- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Stormont—Dundas—South Glengarry
- Ontario
- Voting Attendance: 64%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $135,225.85
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, the bill is flawed in so many ways, and I will give an example. We heard at committee that we need to have this to generate more Canadian content. The minister quotes that it would bring $1 billion more. Here is the thing. At committee, various organizations in the industry have said they are already investing $5 billion per year in the industry, but they need this control.
My argument to the member, the Liberals, the NDP, the Bloc, the Greens and anybody else who thinks this bill is a good idea is that there have been thousands of artists across this country who have gotten their start online and with the freedom of the Internet to rise up and make a living. We have had success to date. It is gatekeepers being brought in, and it is wrong.
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Madam Speaker, I do not know if my translation device is broken or not, but am I hearing the Bloc Québécois supporting a bill that gives power for bureaucrats in Ottawa and the federal government to control what the people of Quebec see on a search engine result? I could have bet on a lot of things, but I never would have bet that the Bloc Québécois would be supporting Bill C-11, especially when the provincial government and numerous groups in that province have said this should not be standardized and centralized by the federal government. Shame on the Bloc Québécois for doing what it is doing.
The Bloc Québécois was wrong on Bill C-5. Bloc members voted for it and now they are regretting it. They are going to vote for Bill C-11, and I will bet $10 that in about a year, they will be regretting that too.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague spends a lot of time in the House. I would encourage him to read clause 7 of this piece of legislation. That is the exact reason why Conservatives have major concerns and are calling out this bill as flawed.
Liberals have had so many opportunities in the House of Commons, in the Senate and in committee, through amendments, to do this, but the reality of the situation is true. They are punting the power to the CRTC behind closed doors, to create algorithms on what goes up in searches and what goes down. That is control. That is censoring something.
If it is organic and what people want to watch, and the Liberals do not like it, they could put a formula in and make the company have it go down. If they have these big lobbyists who advocate to tweak that formula, all of a sudden search results can go up. It was not a problem until Bill C-11 came along and the government's intent. It has had every opportunity to clarify it, and it refuses.
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Madam Speaker, normally, there would not be much debate in the House when we talk about making updates to the Broadcasting Act, which came into effect in 1991. At face value, most Canadians would say that a lot has changed since then. A little thing called the Internet came along, and most would agree.
I have talked about this topic in the House before and I am pretty proud of myself. I am pretty sure that I was the first MP in Canadian history to put Boyz II Men in the parliamentary record, when talking about the legislation before us, because times have changed a little bit. Back in 1991, Boyz II Men, Bryan Adams, MC Hammer and Monty Python were on the charts. I wanted to put that in the record again, and I am glad I have done that.
The goals of the Broadcasting Act have been reasonable: respecting official languages and providing an avenue for Canadian content in the traditional media at the time of TV and radio. Here is the thing I have said in the House, sadly, on many issues over and over again: Only the NDP and the Liberals, working together, can take something so mundane and so innocuous and make a disaster out of it when it comes to policy.
Here is how I know that. Outside of the Ottawa bubble, there are not too many Canadians who know what Bill C-4 or Bill S-252 or Bill C-39 is when it comes to government legislation. We know that the government is in trouble and we know it is on the wrong side of public opinion when a bill title becomes famous. In the last couple of weeks or couple of months, Bill C-21 has become synonymous with an attack on rural Canadians, indigenous communities and hunters, when the government tried to ban commonly used hunting rifles. Here we are now, with the famous term “C-11”, known by millions of Canadians across the country today as the most blatant attempt by the Liberals and the NDP, and bureaucrats in Ottawa, to have control over what Canadians see and what they search on the Internet.
If that was not convincing enough, Bill C-11 being a household name to millions of Canadians, we know we are in trouble when Conservatives and Margaret Atwood are on the same page, pushing back against the government. She is a wonderful Canadian, one of the most regarded and successful Canadian artists and content creators this country has ever seen. Canadians do not have to take my word for it or believe this side of the bench if they do not want to. Canadians will take Margaret Atwood's word on Canadian culture and content any day of the week over that of the Liberals and the NDP.
I want to give members the dictionary version of what she said. She said some pretty harsh things, calling out the government on Bill C-11. When we break it down and use the dictionary to further define what she is calling out the government for, it is creating a centralized and dictator-like system of control that requires complete subservience to the state.
This is bad legislation. They know it. It has been ping-ponged back and forth between the House of Commons and the Senate. It is back in the House of Commons, and it is going to go back to the Senate. Every time there is a committee hearing, every time there are more witnesses testifying, there are more questions than answers about what the government is doing here with this bill. From consumer groups to legal experts to content creators, many, many groups from every walk of life and every angle on this topic are calling out the government's direction and how bad and how flawed the bill is.
