- Member of Parliament
- Member of Parliament
- Conservative
- Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa
- Manitoba
- Voting Attendance: 67%
- Expenses Last Quarter: $138,707.52
- Government Page
Madam Speaker, if we want to talk about the bill in particular, let us get to what we are supposed to be debating tonight.
On Bill C-10, there was a portion in there that had an exemption for programs and that users could upload on social media. In other words, there was an exemption for user-generated content. I do not know if the member is actually familiar with that term.
In Bill C-11, they put the exemption back in. What clause was that? Moreover, in what clause did they actually put an exemption on the exemption?
If the member knows the bill that well, why did they put that exemption on an exemption and what clause was it?
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Mr. Speaker, this is the frustrating thing about this bill: No one is listening to the witnesses who gave testimony. If there were 80 of them, how many said that this is a rock-solid bill and we should approve it? Why would the government not then bring it forward for unanimous consent? This bill doing is dividing Canada, not bringing us together.
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Mr. Speaker, again, this is the problem, which is that they are not listening to those witnesses. How many of those—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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Mr. Speaker, I do not know specifically about that group, but I know rural Canadians, especially in places that are sparsely populated and have a lack of connectivity services, will be severely impacted by this. They have very little opportunity to speak, and they should be able to speak as freely and as often as they want to. These regulations will complicate that whole process, so I would encourage the member to have a second look at this. What kind of impact would this mean to rural Canada? It is not good for us living in rural Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, can one imagine any more government, especially when the Liberals are in power? As was commented earlier tonight, we have a passport system that is backed up and not working. We have an immigration system that has two million people waiting to get approved. This is just a mess. They have basically broken everything, so why not break the Internet as well?
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Mr. Speaker, that is the fundamental flaw with this whole legislation and the attitude of the government to the Internet and its approach to the Internet. It has a complete disregard for what Canadians are telling it. Experts, industry people and content developers are all telling it to at least look at the amendments and fix the legislation. Will it? No, it will not, and that is why we are here.
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Mr. Speaker, if the people across the way want to listen, here is the quote from Michael Geist.
He said, “To be clear, the risk with these rules is not that the government will restrict the ability for Canadians to speak, but rather that the bill could impact their ability to be heard.” That is the fundamental problem with this. He then continues:
In other words, the CRTC will not be positioned to stop Canadians from posting content, but will have the power to establish regulations that could prioritize or de-prioritize certain content, mandate warning labels, or establish other conditions with the presentation of the content.... The government has insisted that isn’t the goal of the bill. If so, the solution is obvious. No other country in the world seeks to regulate user content in this way and it should be removed from the bill because it does not belong in the Broadcasting Act.
Bill C-11 was so bad that, when the NDP-Liberal coalition sent it to the Senate, even the Liberal-appointed senators sounded the alarm. It was written so terribly that the Senate returned the legislation back to the House of Commons with 29 amendments.
I found it interesting that the Liberal-appointed senators, after hearing from experts, proposed an amendment that would reduce the amount of regulation that Bill C-11 would have on social media, but guess what? The minister has already indicated that the Liberals will reject the amendment, which came from their own senators. If the government is unwilling to listen to its own senators, how can Canadians believe they will be heard?
There is a reason I am here with my Conservative colleagues at nine o'clock at night to oppose Bill C-11. Canadians want the Liberal government to keep its hands off the Internet. Although this may be our last chance to stop this bill in this Parliament, Canadians can be hopeful knowing that it will be killed once Conservatives are elected to clean up the Liberal government's mess. Until then, I will, once again, be voting against Bill C-11.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-11. Nearly one year ago, I spoke to Bill C-11 in the House of Commons, and I expressed my opposition to the bill, a bill that would regulate the Internet. I have said it before and I will say it again: The Internet is supposed to be open and free. It is supposed to be open and free to create one's content and choose what one reads, free from government overreach.
However, here we are, once again, debating Bill C-11, a bill that would give the government the power to regulate what people see and hear on the Internet. If Bill C-11 passes, the government will give itself power to control what people watch. Instead of giving Canadians more of what they want to see, YouTube would be instructed to give viewers more of what the government wants them to see.
This could be our last chance to stop this bill from becoming law, which is why so many Canadians have reached out to their MPs to oppose Bill C-11. As I have said before, Bill C-11 is legislation to regulate the Internet. The Liberal government wants to influence what people see while they are browsing the web. It wants to push specific content to the top of their screens so they see it first. Consequently, other content will move down their screens so they see less of it. This is what the Liberals really mean when they say they want to make content more discoverable.
