44th Parl. 1st Sess.
May 11, 2022 02:00PM
- May/11/22 6:24:55 p.m.
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The question is on the motion.
If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes to request a recorded division or that the motion be adopted on division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.
The hon. member for Chatham-Kent—Leamington.
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- May/11/22 6:25:44 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I respectfully ask for a recorded division.
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Pursuant to order made on Thursday, November 25, 2021, the division stands deferred until Wednesday, May 18, 2022, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.
The hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.
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- May/11/22 6:26:08 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I believe if you seek it, you will find unanimous consent to see the clock at 6:30 p.m. so that we can continue with the business of the House.
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- May/11/22 6:26:17 p.m.
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Is it agreed?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
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Madam Speaker, I remember the discussions we had about Bill C‑10 during the previous Parliament, especially with respect to potential breaches of freedom of expression and concerns about social media users being taxed. These same concerns are being raised again, even though the summary, clause 2 and clause 4.1 clearly state that users will not be taxed and even though there are no clauses that restrict freedom of expression.
I now want to talk about access to culture.
It is not right that it is easier for francophones to access Korean content than it is to access media in their first language on some sites. Out of curiosity, I watched a few of the Korean offerings suggested to me and I enjoyed the production, set design and costume quality.
Bill C‑11 will ensure that francophones have access to content that is just as good a quality in their language and will ensure that non-francophones can do what I did and watch content that is made in Quebec and in Canada. Curiosity is something to be developed.
If we want to encourage curiosity and interest, we need to make it easier to access good-quality content, and that is what Bill C‑11 will do. Some members will tell me that people who want access to francophone culture just need to seek it out like I did, but that is a troubling thought.
Why should I have to go looking for expressions of my culture when others never have to look at all to have access to expressions of their own culture?
Are those who might say such a thing really telling me that the only good culture is culture that is readily accessible, or in other words, American culture?
Could it be that they have no problem with the fact that they have no access to content about their own culture, Canadian content? Could it be that they think Canadian culture and American culture are similar?
I can almost hear those same individuals telling me that those two cultures are not one and the same. In that case, why would they not want more people to have easier access to Canadian culture? Why would they not want francophones and francophiles from Quebec, Canada and elsewhere in the world to have access to Quebec and francophone content just as as easily as they do to American or anglophone cultural content?
Bill C‑11 will allow online streamers to broadcast culture and improve access to the cultures present in Canada.
To sum up, for anyone who cares about their own culture, Bill C‑11 is a good bill that deserves to move through the legislative process in good faith on all sides. It deserves it because we should never have to let our culture be managed by a foreign culture.
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Madam Speaker, I studied economics at university. When classes started, we were given a model of a very competitive market where power was shared equally. However, we quickly learned that whoever controls the distribution network can successfully distribute their products. In my opinion, this bill is designed to influence the distribution network, so that everyone can distribute their products.
What are my colleague's thoughts on that?
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Madam Speaker, often, the way it works is that, in order to get access to cultural programs or what have you, users have to ask for it. However, on the Internet, users are highly influenced by what the algorithms decide to show them, and that can be a bit more problematic. If broadcasters are encouraged to present more Canadian content, this will pique consumers' curiosity and interest in the excellent content that is available in Quebec and Canada.
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Madam Speaker, I have a great deal of concern about the fact that time allocation was moved on this bill. I also have serious hesitation about being able to trust the government members, who are saying to simply take them at their word that it is not impacting the ability of Canadians to have free expression on the Internet, especially after some of the outrageous things that the previous minister of heritage said. He said that he was not censoring the whole Internet; he was simply censoring some of the Internet.
My question, though, is very simple. Does the member support our very simple request that the government provide the terms of reference that it will be providing to the CRTC prior to the bill being passed so that members in this place can understand exactly what is being asked of the CRTC when it comes to the impacts that this bill would have on Canadian content?
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Madam Speaker, that is an excellent question.
Since I do not have in front of me the proposal my colleague's party wants to make to the government on the CRTC, I will not give a direct answer. However, that being said, it is important that things be done right. For that to happen, we need to move the bill forward through the legislative process and examine it in committee.
I encourage all my colleagues to read Bill C-11. I know that this bill is thick, but we need to take the time to read it clause by clause, to understand what it means in lay terms, and to look at every side of the issue, so that we can thoroughly examine it in committee and then make proposals that make sense.
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Madam Speaker, we know that every artist and the entire arts and culture sector in Quebec support the bill. There must be something in it that helps protect francophone culture.
I would like to hear my colleague's thoughts on that.
