44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 20, 2022 11:00AM
Madam Speaker, if I wanted to tease my colleague from Winnipeg North, I would ask him what he thinks it means when colleagues leave the chamber while he is talking or when a bunch of points of order are raised, but I would not want him to take that the wrong way. I really like him, especially when he asks me questions that allow me to elaborate on our plan for independence.
I believe my colleague is a father too and someone was extending father's day wishes earlier. I want to take this opportunity to wish a happy father's day to my father, Gérard, who is 87 and worked hard his whole life.
I would like my hon. colleague to tell us about the importance of discoverability. Why is it important to showcase content that was produced by people in Canada?
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Madam Speaker, the member is correct. I am a father and a grandfather, and I am very proud of my children and grandchildren. I know my father would be with me at least in spirit. It is important for us to recognize the important role that fathers play in society, along with mothers too obviously.
I really believe that the modernization of the Canadian Broadcasting Act provides hope for future generations of artists and creators and, as I always try to emphasize, the industry as a whole, because it is healthy. I know the province of Quebec has been absolutely incredible. Many would argue that it is one of the leaders of the country in terms of the artists who have come from the province of Quebec. There is truly amazing talent there, but it is also scattered throughout the country.
That is why we find so many members supportive of the legislation. It is long overdue. We need this modernization because the sooner we can modernize the act, the healthier and better it will be for the industry as a whole.
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Madam Speaker, I want to thank my hon. colleague for his speech despite my point of order. It had nothing to do with the content of his speech. It was more about the process in the chamber.
My question is specifically around how the bill was sped through committee with the amendments. I sat late into the night last week as we were voting on amendment after amendment with no discussion and not even reading which amendment we were voting on. Does the member believe that is an appropriate way to govern business and discuss the legislation before us?
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Madam Speaker, if the member wanted to get a really good answer, she should probably talk to her House leader. At the end of the day, I suspect that if there was a higher sense of co-operation and less filibustering, all members would have loved to see more opportunity to feel comfortable in knowing that the legislation would pass out of the committee stage in a timely fashion so that we could ultimately see the legislation pass before the summer break.
I suspect that had there been some sort of an accommodation for that and maybe a little less filibustering we quite possibly would have been able to have more dialogue on some of the amendments. It was a time issue as not only the government but members of the Bloc and NDP recognized that we needed to get the bill out of committee so that it could come back with the idea of hopefully passing it before the House rises later this week.
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Madam Speaker, web giants are going to be using every possible loophole to circumvent our tax rolls and circumvent the requirement to fund Canadian cultural content. Therefore, the government has a responsibility to ensure the bill does not contain any loopholes. In the interest of transparency, is the government going to make public the instructions to the CRTC to ensure the web giants fulfill their obligations of making Canadian content discoverable and disclosing their financial information to contribute to the development of our cultural content?
When does the government plan to send and disclose these instructions?
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Madam Speaker, I would encourage the member to talk to the minister of heritage, who is looking at how we can ensure we protect our culture and our arts industry. That is one of the reasons why he was very quick to bring forward this legislation. That is one of the reasons why the government is so insistent, with the support of the NDP, in getting this legislation through. I am confident that we are taking a step in the right direction. No doubt, as time goes on, we will have to ensure that the field is, in fact, being levelled.
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Madam Speaker, in response to a question from my hon. colleague, the hon. parliamentary secretary essentially laid the blame with the Conservative House leader for the amendments at committee being rammed through. The last time I checked, it was the Liberals and their coalition partners who have a majority there, so who is he to place the blame on the Conservatives for those amendments being rammed through in an otherwise clearly undemocratic fashion?
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Madam Speaker, I have sat on both sides of the House, in opposition and in government. I know how often the Conservative Party has been a destructive force on the floor of the House of Commons. We have seen that amplified over the last number of months.
Even though I was not at committee, I can imagine just how disruptive they would have been, just based on some of the dialogue and some of the discussion that we have already heard in debate. We need to realize the Conservative Party of Canada does not like this legislation, so they are doing whatever they can to prevent its passage, unfortunately.
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- Jun/20/22 6:51:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Both the Conservative Party and the Bloc have confirmed that they did not agree to—
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- Jun/20/22 6:51:29 p.m.
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I am sorry. I am not going there on that point of order. I have already ruled on that, not just with you now, but also with the hon. member for Mission—Matsqui—Fraser Canyon.
I ruled on this earlier. You are trying to challenge the Chair, and that is not acceptable.
We only have time for a brief question. The hon. member for Beauport—Côte‑de‑Beaupré—Île d'Orléans—Charlevoix.
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Madam Speaker, I will try to be brief. I congratulate my colleague on his speech and for talking to us about people like Céline Dion and Anne Murray, who we are all very familiar with.