Back in the day, as my other colleague mentioned, the content we saw and heard was controlled by a small group of large players. Whether that was a small group of radio tycoons or a small group of television moguls, there were a limited number of people who decided what content we consumed. We were limited to what we could read, listen to or watch through traditional media channels. One of the reasons Canadians were limited in the content they could consume was that the government regulated television and radio through the Broadcasting Act.
The Broadcasting Act meant that TV and radio stations had to have broadcast licences to operate. TV and radio stations needed to meet specific government-imposed rules concerning what they could air and what proportion of their content had to be Canadian. My colleague mentioned this earlier today when she explained how television and radio had been managed as a finite resource. However, the Internet is not a finite resource. Its content can be infinite. People no longer have to tune in to the soap opera at a specific time in order to consume content. The Internet allows consumers to access what they want, when they want it.
Now the government wants to regulate the Internet like it regulated traditional television and radio stations. The Liberals claim that Bill C-11 is needed to modernize the Broadcasting Act. Instead, they are taking an outdated government approach to traditional broadcasting and applying it to a free and open Internet. The Liberals want to place regulations on content that goes beyond large companies such as Netflix and Amazon Prime. They want to apply the same regulations to user-generated content, whether it be a local podcaster, the independent content creator or even the individual uploading videos to social media. The Liberals claim they have included an exemption for user-generated content, but they also added an exemption to the exemption, making such effort effectively meaningless.
What happens if someone decides to violate the Bill C-11 regulations? Well, the fines could be as high as $25,000 for a first event by an individual and $10 million for an offence by a corporation. The government thinks that Canadians are incapable of choosing what they want to read or watch on the Internet. The government believes that Canadians need help navigating through their social media streams. It believes Canadians would be better off if the government were deciding what they see and hear on the Internet.
The other day, the Prime Minister was hosting a town hall and spoke about the importance of the government keeping Canadians safe from the Internet. He could not hide his belief that it is the government's job to protect Canadians from the Internet. The Prime Minister's mentality is that the more government the better. He said that the Internet means there is a lot of people spending a huge amount of time in places that the governments have no ability to keep people directly safe from Internet companies, specifically the web giants like Facebook and Google.
The Prime Minister believes that only the government can keep us safe. No wonder he wants to regulate what we see and hear online. If his government can regulate the Internet, it can decide what is best for us to see.
I know the Prime Minister likes to call the opposition “despicable”. Do members know what is despicable? It is despicable for the Liberals to target the freedom of individual Internet users in Canada. It is despicable for the government to push certain content to the top of our screens and therefore move other content down our screens. It is despicable for the government to overwhelmingly reject the advice of experts and digital content creators across this country. That is right, it is not just Conservatives who are opposing Bill C-11. Experts across the country are alarmed.
This following is a statement by University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist on Bill C-11.
An hon. member: You can name another one.
Mr. Dan Mazier: You can listen to this if you want to.
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Mr. Speaker, it is questions like this that we need to debate more to have a clear understanding of what this bill is going to do to the future of the Internet, and introducing closure does not help that situation.
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Mr. Speaker, I think we understand that we look far beyond Quebec. I think we have to remember that this is a bill for all of Canada.
I would ask the member to consider this for a minute. Can he imagine if Quebec artists said they had great songs or great movies and the CRTC said they do not quite meet the Canadian content? How would he feel about that? We do not know. That is the problem. The government has not supplied the directive to the CRTC yet, and that is the biggest problem with this bill.
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Mr. Speaker, I think that was more of a comment than a question. Here is my quote, “Thankfully, because of the hard work of Conservatives and Canadians, we defeated Bill C-10, so that it never had a chance to become law.”
Mr. Mark Gerretsen: That's not what happened.
Mr. Peter Julian: You're making it up. That's not what happened.
Mr. Dan Mazier: What happened? There was an election called, so the bill got done. There we go, by their own Prime Minister. That is what happened. They killed their own bill. That is even better.
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Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-11, the Liberals' Internet regulation bill. This is an important bill, because it could have everlasting impacts on how every Canadian experiences the Internet.
Before we fully examine the details, it is critical to state why we are debating this legislation today. The reality is that I would not be standing here today to debate Bill C-11 if it were not for Bill C-10 in the 43rd Parliament. Canadians may recall that it was just last year when Parliament witnessed one of the most alarming pieces of legislation the Liberals had ever introduced since their election in 2015. Many Canadians viewed Bill C-10 as an attack on our freedom of speech, a measure of government overreach and a new means of censorship. I shared these valid concerns and strongly opposed Bill C-10 until the final hour on the final day.
Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and expert in Internet policy, was one of the most outspoken opponents of Bill C-10. Parliament needs to remember his criticism of the previous legislation. He stated, in referring to Bill C-10, “No one – literally no other country – uses broadcast regulation to regulate user generated content in this way.”
Many members of this House voted against Bill C-10 at one o'clock in the morning, as the Liberals tried to ram it through Parliament with as little debate as possible. This is déjà vu. I was one of them. Thankfully, because of the hard work of Conservatives and Canadians, we defeated Bill C-10, so that it never had a chance to become law.
Bill C-10 died, but it has re-emerged as Bill C-11. When the Liberals introduced Bill C-11, the minister responsible for the legislation stated, “This is about making the Internet a better place for all Canadians.” It sounds grand. That statement should have been a red flag for every Canadian. We have heard this kind of language from the Liberal government before. The Liberals say, “Trust us. Everything will be okay.”
It was former president Ronald Reagan who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.'” It would be unwise for any member of this House to trust that the government has the best interests of Canadians top of mind, particularly on the issue of Internet regulation.
Bill C-11 is legislation that proposes to regulate the Internet. The government wants to influence what you see while browsing the web. It wants to push specific content to the top of our screens so we see it first. Consequently, this would move content down our screens, so we would see less of it. This is what the government really means when it says it wants to make content more discoverable.
The details of what content and how much the government will promote are unknown. This is because Bill C-11 would hand over this decision-making power to the government-appointed body called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or as most Canadians know it, the CRTC. The government claims that this is a way of promoting Canadian content, but I believe that if Canadians want to watch Canadian content, nothing is stopping them from doing so.
Why does the government need to reach into the Internet to pick and choose what Canadians discover? Canadians do not need assistance from the government in discovering what they see on the Internet. They are totally capable and free to discover the content they want to see.
The Internet is exceptionally vast in content. An immense amount of content is uploaded on the Internet daily. YouTubers alone upload over 700,000 hours of content every single day. I cannot stress how much content and how many content providers exist in Canada. How can a government body like the CRTC monitor all this content to determine if it meets the Liberal government's standards? It is impossible.
I want to discuss some of the technicalities of the legislation. Although clause 2 of the bill mentions who is not subject to the regulation, it does not address what content is subject to the regulation.
The government claims that user-generated content is exempted from this bill through proposed subsection 4.1(1). However, proposed subsection 4.1(2) creates an exemption for the previous exemption in proposed subsection 4.1(1) and allows the CRTC to determine who is subject to these exemptions. The bill is confusing, to say the least, and I sincerely question whether it was intentionally done this way.
OpenMedia, an organization that works to keep the Internet open and free, and an organization that I had the pleasure to work with on my private member's bill in the previous Parliament, has also raised many valid concerns. The bottom line is, as Michael Geist said, “The CRTC is empowered to create regulations applicable to user content uploaded to social media services as programs.”
Canadians will not fully know who or what is exempted from this bill because the Liberals have yet to announce their policy directive for the CRTC. The Liberals have told Canadians that this policy directive will be given to the CRTC after the bill becomes law, not before, which is suspicious. I think that parliamentarians and all Canadians deserve to know what the government is planning to direct the CRTC to regulate before Bill C-11 can become law.
I want to quote Dr. Irene Berkowitz, a senior policy fellow from Ryerson University. She stated:
The idea that the CRTC can – or should – regulate the global internet, in an age when market intervention should be sharply decreasing, is unworkable and counterproductive, falsely pitting the industry against itself.
I agree with her. Canadians do not want their government regulating the Internet. The government regulates and restricts enough as it is, especially the Liberal government.
Bill C-11 is a very concerning piece of legislation that opens the doors to government overreach. It will impact every Canadian who uses the Internet. Canadians expect their elected officials to study it carefully and debate it thoroughly. However, the Liberals are playing the same political games that they did with Bill C-10. They are limiting the time we can spend debating this important bill. Instead of debating this legislation through the standard parliamentary procedure, the Liberals are supporting a procedure called time allocation to stop debate. The fact that the Liberals would move time allocation while dozens of members of Parliament wish to speak on behalf of their constituents is simply unacceptable. How ironic: government overreach on a government overreach bill. It is sad.
Canadians are concerned any time the government wants to create more regulation. Any time the government wants to regulate what Canadians see or hear is even more concerning. The idea that the Liberals want to promote certain content to Canadians who use the Internet is disturbing. My constituents believe in less government, not more.
As I said earlier, Canadians do not need assistance from the government in discovering what they see on the Internet. They are capable and free to do so themselves. I will be opposing Bill C-11, just as I opposed Bill C-10.
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