44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 29, 2022 10:00AM
- Mar/29/22 4:22:19 p.m.
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Order.
The hon. member had an opportunity to ask a question, and neither she nor anybody else on that side of the House should be raising any more questions or comments while the hon. member is answering.
The hon. member has about eight seconds to respond before I ask for another question and comment.
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Madam Speaker, I just want to thank you for restoring decorum in the House while I finish answering my question. I will go to the next question now.
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- Mar/29/22 4:22:42 p.m.
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Questions and comments.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Carol Hughes): Order.
Sometimes that is what happens when individuals are continually being interrupted. I want to remind members that if they want to ask questions, they must wait until it is their time to do that.
The hon. member for Thérèse‑De Blainville.
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Madam Speaker, I sincerely hope that Bill C‑11 will be passed as soon as possible.
I applaud the work that our colleague from Drummond did in committee. I am very happy that Bill C‑10, now Bill C‑11, is before the House today.
I do not understand why anyone would oppose this bill. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission Act is archaic and toothless.
Francophone cultural content is in decline, and all our broadcasters are losing momentum. I believe we must act to resist the web giants of the world. Personally, I find this very important.
My question for the member who spoke is this: If this bill passes, it will go to committee. How much time will it take for the CRTC to implement the changes?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for her question.
I would like to say I completely agree with the hon. member for Thérèse-De Blainville on the requirement and the real need for the modernization of the Broadcasting Act with the amendments we are bringing forward.
In terms of the length of time the CRTC would need, at this juncture I cannot answer that question. I would have to get back to the hon. member on that question.
I completely agree that Canadian content is unique. I was reminded of that when I spent a few days in Quebec City over March break with my family. We are unique here in Canada, and it is important that Canadian stories be told from coast to coast to coast and that we ensure that online providers deliver and provide funds when Canadian providers of content already do so.
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Madam Speaker, I know that my friend from Vaughan—Woodbridge spent a good deal of his life in the beautiful city of Prince Rupert, which is in northwest B.C. I was just reading online that there is a feature film being shot in that beautiful city right now, creating a lot of excitement and activity.
When I think about Canadian content creators, I think about film and television productions like that and the many that have been shot in the Bulkley Valley where I live. I think about content creators like the great Alex Cuba, nominated for multiple Grammy Awards and having won many other awards over the years.
The idea of capturing revenue and reinvesting it in the creation of Canadian content, to me, has a lot of merit. My question is why it has taken the government so long to level the playing field and insist that the big streaming platforms pay into those funds so that they too are reinvesting in content creators like the ones I have listed. Could the member comment on that matter?
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley is correct. That is where I was born and raised until I went off to university like many young Canadians do.
As a person who spent the first 20 years of his career in the private sector, I will say that I tend to be sort of impatient because I expect things to be done yesterday not today. That is just the way I operate, but obviously there is a process involved in government in laying out legislation and a time frame and a timetable to do so. I am very happy and glad to see the modernization of the Broadcasting Act and the amendments therein to bring in online streaming services that have become such a big part not only of our culture but of the economy globally. I look forward to that.
I also look forward to again visiting my hometown of Prince Rupert. Hopefully it is in the not-too-distance future because I do have many relatives and friends there still.
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Madam Speaker, it is interesting that the Conservatives seem to want to deny the reality that times have changed. It is about the modernization of a very important piece of legislation. It is legislation that is going to enable a higher sense of fairness.
I can say for my Conservative friends who wear the tinfoil hats and so forth that they do not have to fear. It is not an attack on freedoms. It is all about updating the Broadcasting Act. I wonder if my friend could provide his thoughts as to why it is so important to recognize that, through the development of the Internet, there is no level playing field. By passing this legislation we are going to enable more Canadian content and level the playing field among different outlets.
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Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Winnipeg North for his great work and hard work in the House in pushing legislation forward.
At this moment in time, these online content creators have no responsibility. They have complete access to the Canadian market but they have no responsibility to Canadian arts, culture and content creation. That has to change. That is what we are doing with the modernization of this act. We as a government are acting and moving forward. We all know that industries change and sectors change with technological development. We as a government must react. All governments react.
I encourage the official opposition, where there are legitimate concerns, to please raise them and ask those tough questions. The folks who sent them here to the House to represent them expect that. We expect that. A healthy democracy expects that.
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Madam Speaker, the member opposite talked a lot about the foreign streamers and the web giants. I am just curious to know how he feels about the fact that he has spent $19,000-plus on Facebook advertising, rather than focusing on the important local broadcasting or local newspapers in his own riding. Why does he feel the need to spend his money on the foreign web giants rather than investing in Canadian broadcasting and print journalism?
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Madam Speaker, I just want to make sure that people all understand that the obligations will fall only onto the platforms. That is the first thing I want to make sure is clear in my remarks today.
For the hon. member, I am sure that if we look at all parliamentarians and the advertising they do, because many of our residents are on Facebook and other platforms, I am sure that we would see that all parliamentarians advertise to reach their residents through the platforms they are using to receive their information as well.
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- Mar/29/22 4:30:19 p.m.
