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Decentralized Democracy

Member of Parliament

Hon. Mike Lake

  • Member of Parliament
  • Conservative
  • Edmonton—Wetaskiwin
  • Alberta
  • Voting Attendance: 66%
  • Expenses Last Quarter: $178,671.82

  • Government Page
Context: House Hansard - 176 - Mar/30/23
Hon. Mike Lake (Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, CPC)
  • Mar/30/23 7:42:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and to speak to this debate tonight. In 2023 alone, I have held 15 constituent round tables of two hours each. I have heard from a couple of hundred constituents on a variety of issues, and this is among the top issues that constituents have raised with me. I am not an expert to the extent that the member for Lethbridge is. She has done such fantastic work for our party on this issue. I am not as eloquent as our leader was tonight in his articulation of the issue, but I am here to represent my constituents. I have been around here for 17 years, and today there is not only an observation about Parliament but also an observation about Canadian society that, if anything, we have to be a society that has more conversations not fewer conversations. We need to be more open to approaching political debate and trying to persuade people. We need to be more open to being persuaded. Having as free of an Internet as possible, of course with safeguards for criminal justice issues and those kinds of things, and using the means available to us and the technology available to us is absolutely critical to the functioning of our democracy and the furtherance and the betterment of our society. I have been watching and studying this, as I have been listening to the debate and also preparing for today, and I recognize that many experts have said that, under this bill, user content would be subject to CRTC regulations. The government has said, no, that is not the case. However, experts have come before committee and said, actually, it is the case. The bill went to the Senate, and the Senate, dominated by Liberal-appointed senators, believed the experts. The senators came up with a reasonable amendment to address the issue. The Liberals in the House, led by the Prime Minister, decided that they were going to reject it. They were going to reject the wisdom of the senators who studied this and the experts who appeared before the Senate. The senators came up with a common-sense amendment to address the issue. Liberals rejected it. The experts raised an alarm, and what did the Liberals do? These are not hard-core Conservatives, by any stretch. These are people who, when we were in government, would appear before a committee and they used to be widely respected by Liberals. They are people like Michael Geist. Now the government, members from the Liberal Party, call them names. They go to the Internet and criticize them publicly. They go to war with experts who have the courage to disagree with them, the people who have spent their lives looking at these things. In the House today, it was interesting listening to an NDP member, earlier, down the way, talk about us wanting to debate this issue on behalf of our constituents, like somehow that is wrong and that we are wasting time raising the concerns of our constituents. The NDP used to stand to debate, overnight, talking about things that the NDP wanted to talk about and debating. Its members used to stand up day after day, alongside the Liberals as well, complaining about the use of closure, every time closure was used. Now the NDP-Liberal coalition shut down debate at every opportunity. Today, they are shutting down debate and limiting what Canadians hear about a bill designed to limit what Canadians see and hear on the Internet. That is the height of hypocrisy, and it is only in Liberal Canada today that we see this. We have a crisis of civil discourse in Canada. At the root of this crisis is the fact that people do not feel heard. People do not trust the government. People do not understand the algorithms at play on Internet platforms either. We have those three things at play here, and this bill would exacerbate all those problems. The Liberal and NDP members will say that the bill does not limit what people can post. Technically, that might be correct, but instead the bill just limits what Canadians see. It is called discoverability. The bill limits what Canadians see. We can think about what the challenge is with that. Right now, we are in a world where people feel like they are not heard, and there is increasing frustration among people who feel like they are not heard. Right now, Canadians who have something they think is important to say, maybe through poetry, music, speech, dance or some form of the arts, will post it on the Internet. It might be anything in whatever form of expression Canadians have. Let us assume that what they post in this hypothetical situation would go viral today with whatever mysterious algorithms are at play in the social media world. If we are on YouTube searching for something, it gives us a list of suggestions to watch. It suggests things based on what we have watched, and we get a chance to see something. It does a pretty good job of feeding us what we want to see. In that case, the post would go viral. However, there are two very negative potential outcomes with the legislation. One might be that a person posts some incredible Canadian content that might go viral around the globe today, but under the legislation, it does not meet some vague, undefined criteria laid out by government-appointed public servants. Therefore, it would not be shared. This is not because it would lack popularity but because it would fail to meet what the government is trying to do. Thus, people will not get to see it. This incredible content that would otherwise have been shared would not get shared. The second thing that people do not talk about as much is this: Let us say the post is one that would go viral otherwise and it meets the government-designed criteria, whatever they may be, and is shared with Canadians on the basis of criteria that are different from what fits with their interests. Therefore, it gets shared with me as I am surfing the Internet, watching YouTube or whatever is the case, and it is shared on the side. However, it is not shared with me because it might be something I am interested in; it is shared because the government thinks I should see it. Thus, I do not engage with it because I am not interested in it. Now comes the profit motive. The regular algorithms kick in on social media, and because that post has been shared with a whole bunch of people who do not engage with it, instead of sharing it with people on the basis that they would actually like it, the algorithms do not share it with anybody else at a global level. Therefore, people around the world who otherwise would have absolutely loved this amazing Canadian content never see it. The algorithms do not share it because the government has limited the number of people who see it by sharing it with the wrong people according to government priorities as opposed to people's actual interests. Some hon. members: Oh, oh! Hon. Mike Lake: Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled from the other side. They will not stand up and actually debate today, but they will stand up and heckle me. Then, they will probably ask questions about misinformation without making any arguments or trying to persuade anybody. They know they have the numbers tonight to just ram this through, regardless of what Canadians think. This is the issue we are talking about right now. I am standing up in the interests of my constituents, who have massive concerns about the bill and already do not trust the government. It has been proven time and time again that the government will take steps against the interests of the constituents of Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, which I will mention is the largest constituency in the country. It has a population of about 230,000 constituents who feel completely abandoned by the government. When they take steps to share their feelings with Canadians and people who might be interested, or share anything on the Internet, they now feel that their sentiments and perspective are going to be further throttled by a government that already does not listen to them, neglects their point of view and never comes to visit or hear what they have to say. I will wrap it up there. Hopefully, the questions I get from the Liberal, NDP and Bloc members will indicate that they have heard some of the concerns my constituents have raised and reflect that maybe there is an openness to being persuaded in some way.
1468 words
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