Senator Housakos: I’m standing with the digital-first producers in this country.

“User-generated content,” colleagues, is a digital term, and it’s Canadians. Every time you hear “user-generated content” or “digital-first providers,” just substitute the word “Canadians.”

I’m not standing up for Meta or Google. Unlike this government, I’m not standing up for CTV, Quebecor or Rogers either. If they have issues with their business model and they’re not feeling that they’re competitive enough, that is, philosophically speaking, for them to address. It’s not for legislation to address it or for me as a legislator or any government, Liberal or Conservative alike, to intervene in that particular marketplace to help a business model, because at the end of the day, I’m of the view, “Where does it end?” It has to end somewhere. We don’t have unlimited amounts of money. I know this current government thinks we have unlimited amounts of money, but we don’t.

The truth of the matter and why we’re so persistent, and why you see the subamendment from Senator MacDonald to insist on the amendments that we collectively all voted for — we voted for these amendments at committee; we voted for them here at this chamber. We did that not on a whim but because we are truly a chamber of sober second thought. We did all this because we heard so much testimony from so many witnesses about user‑generated content producers (Canadians) — millions of Canadians who came before our committee and pleaded with this institution.

We are their last hope. These are people who are creating on a daily basis. They’re generating income for the Treasury Board of this country. They’re generating content that is being spread around the world in a very successful way. We see now particularly young Canadians who have completely transformed themselves from the cable broadcasting industry; they’re all online.

As I have said this before in my speeches, I’m still of the old generation. At 9:00 or 10:00, I run to “CTV National News” to watch the news. My boys come walking by the family room laughing at me and spewing out all the news at me at miles an hour because they’re on all these platforms, and they feel they’re getting their news quicker, getting more options, getting more in‑depth news, and they call me a dinosaur.

The issue we have as an institution, Senator Cotter and Senator Dalphond — I listened to your speeches very attentively and I didn’t hear much being addressed in regard to Bill C-11. I did hear a lot of constitutional arguments about how this place is an unelected body. I heard arguments about how it is not our role to push back on government legislation from the other place because they have the elected mandate from the people and so on and so forth. But I just want to go back and remind everyone that it hasn’t been that long since Senator Serge Joyal — an eminent senator who, of course, has argued on behalf of the judiciary on this floor on many occasions what our rights and privileges are — has said many times, including on his way out of this place, that we have to be relevant, relevant to our constituency.

So to both Senator Cotter and Senator Dalphond, with all due respect for their arguments, I said to Senator Dalphond that probably what I do think will happen for years to come is the government leader of future governments will probably be quoting his speech on a number of occasions in the future. That is fine, because he put on his judiciary hat, as he was an eminent judge, and did a very good job at making a judicial argument on the floor, but I as a legislator have had the privilege of working at the feet and learning about Parliament from giants such as Serge Joyal and Lowell Murray and others who came before me.

More importantly, I also was privileged enough when I studied political science at McGill University — there was a professor named J.R. Mallory, who also taught me a thing or two, a renowned constitutional expert in this country. He told me that we live in a country where we have separation of the executive, legislative and judiciary bodies.

So with all due respect to judges who are now, of course, legislators, I want to point out that we have supreme constitutional authority on legislative issues, to step in and articulate and craft legislation to the best of our ability, listening to our constituents, even though we’re not elected. I know we’re all appointed by a prime minister — Prime Minister Trudeau or Prime Minister Harper; I don’t think there are any Prime Minister Martin appointees left — but, at the end of the day, we’re still accountable to our constituents, to our provinces.