- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Kelowna—Lake Country
- British Columbia
- Voting Attendance: 68%
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Selkirk—Interlake—Eastman.
I am always proud to rise to speak on behalf of the residents of Kelowna—Lake Country on legislation we have before us. Bill C-11 is before us tonight at this very late hour. It would amend the Broadcasting Act.
Our constituency office has received hundreds and hundreds of emails, letters, phone calls and messages on this bill. Every time I am out in the community, people come up to me, letting me know how they do not want Bill C-11 to pass, as well as the former Bill C-10.
I think it is amazing that along with soaring gas and grocery bills and rising rent and mortgage payments, residents in my riding are letting me know that in addition to these very important topics, they are also concerned about this bill, which would affect their use of the Internet. I think it is because all of these topics affect their lives every day.
That level of attention is warranted because of what the government is proposing for this legislation to pass. It would cause unprecedented changes in how Canadians go about their daily lives online. Local residents in my community, Mitch and Lori, wrote to me to say that Bill C-11 represented the tipping point of government overreach.
Benji wrote to me to say that Bill C-11 would represent a major step back for our country.
Were Bill C-11 to pass, which it looks like it will with the Liberal-NDP coalition, those members in this House would be gifting the Liberals the power to play censor on what Canadians can see, if it does not match what they determine to be classified as Canadian content. The beneficiaries are the oldest legacy companies whose viewership has decreased. This bill would allow the government to have a policy directive implemented through actions like criteria. The government would give authority over online licensing and other matters. The only thing is that we have no idea what these would all be.
Bill C-11's twin bill, Bill C-18, would help failing legacy media companies looking for government cheques. They have found a perfect partner in the Liberals' desire for greater control of everyday Canadians' lives. A free and democratic country like Canada should never seek to empower the government with censorship powers to protect failing companies.
Canadians are rising up against the bill and against the Liberals for not listening. Bill C-11 is the government's proposed updating of the Broadcasting Act to provide the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, the power and authority to regulate online content platforms.
The stated reasoning behind Bill C-11 is to bring the CRTC into the 21st century, while supporting Canadian artists and promoting the spread of Canadian content over that of international competition. While that may seem like a noble goal, there are reasons Canadian artists, legal experts and digital content providers are speaking out against this bill. In fact, this legislation is going to suck content creator innovation into an antiquated Broadcasting Act black hole.
There are profound questions about using the CRTC bureaucrats as online regulators, as would be granted by Bill C-11. Here I am again in this House standing against bureaucracy and government overreach. This bureaucracy, the CRTC, took over a year to implement a three-digit number for mental health emergencies, despite that action being called for unanimously by all members of this House. This organization has proven to lack accountability. It regulates the telecoms and we know that Canadians pay some of the highest rates on the planet.
The questioning we did at the industry committee last summer of the CRTC, that I was part of at the time, on the Rogers' outage was like we were questioning a telecom executive and not an executive of the regulator.
The CRTC's expertise is primarily regulating radio waves, television feeds and advertising. If this bill passes, it would also be tasked with regulating user-content generating websites, like YouTube, where users upload hundreds of thousands of hours of video content every minute but even assuming they could do it, the federal government should not be policing what will be defined as Canadian content when using social or digital media platforms.
Canadians are right to question an organization having the power to censor or impose what content will be prioritized for Canadians to see online.
Here is the most concerning part: The criteria will come later and we have no idea what the criteria will be. We are just to trust the Liberals.
A free and open Internet is the gold standard of open, democratic nations around the world. The bottom line is that what we will search for and see online will be different after the CRTC puts in place its regulations, which will change online algorithms.
The former vice-chair of the CRTC, Peter Menzies, has come out strong, all along the way of this legislation. Of this legislation from the past Parliament, to which there really are few changes in the new legislation, he said, “Overall, it ensures that going forward all Canadians communicating over the internet will do so under the guise of the state.”
Then, in November 2022, Mr. Menzies stated, “If Bill C-11 passes and Internet regulation falls into political hands, Canadians will regret it for the rest of their lives.”
Many of the very people the Liberals say Bill C-11 would help do not even want it. There was extensive testimony, at both House of Commons and Senate committees, by content creators, digital experts and professors. Without Bill C-11, Canadian artists are succeeding in making their full-time livings producing content on digital platforms with the support of fellow Canadians and viewers from around the world, receiving billions of views.