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Order. It is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Battlefords—Lloydminster, Royal Canadian Mounted Police; the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, Foreign Affairs; the hon. member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, Health.
Before I go to resuming debate, I just want to advise the members that the time allotted for 20-minute speeches has now reached an end. Therefore, members will now have 10 minutes for speeches with five minutes for questions and comments.
Resuming debate, the hon. member for Timmins—James Bay.
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Madam Speaker, I am very proud, as always, to rise in the House to speak for the incredible people of Timmins—James Bay.
We are here to talk about Bill C-11. We have to step back into the last Parliament where we had Bill C-10, which this is the update of, and what was then Bill C-11, which was supposed to be about addressing the long outstanding need to bring Canada's laws up to standard in dealing with the tech giants.
This Bill C-11 was the old Bill C-10, which should have been pretty straightforward. Who does not want Facebook to finally start paying tax? This is a company that made $117 billion in profit last year, up $31 billion in a single year, and it is not paying tax. That is what Bill C-10 was supposed to do, but then it was our modern Minister of Environment who was then the minister of heritage who turned it into a total political dumpster fire. It was so bad the Liberals had to call an election, just to get that thing off the table.
Now the Liberals have brought it back. At the time, then Bill C-11 was supposed to be the privacy bill, a pretty straightforward thing. However, that was another dumpster fire, because the Privacy Commissioner had to come out and say that the Liberal plan to update privacy rights would actually undermine basic Canadian privacy in the realm of digital technology. Particularly, the Privacy Commissioner found this American company, Clearview AI, broke Canadian law for their illegal use of images in facial recognition technology. In response, the Liberals were going to rewrite the rules so it would be easier for Clearview AI to break the law, rather than for the Privacy Commissioner to protect Canadians.
The Liberals had to call an election to erase all of that. Now the Liberals have been given, as they have so many times in the past, one more chance. The deus ex machina comes down and gives them a chance to do things all over again.
Now we are looking at this Bill C-11. I can say one thing about this Bill C-11 is that it fixed a lot of the problems with the previous dumpster fire, maybe by moving the minister, although God help the planet now that he is looking after the environment. That is just my own personal thoughts from having read his ridiculous environment plan today. What he was going to do for culture, he is now doing to our environment.
Having said that, I would say that there is a couple of key issues we need to be looking at. We need to be looking at the need for Canada's legislation to actually address the right of artists to get paid in the digital realm. For too long in Canada we sort of pat our artists on the head. We all talked about the favourite TV shows we had growing up. One of the Liberals was talking about the Polkaroo.
Arts policy should not be that we just pat our artists on the head. This is an industry. It is one of our greatest exports. We are not promoting arts as an export or promoting our artists to do the work they need to do. We saw from COVID the devastating impacts on Canada's arts industry, on theatre, on musicians and on the tech people, the highly skilled tech people who went over two years without working. We really need to address this. One of the areas where they have been so undermined is online.
Let us talk about Spotify. It is basically a criminal network in terms of robbing artists blind. The number of sales one needs to have on Spotify to pay a single bill is so ridiculous that no Canadian artist could meet it.
We have streaming services that are making record fortunes. Therefore, it is a reasonable proposition to say that they are making an enormous amount of profit and they have a market where they do not have any real competition, so some of that money, and this was always the Canadian compromise, needs to go back into the development of the arts so that we can continue to build the industry.
The one thing I have also come to realize is that what the digital realm gives us and what streaming services give us is the ability to compete with our arts internationally on a scale that we never had before, if we are actually investing. Let us not look at it in a parochial manner, like what was done with the old broadcasters, where it was one hour on prime time a week they had to have a Canadian show on. Let us actually invest so that we can do the foreign deals. Why is it I can watch an incredible detective show from Iceland on Netflix, yet people in Iceland are not seeing an incredible detective show from Canada?
This is what we need to be doing. This is a reasonable position to take. With the profits that Facebook and Google are making, they can pay into the system. That is simple. They have unprecedented market share.
I will go to the second point, which is dealing with the tech giants. It is something I worked on in 2018. Our all-party parliamentary committee came up with numerous recommendations. I have to speak as a recovering digital utopian because there was a time when I believed that when we let all these platforms come, if we stood back and did not put any regulations on them, they would create some kind of new market promised land, but what we saw was that those dudes from Silicon Valley who were making YouTube in their parents' garage morphed into an industrial power that is bigger than anything we have ever seen.
There is a term, “kill zone of innovation”, where these companies have become so rich, so powerful and have such unprecedented corporate strength that it dwarfs anything we have ever seen in the history of capitalism, companies like Facebook. When Facebook gets a $5-billion fine, it does not even blink. It does not bother it. When the Rohingya are launching 150-billion U.K. pound lawsuit for the mass murder caused because of the exploitation of Facebook's platform, we realize we are dealing with companies that are so much beyond that they do not believe that domestic law applies to them. There has to be some level of obligation. I have worked with international parliamentarians in London, and there were meetings in Washington, trying to see how we can address the unprecedented power.
