- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Sarnia—Lambton
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $118,419.33
- Government Page
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, it is a pleasure to rise today to speak to Bill C-26 on cybersecurity. I will be sharing my time today with the member for Edmonton Manning.
Canadians recognize that we need to do something in the area of cybersecurity. We have all experienced hackers. Myself, when I have bought something online, the next thing I know is my credit card is hacked and then all the pre-authorized transactions need to be changed. It is very time-consuming. I have been hacked numerous times on Facebook, as I am sure many have, as well as on Instagram and other places. Those are small examples that Canadians are seeing.
Let us think about the more serious cyber-hacking we are seeing, whereby government systems are hacked and breaches of information are happening. Businesses are experiencing this. I have a friend who is an anti-cyber hacker. For $2,500 a day, he goes around the world, helping companies that have been hacked to improve their protections.
Something needs to be done. I would like to talk today about what needs to be done, and then how the bill does or does not meet that need.
First, we have to identify what the critical systems are. What are the things we want to protect? If somebody hacks my Netflix account, it is not earth-shattering. However, there are things that are important, and I think everyone would agree that databases that protect our identity or have information about our identity are critical.
Financial institutions and people's financial information are critical. On our medical information, we have spent a lot of time on legislation and regulations on protecting medical privacy. Those, to me, would be three of them, but certainly, the critical systems need to be identified.
We need to make sure there are adequate protections in place. Not every business and level of government has the same amount of protections and technology in place. There is a journey of defining what adequate protection is and helping people get there.
In the case of breaches and having them investigated and addressed, the bill gives very broad powers to the minister. It allows the federal government to secretly order telecom providers to “do anything or refrain from doing anything...necessary to secure the Canadian telecommunications system, including against the threat of interference, manipulation or disruption.”
Those three terms are not well defined, so I think there is some work to be done to define those better, but I do not really believe we want to give the government power to do anything it wants. Certainly, shutting down a system for protection is important when there is an actual threat and not just a potential future threat or a possible threat. In the case of a threat, the government needs the ability to act, but certainly we have to tighten up the language in the bill on that.
After there has been a breach, there needs to be preventive and corrective action. Preventive action would be additional technology walls or additional controls that are put in place to ensure that we have enhanced protection in the future. Corrective action is fixing the holes that people got into in the first place and punishing the hackers. It does not seem like any of that is happening today. The bill does not address that, but there should be some measures there to take corrective action.
I talked about the overarching powers and my concern with them. We cannot have the government continually coming up with bills in which it has not really defined what it is going to do but it tells us not to worry about it because the Governor in Council, after the fact and without any parliamentary oversight, will determine what we are going to do.
The Governor in Council means the Liberal cabinet ministers. I think we are at a place where people have lost trust in the government because there is no transparency. The bill allows the government to make orders in secret, without telling people what is done. The public cannot see it and is suspicious, because people have seen numerous examples of the government hiding things.
We have just come through a $19-million emergency measures act situation in which the Liberal cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister knew they were never going to disclose the documents that would prove or disprove whether they met the threshold, because they were going to hide behind solicitor-client privilege.
They have done it before, hiding behind cabinet confidence, like on the Winnipeg lab issue. Look at the documents we tried to get hold of there. The Liberals even sued the Speaker in order to hide that information from Canadians.
In the SNC-Lavalin scandal, we saw them hiding behind cabinet confidence. In the WE Charity scandal, we saw them hiding behind cabinet confidence. I am a little concerned, then, to find that in this cybersecurity bill, the Liberals are saying the government can make secret orders that the public is not going to ever know about. I think that is very dangerous. This is one of the reasons we are seeing an erosion of trust in Canada.
A recent poll posted by The Canadian Press showed that if we look at the trust index in Canada, only 22% of Canadians trust the government or politicians. That means four out of five Canadians do not trust the government or politicians, and it is partly because of what has gone on before, when things have been done such as people's banks accounts frozen and drones surveilling citizens. People have lost trust, so I do not think they are going to be willing to give a blank cheque to the government to do whatever it wants for cybersecurity, to control enterprises outside the government to get them to stop operating, for example. The riverbanks need to be much tighter on that.
People are concerned about their civil liberties, and I know there has been a lot of conversation about the lack of privacy protection in this country. We have regulations like PIPA and PIPEDA. My doctor cannot reveal my medical information; my employer cannot reveal my medical information, but various levels of government in the pandemic made it so that every barmaid and restaurant owner could know my private medical information and keep a list of it, which is totally against the law. Therefore, when it comes to cybersecurity we are going to have to make sure the privacy of Canadians' information is better protected, and I do not see that element here in the bill—
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- Mar/24/22 1:27:00 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today. I will be splitting my time with the member for Peterborough—Kawartha.
I am glad to have an opportunity to speak to our Conservative motion, which reads:
That, given that Canada has one of the world's highest vaccination rates and every province across Canada has lifted or has a plan to lift vaccine mandates, the House call on the government to immediately lift all federal vaccine mandates in order to:
(a) protect the jobs of federally regulated employees;
(b) enable Canadians to travel unimpeded;
(c) ensure Canada's tourism industry recovery; and
(d) allow for the free flow of goods across the Canadian border.
Of course, before my colleagues across the way try to shame and attack me for various and sundry, let me give a full disclosure for the record. I have had my vaccinations and I have also had COVID-19 twice, once at the beginning of the pandemic and once at Christmastime. I also know quite a bit about science. I have been a chemical engineer for nearly 40 years, so I would like to approach this from a scientific point of view.
I will start by talking about the charter rights violations.