Canadian social media stars bringing their concerns to the federal government about their content being hidden because of Bill C-11's regulations found themselves ignored. Over 40,000 content creators affiliated with Digital First Canada called for the discoverability rules in Bill C-11 to be removed. The government is not listening to all of these voices.
What is discoverability? It really is about, when one searches online, what comes to the top based on what one is asking about and what one's interests are. This legislation would change discoverability, because the CRTC would come up with criteria that would rise to the top.
The Liberals have refused every offer of good faith regarding Bill C-11, not just from regular Canadians but also from the government's appointed senators. Most of the senators are independent who sent an unusually high number of amendments, after months of study, back to the House of Commons.
The minister responsible made it clear he was rejecting all amendments that attempted to restrict the powers he sought for himself and the CRTC.
Once again, this has never been about good legislation, better regulation or updating our laws. It is about control for the Liberal government.
Some Canadians have already gotten a sneak preview of what life with Bill C-11 might be like. Recently, Google announced that, because of another overreaching online law, Bill C-18, it started a test run to temporarily limit access to news content, including Canadian news content, for some Canadian users of Google.
This was not an outright ban. However, people were searching and not seeing what they did before, and that is my point here. Censorship by big government or big tech has the same results.
When I debated the government's original version of this bill in the previous Parliament, I said that Canadians did not want this deeply flawed legislation that would limit speech and online viewing.
The number has changed from Bill C-10 to Bill C-11. Sadly, everything else has stayed the same, with some minor amendments from the Senate. The most important Senate amendments have been rejected by the government.
Canadians still do not want it, but the Liberals and their coalition partners insist on passing it. It is time for a government that protects consumer choice and encourages Canadian creators instead of getting in their way.
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Mr. Speaker, it is always a privilege to rise on behalf of the residents of Kelowna—Lake Country. Today we are debating Bill C-27, an act that would enact the consumer privacy protection act, the personal information and data protection tribunal act and the artificial intelligence and data act.
Canadians know we no longer live in the year 2000, but unfortunately much of our digital regulation still does. We have come a long way since Canadians' primary online concern was Y2K. The last time Parliament passed a digital privacy framework was PIPEDA, or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, on April 13, 2000. The most popular website in Canada that month was AOL.
When Parliament last wrote these regulations, millions of homes did not have dial-up, let alone Wi-Fi. Cellular phones lacked apps or facial recognition, and people still went continually to libraries to get information, and did not have the Alexas of the world as an alternative. They also called restaurants directly for delivery. Digital advertising amounted to flashing banners and pop-up ads.
In only 22 years, we have experienced a paradigm shift in how we treat privacy online. Personal data collection is the main engine driving the digital economy. A Facebook account is now effectively required to use certain types of websites and help those websites; a laptop can create a biometric password for one's bank account, and Canadians are more concerned about privacy than ever before.
One of the most common videos I share with residents in my community of Kelowna—Lake Country is one relating to privacy concerns during my questioning at the industry committee in 2020, as many people reached out to me about privacy concerns. It was to a Google Canada representative regarding cellphone tracking. This was in the immediate aftermath of reports of Canadians' cellphone data being used to track people's locations during the pandemic.
Cellphone tracking is something I continue to receive correspondence about, and I am sure other members in the House do as well. As traditionally defined, our right to privacy has meant limiting the information others can get about us. The privacy of one's digital life should be no different from the physical right to privacy on one's property. Canadians must have the right to access and control the collection, use, monitoring, retention and disclosure of their personal data.
Privacy as a fundamental right is not stipulated in the legislation we are discussing today, Bill C-27. It is mentioned in the preamble, which is the narrative at the beginning, but that is not binding. It is not in the legislation itself. While the degree to which someone wishes to use this right is ultimately up to the individual, Parliament should still seek to update the rules using detailed definitions and explicit protections. Canadians are anxious to see action on this, and I have many concerns about this legislation, which I will outline here today.
As drafted, Bill C-27 offers definitions surrounding consent rules to collect or preserve personal information. It would mandate that when personal information is collected, tech companies must protect the identity of the original user if it is used for research or commercial purposes. The legislation outlines severe penalties for those who do not comply and would provide real powers of investigation and enforcement. It presents Canada's first regulations surrounding the development of artificial intelligence systems.
Even though Bill C-27 presents welcome first steps in digital information protection, there is still a long way to go if we are to secure digital rights to the standard of privacy regulation Canadians expect, and most importantly, the protection of personal privacy rights. As is mentioned in Bill C-27, digital privacy rights are in serious need of updating. However, they are not in this legislation.