I am proud to stand as a Conservative to say that when we form government, we will repeal Bill C-11. We will kill Bill C-11, as simple as that.
Let us get into the weeds and talk about some of these pieces bit by bit. One of the things we hear the Liberals and the NDP say is that we need to support Canadian content more.
When I think about that, I pull up a list and say, sure, let us support Canadian content, things like Deadpool. It was filmed in Vancouver, starring Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, with a screenplay by Canadian Paul Wernick, based on a Canadian comic book character.
We have Canadian Bacon. Who could forget that? There is John Candy, a legendary Canadian actor, in a story involving Canada.
I talked about Margaret Atwood. We have The Handmaid's Tale, based on her book. When we look at the production, the series was filmed in Mississauga, Toronto, Brantford, Hamilton, Burlington, Oakville, Cambridge.
I think of Canadian content like All or Nothing, a series on the Toronto Maple Leafs. It is a five-part series that followed the Leafs for months during the 2020-21 season. It is narrated by a Canadian, Will Arnett. It used Canadian crews.
Is this all Canadian content? No, every one of those examples I just cited does not meet the definition and criteria for Canadian content in the definitions that we have.
Bill C-11 is currently 56 pages long, and any Canadian can go online and look at it. They can hit Ctrl+F and search. Nowhere in there does it talk about modernizing and cleaning up that definition. I will argue that this is not about Canadian content, but about something else.
Every time, we put an amendment forward to clarify. If the government wants to debunk a myth and say that what we are saying is not the case, it can clarify it and put in amendments to say what it is not, to exclude certain things. The government refused to do so. It says, “Don't worry. We are not going to determine that. It's going to be the CRTC.”
This brings me to my next point, about another fundamentally flawed part of the legislation. The CRTC is an Ottawa-based acronym. Federal acronyms go left, right and centre around here. It is an agency in Ottawa, and on the Quebec side as well, in the national capital region, full of bureaucrats who, behind closed doors, would not only set the rules for what is Canadian content, but also, through the bill, be directed to start controlling the search results we have on the Internet.
Members heard that right: “behind closed doors”. We have asked repeatedly to put some sunshine, sunlight and transparency on those protocols. There are no criteria in the bill. There is no public formula. There are no clarifications or guardrails on what those protocols are, so for Canadians, when it comes to what they search and what they want to see, whether it is searching on Google, Crave, YouTube or any other platform, as a Canadian here and now, the government will control what goes up in search results and what goes down, and we would not be able to find out the algorithms and calculations it uses, because of CRTC bureaucrats doing it behind closed doors. They never have to share their reasoning, or what I call “showing their homework”. That speaks volumes.
The Prime Minister and the NDP will say not to worry because the CRTC is an arm's-length agency of the federal government. “It is independent,” they say. Let us just debunk that right now. The CRTC reports to the Liberal Minister of Canadian Heritage. Its chair and the commissioners who are working there and leading that organization are appointed directly by the Prime Minister and the Liberal cabinet.
Nobody believes it is arm's-length, and nobody believes the legislation is about Canadian artists and everyday Canadians, because if it were the right thing to do and the popular thing to do, and if there were no problems about it, the government would have made that whole process a lot more public, rather than punting it over behind closed doors.
The bill is not about sunlight. It is not about Canadian artists and content creators. I say the bill is a Trojan horse, because there are some very big cheerleaders for it. The bureaucracy at the CRTC would be exploding in size. The size of the Internet is massive. The amount of content uploaded every single day is huge. It is going to take an administrative swarm of new bureaucrats to go through, and the people who are going to hit the jackpot, the people who are doing cartwheels in downtown Ottawa, are the lobbyists who would be hired by all these groups, associations and artists to try to lobby to get them, when the CRTC goes behind closed doors, to take what is going on.
As I share my time with the member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, we will continue the commentary on this and how it works. If someone is a budding content creator in north Winnipeg, a Franco-Ontarian or an indigenous artist in northern Canada, in Nunavut, they can currently upload, and may the best content win. The cream of the crop rises. Canadians will determine what they like and what they want to watch, and that should be the most popular search result. That is the most organic way possible. Trust me, the best way is to let Canadians do their own work and let the organic way go. Good videos go to the top. We have thousands of artists who have made a living by creating content and continue to do so. We do not need to fix what is not broken.
I will wrap up by saying that Bill C-11 is bad. It is online censorship. Ottawa telling 37 million Canadians what they should watch and see is wrong. The Liberals and the NDP have had years to get this right, and now they are just being stubborn.
We oppose this bill now, and as a Conservative government, we would kill Bill C-11.