There is one thing that changed fundamentally when we saw the growth of this power. There used to be a principle that the telecoms would always tell parliamentarians, which was that we should not be blamed for what is in the content because, as they say, the pipes are dumb. We just send out the content and people choose, but people do not choose the content on Facebook and YouTube because of the algorithms. It is the algorithms that make them culpable and responsible.
I refer everyone to Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who demanded Facebook explain how many of these stolen bot pages were driving misinformation during the convoy crisis here in Ottawa. Congresswoman Maloney wrote, “Facebook’s history of amplifying toxic content, extremism, and disinformation, including from Russia and other foreign actors” is well known. It is no wonder that some members on the Conservative backbench are so defensive about this bill. My God, this is their main source of news. What are they going to do if we start dealing with bot pages that they think is something that came down from the promised land?
As parliamentarians, we have an obligation to address bot accounts. We have an obligation to hold these companies to account. What does that mean? Number one, it is about algorithm accountability. I do not care what someone watches on Facebook or YouTube, that is their business, but if the algorithm is tweaked to show people what they would not otherwise see, Facebook is making decisions for them.
I would refer my colleagues to Tristan Harris, the great thinker on digital technology. He spoke to the committee in 2018 and said, “Technology is overwriting the limits of the human animal. We have a limited ability to hold a certain amount of information in our head at the same time. We have a limited ability to discern the truth. We rely on shortcuts” like thinking what that person says is true and what that person says is false. However, what he says about the algorithm is that the algorithm has seen two billion other people do the same thing, and it anticipates what they are going to do so it starts to show people content. What they have learned from the business model of Facebook and YouTube is that extremist content causes people to spend more time online. They are not watching cat videos. They are watching more and more extremist content. There is actually an effect on social interaction and on democracy. That is not part of this bill.
What the all-party committee recommended was that we needed to address the issue of algorithmic accountability and we needed to address the issue of the privacy rights of citizens to use online networks without being tracked by surveillance capitalism. With this bill, we need to ensure that these tech giants, which are making unprecedented amounts of money, actually put some money back into the system so that we can create an arts sector that can compete worldwide.
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Madam Speaker, this bill will ensure that broadcasters and streaming platforms contribute to the direct support of creators from francophone, racialized, indigenous, LGBTQ2 and disability communities. Could my colleague elaborate a bit more on this aspect?
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for this important question.
The role that the francophone community plays in the arts is essential for Canada, for Quebec and for my region of northern Ontario, where many proud Franco-Ontarians live.
It is essential for the francophone community to have access to the digital environment. It is also essential that Facebook, Netflix and YouTube support the development of Canada's francophone community to ensure that the whole world has access to Canadian content.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Timmins—James Bay for his speech. We have a lot of friends and family from Coast of Bays—Central—Notre Dame actually living in the Timmins area and working hard in the resource industry, bringing new dollars into the economy, but I was a bit sad that he had to insult Conservatives after the Deputy Speaker chastised us about insulting each other. I guess that respect is not really there.
He made reference to tin hats and things like that. I was feeling really bad. He talked a lot about marmalade, but he could not spell jam, so after all this I do not know which way my colleague across the way is going to vote. Is he going to stay in line with the marriage, or is he going to cheat like he did earlier today in our vote?
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague. At least his relatives work hard for a living, and I am glad they are working in the mines and the forestry industry in Timmins.
One of the great concerns that we have in the digital realm is the dumbing down of conversations to a level that they would fit on a Facebook meme. The fact that my hon. colleague thinks we are talking about marmalade and jam while we are actually talking about the digital marketplace is really concerning to me. Maybe he should spend a little less time online and come up to Timmins—James Bay. We could show him what real working people do.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech. I believe we feel the same way about this bill, which is very important for the discoverability of French-language content and is essential for Quebec artists. Members may not know this, but I used to be an actor. I have friends who really struggled during the pandemic, and this is a fundamental bill.
I would like to address something else with my colleague. He stated that platforms such as Facebook and Google are siphoning off advertising revenues. A recent UNESCO report found that Google and Facebook now soak up no less than half of all global digital advertising spending.
This bill does not address that threat. The fact that these major global platforms account for half of all advertising spending is a threat to democracy and independent media. Does my colleague believe that it is time to pass legislation to address this issue as quickly as possible?
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Madam Speaker, this is really important. The size of these companies are without parallel, and the fact is that they make the choices of what we see. They make the choices through the algorithm, which has a huge impact. For example, when I saw I could find my good friend Richard Desjardins' film Trou Story on Netflix, I was telling all my friends they had to see this film. I am in it by the way, but that is a side issue, it is still a great film.
People should be able to see great Canadian films on Netflix and not have the company decide what we watch or do not watch. That is why the accountability of algorithms is there, and they should pay into the system so we can make better films.
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- Mar/29/22 4:46:01 p.m.
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Before resuming debate, I want to remind members who are having side conversations that it is not really respectful when someone has the floor and is trying to answer questions or do their speech if other members are having side conversations. There is a lot of echo in here. I would ask those members to bring their side conversations outside in the lobby. That would be a lot more appropriate.
Resuming debate, we have the hon. member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
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