I agree with the purpose of the legislation, but many of my concerns are about inefficient, regulatory bureaucracy being created and the list of exemptions. Also, the artificial intelligence legislation included in this bill has huge gaps and should really be its own legislation.
From a purely operational perspective, while the legislation would empower the Privacy Commissioner's office with regard to compliance, it also constructs a parallel bureaucracy in the creation of a digital tribunal. If Bill C-27 is enacted, Canada's Privacy Commissioner can recommend that the tribunal impose a fine after finding that a company has violated our privacy laws. However, the final decision to pursue monetary penalties would ultimately rest with the new tribunal. Will this result in a duplicate investigation undertaken by the tribunal to confirm the commissioner's investigation?
As someone who has operated a small business, I am all too aware of the delays and repetitiveness of government bureaucracy. While it is important to have an appeal function, it is evident in this legislation that the Liberals would be creating a costly, bureaucratic, regulatory merry-go-round for decisions.
Canadians looking to see privacy offenders held accountable need to see justice done in a reasonable time frame. That is a reasonable expectation. Why not give Canada's Privacy Commissioner more authority? Of course, Canadian courts stand available. The EU, the U.K., New Zealand and Australia do not have similar tribunals to mediate their fines.
In addition to concerns about duplications of process, I am worried that we may be leaving the definitions of offending activity too broad.
While a fairly clear definition in Bill C-27, which we are debating here today, has the consent requirement for personal data collection, there is also a lengthy list of exemptions from this requirement. Some of these exemptions are also enormously broad. For example, under exemptions for business activities, the legislation states:
18 (1) An organization may collect or use an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if the collection or use is made for the purpose of a business activity described in subsection (2) and
(b) the personal information is not collected or used for the purpose of influencing the individual’s behaviour or decisions.
On plain reading, this exemption deals more with the field of human psychology than with business regulation.
Also in the legislation is this:
(3) An organization may collect or use an individual’s personal information without their knowledge or consent if the collection or use is made for the purpose of an activity in which the organization has a legitimate interest that outweighs any potential adverse effect on the individual resulting from that collection or use
There is also an exemption to consent that would allow an organization to disclose personal information without the individual's knowledge or consent for a “socially beneficial purpose”. This is defined as “a purpose related to health, the provision or improvement of public amenities or infrastructure, the protection of the environment or any other prescribed purpose.” Who determines what constitutes a socially beneficial purpose? This sounds incredibly subjective, and I have a lot of concerns when legislation is this vague.
Let me give a very simple example. Suppose a person using a coffee company app occasionally adds flavourings to their coffee while doing a mobile order. That company could recommend a new product with those flavourings already in it while a person is not physically in their business. Is this not personal information that is collected and used for the purpose of influencing an individual's decision, as in this legislation?
This example is not hypothetical. In an investigation from actions in 2020, Tim Hortons was caught tracking the locations of consumers who had the app installed on their phones even when they were not using the company's app. Tim Hortons argued that this was for a business activity: targeted advertising. However, the report from the federal Privacy Commissioner found that the company never used it for that purpose. Instead, it was vacuuming up data for an undefined future purpose. Would Tim Hortons have been cleared if the current regulations in Bill C-27 were in place and if it had argued that the data was going to be used for future business activity or for some socially beneficial purpose, which is an exemption in the legislation?
While I worry about the loopholes this legislation, Bill C-27, may create for large corporations, I am equally concerned about the potential burden it may place on start-ups as well. This legislation calls for companies to have a privacy watchdog and to maintain a public data storage code of conduct. This is vital for companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon, which have become so integral to our everyday lives and oversee our financial details and private information. Having an officer internally to advocate for the privacy of users is likely long overdue. However, while that requirement would not put much financial burden on these Fortune 500 companies, it could undermine the ability of Canadian digital innovators to get started.
Canada has seen a boom in small-scale technology companies for everything from video game and animation studios to wellness or shopping sites for almost every good or service one could imagine. Digital privacy laws should be strong enough to not require a start-up with just a few staff to have to be mandated to have such a position internally. We should ensure that a concept of scale is appropriately applied in regulating the giants of today without crushing the future digital entrepreneurial spirit of tomorrow.