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Mr. Speaker, I want to build a bit on the CRTC. We have heard a lot about the frustrations tonight. We have seen this time and time again with the Liberal government. Of course, the NDP is supporting them, and then a couple of years down the road when, for example, the CRTC has been given very vague definitions and broad powers to interpret a lot of these things as it sees fit, the government will say that it is not the government, it is the CRTC. The NDP and the Bloc will say they cannot believe that happened, as that is not what they intended.
Could the member speak to the vague definitions in this bill, as we can see this Trojan horse coming, and the CRTC intervening in a wide way? This is apparently not the intention of the bill, but Liberals have had more than enough opportunities to intervene and clarify, and it has refused to do so.
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Mr. Speaker, amendments could be made that could improve the quality of the bill. I have always tried to be constructive, and many of my colleagues have been. There are areas that could provide better definitions. There are areas that perhaps, as I mentioned, could provide specific exclusions.
The reality of this is that the government bungled it in the last Parliament, in terms of the management of this bill. We are seeing this motion because of the same thing again. My understanding of this is that even if we pass it here in the House and rush through this process, the Senate said it is not going to get to it until September anyway.
We need to hear from more people. Every time government officials intervene, more questions are asked. We need to hear from more witnesses and hear their ideas. I believe that public pressure will lead to better changes and a better legislative framework for this.
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Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague from the NDP's intervention. It is always nice and appreciated to give a Canadian shout-out to a Canadian artist. That is appreciated.
On the revenues, as I said in my intervention, we need to make sure that companies such as Netflix, whether of a national or foreign nature doing business in Canada are paying their fair share, and also contributing to Canadian content using the revenues they have and the power they have to generate Canadian content of Canadian stories, creating Canadian jobs and so forth.
The example I laid out concerning The Handmaid's Tale speaks of how broken the idea of Canadian content is. Bill C-11 is not the solution. It does not tackle those problems appropriately, and I think it is going to leave a lot of confusion in the industry about coming into Canada and creating authentic Canadian content and jobs for actors and producers. There is also all the behind the scenes we see from a wide variety of platforms and the media viewing aspect of things. We are to be left behind.
We need better clarity on this. This bill does not do it. Just saying a title and that it is for artists does not actually mean it is going to benefit all those it says it is going to.
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Mr. Speaker, in the last Parliament, I had a petition on my social media for Canadians in my riding, particularly in my region, who were concerned about the overreach of the bill and the vague definitions. It was a slippery slope that did not go through.
It is not a fake outrage. There are many things that the government, the NDP, the Bloc and others could do to give further clarity to the definitions, give specific exemptions and eliminate proposed section 4.2 regarding individual user-created content, and they choose not to. They are fuelling the rage by not listening to those who are opposed to the bill, who have reasonable suggestions that could better define and narrow the scope of what the CRTC's mandate is in doing this. They are ignoring it, and the language of false anger on this is something that only adds to that.
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Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise tonight once again to speak to the government's proposed Bill C-11. In the last Parliament, it was Bill C-10, and it certainly generated a lot of feedback and frustration from Canadians across the country. We have been witnessing that here again in the last couple of months with this bill in its current form.
I have been receiving a lot of emails and advocacy petitions from constituents, both online creators and those who consume the content. They are concerned about what this bill entails and, frankly, among several things I will get into, what it does not entail. I believe that kicking the can to the CRTC and other organizations is a slippery slope and not a good precedent, based on the precedents that have caused a lot of frustrations to build up over the years.
I want to note that I will be splitting my time with the member for Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
We are debating this motion tonight because of an attempt by the government and its NDP partners to try to jam this legislation through the House of Commons once again. I know there are still numerous witnesses who want to provide their perspectives and voices at the heritage committee and share the legitimate and reasonable concerns they have and the clarifications they wish to see that they are not getting from the government and its partner.
One of the problems we have that is typical of the Liberal-NDP strategy when it comes to legislation, which we are seeing in Bill C-5, the criminal justice reform legislation, is that if members do not support the Liberals and NDP on the bill, it means we do not care about racism. If members want an end to federal mandates and the chaos we are seeing at the borders and airports, it means the members hate vaccines and health care workers. Now, with the Internet censorship bill, Bill C-11, if we do not support their way and their ideas, we hate content creators and arts and culture in this country. It is an either-or, a divisive approach, but it is not surprising. It is one that we see more and more.
I will repeat what I said in the last Parliament because Bill C-11, as we have it, is very similar to what we saw in Bill C-10, and a lot of the concerns we had last time are not addressed or clarified in the bill in its current form.
Let me start with a positive in terms of agreement in Parliament. The Broadcasting Act was created in 1991. I do not remember it. I was about five years old at the time. Boyz II Men, Paula Abdul and Bryan Adams had some hits then, but since that original piece of legislation, a lot has changed in how Canadians create content and get it out there as well as in how they consume it.