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Madam Speaker, this bill will not only give funding to artists, but that funding will also give those same artists the opportunity to showcase our culture, particularly francophone culture, which is extraordinary. Francophone culture is unique in the Americas, and even though some of us may have a funny accent, that is part of our charm.
This bill will also help us to shine.
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Madam Speaker, it is kind of a pleasure to speak to Bill C-11. I will offer a few things based on a career, at least my first career, of dealing with the CRTC as a broadcaster, as a person who was on the radio and occasionally on television, and especially as a manager of stations that were required to follow the CRTC regulations.
The concerns that have been expressed about Bill C-11 need to be paid attention to. We should not just dust them off and say there is no problem here. The questions are legitimate, but we also need to drill into the details and see exactly what the implications are. When we do that, we are going to end up feeling a lot more secure and confident that Bill C-11 is going to add significant value to Canada.
First of all, this is the Broadcasting Act that we are talking about. The Broadcasting Act relates to broadcasters. I want to quote a couple of things that kind of settle what we are talking about. The first is:
undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet as a distinct class of broadcasting undertakings...
In other words, basically we are saying that the web platforms that distribute and carry programming to Canadians will be classed as broadcasters. The legislation also says:
the [Broadcasting] Act does not apply in respect of programs uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service
In other words, cat videos, homegrown YouTube and even the productions that someone may have spent some money to develop will not be covered. They will not be influenced by this.
Further, there is one exception that we need to note in the legislation. It says:
A person who uses a social media service to upload programs for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service—and who is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate...does not, by the fact of that use, carry on a broadcasting undertaking...
I want to go back to my radio days. It was 15 years of misspent youth, but an amazing education in a lot of ways. I got into the radio business just after the initial Canadian content regulations came to radio, and here is how that worked. The original rules said that 30% of the music that we played from 6 a.m. until midnight had to be Canadian content. I will describe what that is in a second. Later, the CRTC and the governments of the day came forward with a formula in which the radio stations had to contribute to a fund. Initially, it was called the Canadian talent development fund. There have been other names and other versions of it.
The two things were that, first of all, we had to profile Canadian content, and then later we had to contribute financially to the creation of Canadian content. What we are doing here now is no different from what was done 50 years ago.
How did we know what Canadian content was? In the radio business, every record had what was called the MAPL logo. It was a system that identified music, artist, production and lyrics of the piece. The rule was that anything produced after 1971 or 1972 had to have two of those categories covered as being Canadian to be classified as a piece of Canadian content. It was tough in the beginning, I have to say. I had grown up listening to radio that was free to play anything it wanted at any time, within reason. I will get to that, but the fact is that all of a sudden we had to play Canadian content. In those days it was scarce; at least, the kind of music we wanted to program on our station was scarce. I still today cannot listen to Snowbird by Anne Murray because we played it to death. It was what we had at the time. That no longer exists, and it is because the Canadian content rules led to the development of a Canadian music industry that punches way above its weight around the world.
There was a unique proposition to those early CanCon days that is totally different from what we face today. Radio, by its nature, is very linear. The listeners listened to the piece of music I had on the air, and got it in the order that I gave it to them. If they were going to listen to our station, they would get that 30% of Canadian content, period.
It is different in this case. We are asking online broadcasters to simply make Canadian content available. The people who use Netflix go in and there are little tiles that show them all of the movies available. What this rule would do is tell Netflix that it has to make sure that Canadian content is represented in those tiles. People do not have to choose it, but they have to know that it is there. That way, we are going to at least give Canadian creators access to audiences who can choose to view or listen to their material, or not.
The actions of the regulator have certainly changed throughout my lifetime. Sometimes, when I talk to kids in schools, they ask me what it was like in the old days when I was a kid: when we would ride our dinosaurs to school and all that good stuff. When I was a kid, Canadian radio stations were not allowed to play commercials on Sundays. If they played a recording, they had to announce that it was a transcription so that people would not think that the performance was live. That was then.
Over the years, the broadcast regulator updated, streamlined and allowed things that were not allowed previously. I remember only two times, or maybe three, when the Canadian regulator stepped in and got in the way of a licensed broadcast undertaking.
One was at one of the first stations I ended up working for: CJOR in Vancouver. The family who put the station on the air was forced to sell it because it lost control of the programming. The programming in the mid-1960s was pretty rough, when we look at the community standards of the day.