I would like to address the presence of Canada's first artificial intelligence, or AI, regulations in this bill. While I do welcome the progress on recognizing this growing innovation need for a regulatory framework, I question whether it is a topic too large to be properly studied and included in this bill. In just the last few months, we have seen the rapid evolution of the ability of AI to create an online demand digital artwork, for example, thanks to the self-evolving abilities of machine learning.
The impact of AI on everything from our foreign policies to agriculture production is evident. Computer scientists observed a phenomenon known as Moore's law, which showed that the processing power of a computer would exponentially double every two years, and in the 57 years since this was proposed, this law has apparently not been broken.
I am concerned that most of the rules around AI will be in regulation and not in legislation. We have seen the Liberals do this many times. They do not want to do the hard work to put policies into legislation that will be brought to Parliament and committees to be debated and voted on. They prefer to do the work behind closed doors and bring forth whatever regulations they want to impose without transparency and scrutiny. We have seen the Liberals conduct themselves many times in this way.
Experts in the field have already made the case that Bill C-27 falls seriously short of the global gold standard, the EU's 2016 General Data Protection Regulation. Canadians deserve nothing less.
Though Conservatives agree with the premise of strengthening our digital privacy protection, this bill has many concerns and gaps. Clause 6 outlines that privacy protections do not apply with respect to personal information that has been anonymized. To anonymize is defined in the legislation as “irreversibly and permanently modify personal information, in accordance with generally accepted best practices, to ensure that no individual can be identified from the information, whether directly or indirectly, by any means.”
There are a lot of risks around this. Under this legislation, information could be disclosed in numerous ways, and that is very concerning. This goes back to what I mentioned at the beginning of my speech with respect to my questioning of Google Canada early in the pandemic about tracing the locations of people through their phones and sending it to the government.
The legislation creates more costly bureaucracy. It does not protect personal privacy as a fundamental right. It has questionable exemptions to protect the privacy of people based on ideologies. It allows the government to create large areas of regulations with no oversight or transparency and it is far from the gold standard that other countries have.
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Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
I am rising today to speak on behalf of my constituents of Kelowna—Lake Country to this motion to close debate on Bill C-11. It is a bill that the government continues to insist should not be of concern to Canadians, yet barely allows it to be debated. The previous iteration, Bill C-10, had massive backlash last year, and damning testimony and expert analysis of the Liberal bill, so we can see why the Liberals want to shut down scrutiny as quickly as possible this time around.
Bill C-11 is a piece of legislation that the government continues to insist is entirely different from last year's Bill C-10. After reviewing the legislation, I can confirm there is definitely an 11 and not a 10 in the title of the legislation. Unfortunately, the rest of the deeply flawed Bill C-10, which would limit what Canadians could see, share and view online, has been sadly left in place.
The government can say that it listened and that regulating user-generated content is off the table; however, legal experts and digital content producers can read, and what they are reading in this legislation is still deeply concerning.
The government is moving to shut down debate, shut down committee study and prevent dozens of witnesses from sharing their thoughts and concerns on this bill. Probably the most recent conflict comes between the heritage minister and comments from the current CRTC chair, Ian Scott. Mr. Scott confirmed that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, CRTC, would be able to regulate user-generated content under the current iteration of Bill C-11.
The government has stated that this legislation intends to support Canadian artists, promote the spread of Canadian content over that of international competition and update the Broadcasting Act to cover the rise of digital streaming content. None of these goals is wrong. Our Canadian arts and culture sector is flourishing and deserves our support. More Canadians than ever are making films about Canada. More Canadians are making music than ever in Canada. More video games are being made here in Canada, not to mention e-books, podcasts and YouTube content.
Canadians are producing and watching great Canadian content. Sometimes they will see it through Disney+, and occasionally getting that content made will involve international investment. Under the current rules, this may make it un-Canadian. It is not what the government would prefer for Canadians to watch.
A constituent of mine recently wrote to me with his concerns on Bill C-11 and the threat of censorship that is always present when a government looks to prefer one source of information over another. He told me the story of tenants of his who had grown up in the Soviet Union. He wrote:
Some time ago, a couple from Russia rented our basement suite. We got to know them well and had many discussions over how Russia-controlled media impacted them.... We asked, in your opinion, what was the biggest lie ever told to the Russian citizens. Slava didn’t hesitate: “That Russia won the 72 Canada Russia hockey series!” We were astounded… how could they not know that Canada won? We had the videos. They said the government simply eliminated the last four minutes of the winning game and controlled the narrative.
They only saw what the government wanted them to see. Bill C-11 gives the Canadian government the powers to do this: it has broad powers that could be used to censor what Canadians can see and say online according to the government’s preferences.