This government has trapped almost three million Canadians in the country. They cannot take a plane, they cannot take a train and they cannot cross at the land borders. There was a point in time when this would have been considered a reasonable measure, according to the medical health experts and the World Health Organization, because we were in the time of trying to control the transmission of the disease. However, with omicron, we are now at a place where the World Health Organization has said that omicron is everywhere. Therefore, these types of restrictions are no longer working, and that is the reason countries all over the world are opening up.
If we think about it, we have quite a high rate of vaccination in Canada, and those people can get and transmit COVID-19. I talked about having it myself. The Prime Minister had it. The member for Beauce had it. A lot of members in the House have had COVID-19, and we have all had our vaccines. Therefore, if we have almost 90% of those people going back and forth across the border, what is the additional risk of allowing another 10% of people who can get COVID-19 and transmit it from going back and forth across the border? There actually is no difference in risk from a science perspective. The government can no longer rely on section 1 of the charter, which allows it to temporarily infringe the charter rights of Canadians to freely come and go. That is one mandate that I would like to see dropped immediately.
The second thing I will talk about is the people who were fired for not being vaccinated.
First of all, I think this is just wrong on so many levels, but let us talk about it from a science perspective. Let us take a person who is a federal employee working from home who is vaccinated. What is the chance of that person spreading their germs to somebody in another building who is also working from home? The answer is, quite simply, there is zero risk. Now, if one is an unvaccinated federal worker who is working from home, what are the odds that this person is going to transfer their germs to somebody who is also working from home in another building? The answer from a science perspective is, again, there is zero risk, but those people were fired by this Liberal government. That is discriminatory. It is not based on science, and it is just one example of the many things this government has done to deliberately punish people who chose not to get vaccinated.
I have had many people approach my office who wanted to get an exemption because they had a history of stroke or a history of heart and kidney problems or other comorbidities. Originally, many of them received exemptions from their doctors, but then the Royal College of Physicians overturned all of those exemptions and threatened the medical licences of doctors in this country if they wrote exemptions for anything other than an anaphylactic reaction to the first vaccine. That is the reason many people were not able to get their exemptions, but they still had valid reasons for not taking the vaccine. I would like to see the federal government hire back every person it fired who is working from home regardless of vaccination status.
Now all provinces have started to lift their mandates. Let us take Ontario, for example. We have vaccinated and unvaccinated people whose children are going to school without masks, who are going to malls, who are eating in restaurants and who are all breathing the same air, so it is ridiculous to think that we have to protect them in some way in other places when they are already exposed. That is why, for all these mandates that have to do with the requirements on planes and trains and keeping unvaccinated people out of that line, the science is not there. These people are already exposed to omicron, just like the vaccinated. Everybody can get it and transmit it, so that needs to go.
With respect to the things causing problems at the border, let us talk about ArriveCAN and the ability to input all of that stuff. Some people do not have cellphones. A lot of seniors are not computer literate. What is the increased risk of exposure to COVID‑19 if the federal government eliminated the need for ArriveCAN today? What is the difference? There is no scientific risk of increased COVID exposure related to an application. It can get rid of it today, and I suggest it does.
At the same time, I am very concerned about some of the privacy invasions that happened during the COVID‑19 pandemic. We have seen privacy issues that have been put forward to the Privacy Commissioner. We have also seen the digital tracking of Canadians. I am concerned about those things as well.
Some members may know that at the beginning, when we returned to this parliamentary session, I was quite passionately standing up for civil liberties. I had meetings with MPs who had their concerns. I happened to keep the paper with the list of things we wanted to see addressed, so I thought I would tick these off one at a time.
There was the elimination of the PCR test for vaxxed and asymptomatic people. I am glad to see that was removed. There was no scientific evidence that it was needed, so that went away. I talked about ArriveCAN and the rules at the border. With respect to those things as well, there is no scientific merit to keep them in place. They are not going to prevent the spread of omicron and need to go. There were the medical privacy violations. I just spoke about that one. Then there was trapping Canadians in their own country. I just spoke about that one. Finally, there was the firing of the unvaxxed, and I just spoke about that one.
I would like to share a little story. In my own riding of Sarnia—Lambton, Bluewater Health fired 18 medical workers and forced 300, under duress, to take the vaccine or lose their jobs. Four weeks after it did that, there was an outbreak of COVID‑19 among the vaccinated medical staff. What was accomplished? It was absolutely nothing but misery for the 18 families of the people who lost their jobs.
Keep in mind that these are health care workers who, from the beginning of the pandemic, were dealing with COVID on the front lines with their personal protective equipment. Nobody was vaccinated then and they were considered heroes. Then, fast-forward, they were fired. Really, they were the safer ones. They were getting rapid-tested every day and wearing their PPE, whereas the vaccinated ones who ended up having the outbreak were not. Therefore, we can see that all of these mandates are intended to discriminate and punish, but they are not based on science and they do not accomplish anything.
I do not think we need to talk about the provincial mandates. There are plenty enough at the federal level so we do not need to bring a lot of that in, but it is the same sort of thing. We need to look at the World Health Organization, which is recommending that we drop these mandates. We need to look at the other countries that have opened up. We need to look at the U.S., where 40 states have dropped all of their mandates. We need to look at the provinces, which have all dropped or are dropping their mandates.
The current government needs to get rid of these things immediately. We all want to work together. The people who are vulnerable will want to continue to protect themselves, and I support that, but at this point in time we need to learn to get on with our lives. We need to stop punishing people. We need to stop violating their charter rights.
Together, we will be better prepared for the next pandemic when it arrives.
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