We have the Internet, social media platforms, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok and so forth. There is an agreement that we need to have a level playing field with these large conglomerates of a foreign nature and how they do business in this country. At the same time, we also need to make sure that we protect the individual freedoms and rights of individual content creators, like those on YouTube who have been able to explode in not only the Canadian market but also the international market with the evolution of the Internet and social media platforms.
There are serious flaws, and I have a perfect example. My colleague from Perth—Wellington, the shadow minister for Canadian heritage, raised this as a perfect example today. We all want to make sure Canadian content is created and is fairly represented on Netflix, Hulu, Crave and all the different platforms. He alluded in the chamber today to this bill not creating the specific measures to clarify some of the red tape about what is Canadian content. A perfect example that was illustrated was The Handmaid's Tale. I do not agree with Margaret Atwood and a lot of her politics, but I will admire her and give her respect as an artist and an author and for what she has done over her incredible career. A proud Canadian she is.
The Handmaid's Tale, a blockbuster TV series, was filmed in part in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area. One would think Margaret Atwood and filming in the province of Ontario, the GTA, would classify as Canadian content. It does not. That speaks to the need to define this content better, to set better parameters and better definitions when it comes to this. Sadly, the bill would not do that. One would think it would when we talk about the modernization that we face.
I want to specify my concerns during my time. This comes perhaps from my background before being in the House, as a mayor at the municipal level, and perhaps it is a bit affected by my experience in the past few months on the public accounts committee, which reviews Auditor General reports on programs and efficiencies and how they run.
I want to reiterate my concern with regard to the vague definitions particularly around user-generated digital content, claiming there is an exemption, but section 4.2 is there. The government says not to worry about it. The CRTC says not to worry about it. I do not think Canadians have a lot of faith in that approach to what we have.
The CRTC is a public entity, but considers itself very independent. I have a lot of frustrations with the organization that I will not get into tonight when it comes to providing Internet service to rural and remote communities. That is a speech for another night.
Particularly, what is happening is that the government's legislation is extremely vague. Conservatives have been standing up in committee and in the House, not just in this Parliament but also in the last Parliament, and I have foreseen and I am foreshadowing what I know is to come. We see it over and over again. The government says, “That is not our intention. Do not worry.” The legislation would pass and then it would go to the CRTC, after which, at some point down the road after the bill is passed, after it has come into law and been enacted, suddenly we would see algorithms or we would see content. At that point, the CRTC would say, “We are independent. There is nothing you can do. This is the law that was passed and this is the way it is interpreting it.”
The minister has tried to claim that user-generated digital content and YouTube creators, TikTok creators and Canadians who have been able to burst onto the scene, not just in this country but internationally, are free from having their content regulated. They say that they have no interest in looking at that.
If that is the case, the government should be going for what we have been advocating for: it should specifically rule it out and make it black and white. It should make it very clear so that there is not a little door poked open for the CRTC, when it is batted over there to look after, all of a sudden to decide that, in the public interest, it is going to be doing this.
This is the time for Parliament, for Conservatives, for us to stand and be on the record to say that there are amendments. There are a lot of things that need to change, but there are specific amendments at least on that. I believe that just speaks to the rushed attempt that we are seeing from the government. It speaks to the secrecy of what it is trying to do. It is trying to pass the buck over to an independent organization, one that is overly powerful in my personal view, to interpret these laws, at which point the government can later say that it was its goal but secretly it was not the government's problem but somebody else's.
It is government creep at its worst. We have seen it before. We see it at the public accounts committee, in terms of leaving it to bureaucratic organizations to organize, and the success of that.
In my time remaining tonight, I want to acknowledge some of the comments made by a Canadian YouTube creator who spoke at the Canadian heritage committee a few weeks ago, J.J. McCullough. I go back to what we could agree on: Modernization is needed for the Broadcasting Act to make sure that large companies such as Netflix pay their fair share and also create Canadian content for us to have as Canadians. J.J. McCullough noted the following, which really hit home when I heard his testimony:
The tremendous success and even worldwide fame of many Canadian YouTubers in the absence of government regulation should invite questions about the necessity of Bill C-11. An unregulated YouTube has been a 17-year experiment, and the result has been an explosion of popular Canadian content produced by Canadians of every imaginable demographic....it is important to understand that it is simply impossible to regulate a platform like YouTube without also regulating creator content.
We have seen more Canadians become known. We have seen more Canadians make a living on these platforms. What the government is proposing is not that if one does not support this, one does not care about Canadian artists. We are standing up for individual content creators to say that platforms like these have given them the opportunity to make a living, to get known and to get Canadian brands, Canadian stories, Canadian music or other things we could name out there.
Our colleagues will stand up for those individual creators in making sure that we get the government to better define the very slippery slope it is on, not just with Bill C-10 in the last parliament. It is repeating the same mistake with Bill C-11.
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