If the government is genuinely interested in updating the Broadcasting Act, let us work together to do that. If the government wants to ensure that Netflix, Spotify and YouTube are not playing by different rules than Canadian producers are, Conservatives are happy to help them in that. Canadians want to see digital platforms pay their fair share, but do not trust Bill C-11 to do it with all the extra censorship power.
To quote very specifically from the bill itself, Bill C-11 seeks to bring platforms like YouTube under the following content regulations. It says the CRTC:
May, in furtherance of its objects, make regulations
(a) respecting the proportion of time that shall be devoted to the broadcasting of Canadian programs;
(b) prescribing what constitutes a Canadian program for the purposes of this Act...
The government says it is looking to bring the Broadcasting Act into the 21st century, but applying those regulations to user-driven content platforms is trying to bring digital content into the 20th century. As my colleague for Calgary Nose Hill put it, “It is like playing an MP4 on a VHS machine: It is just not going to work.”
Regulating digital platforms and social media is beyond the scope of the CRTC's mandate and abilities. Right now, Canadians are succeeding on digital platforms with the support of fellow Canadians. People of every background in this country are making their full-time living creating digital content while receiving billions of views. We know Canadians are succeeding in these spaces.
Social media platforms already have reach within Canada. Why would the Liberals fork over $600,000 in taxpayer dollars in 2021 to pay for social media Internet influencers to sing the Liberals' messages if online platforms were so ineffective? This does not include the money the Liberals spent on the various digital platforms themselves, only to pay influencers. This was only discovered through investigations by Conservatives.
Governments should not look to discourage Canadians from watching Canadian YouTubers just because they make content abroad. We should not look to saddle the success of homegrown content makers with checklists to prove the Canadianness of their videos. Over-regulation is the swiftest eliminator of innovation. It benefits the previously established who may be too out of touch to keep up with the pace of change. Canadian digital content creators are on the cutting edge of new media. They do not need Bill C-11 to succeed, and they have proven that. Canadians are already watching what they are making. They do not need the federal government to tell them to, or to have the CRTC analyzing every online post to see if it is something that meets whatever rules it comes up with and is worthy of its view.
This is truly unbelievable. The Liberals are also refusing to release the policy directive they are giving the CRTC. The only ones who are seeking the government's assistance really are the legacy media companies that once enjoyed monopolies on television and radio. They did not innovate to the new media landscape, and are now looking for backdoor bailouts in partnership with a government seeking greater control of the lives of everyday people.
Any government looking to impose new regulations on a service so vital to everyday life as our digital devices would need to first demonstrate that its actions are not self-interested and that it would not choose to discriminate based on the viewpoints of those it is seeking to regulate.
The current government has proven that it cannot be trusted to be fair and equitable. In the past two years, we have seen two public protest movements that blocked public infrastructure get two entirely different responses from the same Liberal government. Of course, I am talking about the 2020 rail-line blockades, which brought pretty much all passenger and commercial rail, including from ports, to a dead stop for almost three weeks across the entire country and laid off 1,000 people. That is compared to the 2022 trucker convoy border closures at a handful of border crossings for a few days of that critical infrastructure.
Even though there was damage to infrastructure during the rail blockades, the Liberals worked with law enforcement and met with protesters. When the Liberals disagreed with trucker protests over mandates, they turned to the Emergencies Act to give themselves new powers, which were proven not to be necessary as our border crossings had already been reopened under our existing laws. The Liberals froze Canadian bank accounts without verification, which is something just admitted by the Department of Finance. The Liberals were called out by the Privacy Commissioner for failing to notify or ensure the privacy of Canadians whose cell phones were tracked by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Nothing can make the government's track record of secrecy, control and division clearer today than to repeat the same tactic of cutting short debate it used in the prior piece of legislation, Bill C-10, in the previous Parliament.
This motion to impose an arbitrary deadline to send the bill back to the House does not help the Liberals' case. The House is not a short-order kitchen. There is no need to push on law-making, especially on a piece of legislation such as Bill C-11, which has so many holes of uncertainty that its symbol should be a piece of Swiss cheese. However, as the Prime Minister has constantly proven, the work of Parliament is secondary if he can move up his vacation plans in Tofino. As currently written, and with the government having no interest in hearing from witnesses or entertaining amendments, I cannot support stopping debate on this poorly thought-out, full of holes, overreaching piece of legislation.
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