Another refers to a general category of radio called radio poubelle: garbage radio or trash radio, which has been a unique property, particularly in the Quebec City area. Station CHOI was forced to be sold, again because it could not control some of its announcers who were doing some hideous things on the air. I could quote them, but will not because members really do not need to hear the sorts of things that were going on there. The CRTC had been more than patient, but it was far beyond what anybody could ever accept.
With respect to the obligations of the broadcaster, there was an article co-written by former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin entitled, “Regulate the System, Not the Speech”. When we look at Bill C-11, what it is really going to do is regulate the broadcaster so that it is responsible for the material that is played by it. I could play any record I wanted, but if I did not follow Canadian content rules the broadcaster, i.e. the station I worked for, would get into trouble, but nobody was standing over my shoulder saying that I had to play this song next or that I could not play a record, except if it did not match the format. It is not the content producers, but the platform that provides the content to the public, that the bill will regulate.
By making Canadian content more available to Canadians, we will do something about that cultural, and I use this word advisedly, juggernaut to the south of us, particularly when it comes to French production. One of the most delightful things in my time as a member of Parliament has been that I have a home in Quebec. I love it here. Quebec is such a wonderful, unique thing and we must do everything we can to protect this unique culture in a unique country such as ours.
I will end it there to let us go to questions, but I have to say that although some of the fears may be quite legitimate, they actually do not get borne out when we look at the details behind Bill C-11.
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Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate a fellow British Columbian speaking here tonight.
The gentleman has described his experience in radio with the CRTC, but the Internet operates on much different principles. I speak to younger constituents who specifically cite the concerns around net neutrality. Net neutrality is literally a commitment by governments to not hold back data unless it is illegal content, but now the government, through the CRTC and some unknown policy directive, will throttle back and block certain content from being seen by consumers when they want to see it, which violates the very principle of net neutrality.
The member might say this is about the platform and the consumers and making sure they can see it. Does he not see that the Internet functions much differently, and that this would violate net neutrality?
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Madam Speaker, I think the hon. member misunderstands what net neutrality is.
The notion came up that the network providers, basically the people who allow the streaming, would constrain access to bandwidth unless more money was paid to get more bandwidth. This would certainly choke off the ability of content providers to stream, let us say, movies, etc., unless they ponied up the money to get the bandwidth to do it.
That is what was meant by net neutrality. The government has been firmly onside that everybody deserves the same treatment by those platforms, so that any content put into the platform would be treated equitably and equally across all potential users.
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Madam Speaker, I would like to note that I really appreciate my hon. colleague's wonderful radio voice.
I have to pick up on the comment by the previous speaker, my hon. colleague from the Conservative Party. I appreciate much of what was said, but I think the analogy between a radio station in the 1980s is not a completely apt metaphor for the Internet today. The average radio station listener could not add to the content or participate in generating content on the radio station. It was a one-way platform, whereas the Internet is something the public meaningfully participates in.
I am interested in my hon. colleague's comments on that. More particularly, I have constituents who are concerned that there would be an attempt by the government to regulate and cause broadcasters, in this case online providers, to remove content that is deemed hateful: in other words, that requires a subjective determination. They are worried that this may lead to censorship of the Internet. I am curious about my hon. colleague's thoughts on that. Is he concerned that Bill C-11 may lead to that consequence?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the member's question, and I also appreciated his comments on my output here.
I think we have to be concerned about that, absolutely. That said, I think we have seen very clear examples of Twitter, particularly, banning people for some of the things they have put on it. Facebook will send people to “jail” if they put things on there that they believe offend community standards, and of course the CRTC has done that sort of thing at the two stations I mentioned.
That kind of regime has always been in place, but community standards tend to rule. We can get away with things now on conventional radio that we could not dream of doing when I was still on the air, and certainly not when I was a kid. Things change. Community standards change. Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, in her article, said that we should regulate the platform but let the platform deal with the content. That is probably the best way to go forward.
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Madam Speaker, does the member really think that the CRTC is the right entity to regulate the Internet?
The CRTC has spent more than 14 months trying to renew the CBC licence. It spent over a year trying to implement a three-digit suicide prevention hotline. It has a chair who has private meetings, and goes out for beers, with one of the largest businesses that it regulates: Bell Canada. The government wants the CRTC with some unknown policy drive to do this. Does this member really think the CRTC is going to be able to regulate the Internet?
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Madam Speaker, yes, I do. I think the CRTC has demonstrated over time that it keeps in touch and stays in sync with community standards. It uses a very light touch, if we really look at some of its pronouncements over time. In fact, if—
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- May/11/22 6:50:03 p.m.
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We have to resume debate.
The hon. member for Kildonan—St. Paul.
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