sharing information. The CRTC has a broad ability to ask people for any information it needs in order to verify that they are eligible, and then there are going to be arbitrators involved, who are not necessarily bound by the same codes of confidentiality. I have a privacy concern about that.
When it comes right down to it, we did everything we could to recommend that the government abandon this bill and instead work with the big tech giants to get a fund, get it together and divide it up among the local media outlets, so that the people who really need it will get that help.
However, here we are, in the middle of the Christmas season. Love did come down at Christmas, and not just for everyone in general but for me specifically. I am very happy to announce that I got married and so, with that, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
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Madam Speaker, later today, I certainly will have the opportunity to, in great detail, let the members of this House and all Canadians understand why the Conservatives voted against the measures in this bill.
One of the more controversial discussions was about the fact that we wanted this to benefit local news media outlets, many of whom have one person who is the owner-operator and the journalist. Although we brought amendments to include them at committee, the NDP and the Liberal members voted against that. Why did they want to exclude ethnic media and those smaller media outlets in rural communities that only have one journalist?
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for a great speech and for moving the amendment because I do have concerns about Bill C-18, especially when we heard the parliamentary secretary talk about how there would not be any discrimination. In every other media policy that the government has brought, there has been discrimination along the political spectrum and, as the member correctly pointed out, small and medium-sized news outlets.
I would like to hear his comments on that.
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Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and speak to Bill C-252. This is a well-intentioned bill that is trying to address a serious issue in Canada, obesity in children.
In one of the previous Parliaments, I was actually the health critic when the former version of this bill came forward from the Senate. We know that Senator Nancy Greene Raine had brought that bill forward. In fact, she received a bit of teasing about it. As many of us will know, she was quite a famous skier but did a lot of promotional work for Mars bars, so when she came with Bill S-228, there was some teasing going on.
However, this is truly a very serious issue, because almost a third of children in Canada are obese, and it is just getting worse. Certainly, the pandemic did not make things better. I think we would all agree, even for those of us who are not children anymore, that we probably spent too much time at home snacking and putting on weight.
The bill is trying to address reducing obesity in children by controlling marketing that is intended specifically for children. If we look at places that have put this in place, there are a lot of them. Quebec was mentioned. Chile has had this program in place for a long time. The problem is that it is not working. That is the biggest problem. What happens is that they are measuring success by the number of packages they are able to have altered so that they are not directing it toward children, when, really, the measure we are looking for here is a reduction in the obesity of children. This is important because obesity is not just a serious health issue, but a cause of death.
If we look at obesity, we know that some of the related health problems are high blood pressure or heart disease. This is the number one killer of Canadians, heart disease and stroke. Type 2 diabetes is another very serious impact. Right now, there are 11 million Canadians who have diabetes or prediabetes. It is very well known that, through a mixture of diet and exercise, many Canadians who develop type 2 diabetes could have been prevented from doing that. There are many other health conditions, such as liver disease, sleep apnea and joint problems, not to mention the emotional toll. In school, we can imagine the teasing and bullying that often accompany those who are obese. This can be permanently damaging as well.
I am definitely very supportive of addressing obesity in children. It has actually tripled in the last 30 years in Canada. It is truly at an epidemic stage. The problem is that, in 2012, Quebec put in similar legislation to this and it still had a 30% increase in obesity over this length of time.
I think that if we look at the root causes of obesity and what medical science is saying about it, it is really saying that there are four factors that we need to address, or four factors that are the most important.
One is genetics and, really, we cannot do much about that. We are sort of born into the family that we are born into. I know of families who are all skinny forever and they eat way more than I am able to eat. Certainly I am envious, but I can do nothing about my own genetics, so I think that is not something the government can control.
Metabolism is another one, obviously, the metabolic rate. Generally, men have a higher metabolic rate than women, so that can be a factor. Of course, those with thyroid issues can also have metabolic impacts. Again, there is not much the government can do there.
Then there is lifestyle, such as diet and physical activity. This is a place where the government really can make some impacts. There have been studies around the world and if we look at places that have the best outcomes and the lowest obesity rates in the world, those are places like Denmark, France, Ireland, Latvia and Norway. If we take a look at what they are doing that is working, we see that there is more walking and cycling going on in many of these European countries than we have here. There is an effort in the schools to serve smaller portions of food, food that is not fried and has more vegetables. In France, they have three recesses to run around, as well as the weekly gym classes, so they are incorporating that into schools.
I certainly remember when I was in school. Keep in mind it was a different time back then, so I am more aged than many members here in the House, but in terms of diet, our household was not stellar. There were Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs and Alphabits for breakfast. My mother used to let us dip our toast in maple syrup. We ate baloney sandwiches on white bread and Kraft Dinner, Beefaroni and things like that. Sprinkle sandwiches were a thing when I was growing up, so none of that diet would be considered a healthy diet today.
At the time, there were no obese kids anywhere to be found in our area because we were running around all day. We were running around at school playing soccer. After school we were playing hide-and-seek, running to the park and jumping off the monkey bars. It was all about activity. There was a specific effort called Participaction at the time that was designed to get kids moving and to get kids active. I definitely think that is something worth focusing on, in addition to the move toward healthier foods.
Environment is the fourth factor that experts are saying is important. We have talked about the environment at school and the things that can be done there. Access to sports facilities, and getting people involved in sports, and access to nutritious food are important things. Right now, the affordability of life is impacting that. That is something that the government can have an impact on. If we think about it, the increases in the carbon tax have caused home heating prices to go up, gas prices to go up, and food prices, especially fresh produce, to go up beyond what those living on lower and maybe fixed incomes can actually afford. This is something that would translate into people not eating as nutritious a diet, so that is something that the government can impact by improving the affordability of life.
At the same time, because of the squeeze on everybody's pocketbooks, a lot of the money in the child tax benefit that we expect would be used to get kids into sports and help them to afford those things is actually being used to help pay the bills. The sports tax credit that we used to have was a specific thing that motivated people to get their kids involved in sports. Those are ideas that the government can implement that can have a really big impact.
In terms of the unintended negative consequences when the discussion came to committee in the last go-round on this bill, there were a lot of organizations like Tim Hortons and McDonald's and whatnot that sponsored children's sports efforts. There was a desire to have an exemption to make sure they would not be punished but could continue to market their products, which some would consider to be unhealthy. When the bill comes before committee, it would be worth looking at those exemptions.
The other discussion was about enforcement. All of the regimes that have put bills like this in place have had difficulty enforcing them, and it has become that much more difficult now that we are in a digital age. Kids have access to the Internet. It is very difficult to control what country they are viewing content from, so the enforcement part of this is a difficult one as well.
There are those who will point out that parental responsibility is important: that parents making healthy choices and helping their children learn to make healthy choices is what this ought to be about. There are those who will say that everybody needs to have their freedom. For me, if chips are in a dark bag with a skull and crossbones on it, I would probably still eat them, but people should have individual choice. There is something to that, and I think about everything in moderation. That said, I do not think that these measures have been effective, but we need to do everything possible to reduce obesity in our country and help our children.
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