Some artists are represented by organizations or agencies in the business. Other creative artists, authors and composers represent themselves, as I do. I have 80 to 85 songs written and released and I have never allowed them to be distributed on social media for the simple reason that I was concerned that someone would take them and that I would not earn anything from them, because they are my property.
What does my colleague think of these creators who are not really represented but who have just as much right to the revenues from their royalties?
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Madam Speaker, I learned that the member has a beautiful voice. Maybe at some opportunity I will get to hear it. I often find that songs sung in French sound a lot sweeter than it is when sung in English. I cite Happy Birthday as a good example. I look forward to maybe hearing her songs, and I applaud her having a strong character to ensure that her work is not stolen.
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- Jun/20/22 6:53:38 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. Both the Conservative Party and the Bloc have confirmed that they did not agree to—
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- Jun/20/22 6:53:43 p.m.
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Again, we are broaching the same subject matter that has already been dealt with before the House. I would caution the Conservative members from raising a point of order on a matter that has already been raised, which means that the hon. members are actually challenging the Chair. Is that what your intent is, to challenge the Chair?
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- Jun/20/22 6:53:43 p.m.
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- Jun/20/22 6:54:22 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, I just walked into the proceedings, and I wanted to ask to see whether the Bloc—
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- Jun/20/22 6:54:31 p.m.
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I am not going to entertain those anymore.
Resuming debate, the hon. member for Fort McMurray—Cold Lake has the floor.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Perth—Wellington.
As members have heard through our debates over the last few weeks, Bill C-11 will set the stage for the federal government to have unfettered control in regulating what Canadians see on the Internet.
This expansion of the regulatory authority of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, better known as the CRTC, to all audiovisual content on the Internet is a radical and sweeping move that really raises concerns around accountability, government overreach and the protection of individual rights and freedoms in this country.
I want to be clear: Bill C-11 is a bill that would give the CRTC the power to control what Canadians find and post on the Internet. It is a fundamental change in the way we do broadcasting in Canada or what is considered broadcasting. The very idea that the government intends to introduce licencing of the Internet in the same way that radio and television are licenced in Canada ultimately means that creators must obtain speech by permission from the government.
From the very beginning, Conservatives have been opposing the ideological agenda of this inflexible and regressive legislation. We have now and always will stand up for our arts and culture sectors, and now especially it is important for us to make sure that we are standing up for our digital-first creators, who are facing a lot of uncertainty about their livelihoods.
Many of these witnesses were not able to heard from in committee because of an arbitrary timeline that was set by the government. This is not just targeting so-called digital giants such as legacy news media, Google or Facebook. In 2022, anyone with a cell phone can be a creator and have an audience on the World Wide Web.
While the heritage minister has misleadingly claimed that Bill C-11 is about creators and about making more Canadian content available, and that it would actually even the playing field, what we have discovered in committee is that this is not true. If Canadians want to watch our world-class Canadian content, there is absolutely nothing stopping them, so there is no need for specific content to be spoon fed to us. If passed, Bill C-11 would not create an even playing field for our Canadian content creators. Instead, it would allow a government body to close off certain creators for the benefit of a select few, essentially hand-picking winners and losers. That is something that, on this side of the House, we disagree with.
In its current form, Bill C-11 does not protect individual online content creators. Instead, it burdens them with an abundance of draconian rules and regulations that they are ill-equipped and underfinanced to engage with. The regulations are through the roof.
While the NDP-Liberal government claims that there is now an exemption for user-generated content, this bill gives the CRTC the power to regulate any content that generates revenue, directly or indirectly. That means that non-commercial, user-generated content, like picking up a cell phone and creating a video, could create indirect revenue, which would then fall under the purview of the CRTC.
Artists, independent content creators and experts alike have all been raising alarm bells about the impact of these changes. I think it is really important to read some of the testimony that we heard at the heritage committee, such as what we heard from Oorbee Roy. She said:
Not only does this bill not help me. It also hurts me and actively undermines my needs as an artist. There's no language in the bill to tell me otherwise.
Frankly, I don't qualify. I'm just not the right fit....
I literally have never gotten a seat at the table—except now, as a digital creator, I'm getting a seat at the table. Representation matters.... Please don't suppress my voice.
I read this into the record because I think it is very important to make sure we understand that this digital space is still fairly new, so trying to over-regulate it, which is exactly what Bill C-11 does, could have long-lasting impacts.
It is important to highlight the fact that it expands the role of the CRTC to allow it to impose new regulations on platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, and whatever new platform has not even been created yet. These changes do not have to be passed through Parliament. These regulations will impact all Canadians who use online content, but there is no power for us, as parliamentarians, to make decisions on this. It leaves questions as to what is going on.
I think the best way to continue to showcase the amazing contributions of Canadian creators is to safeguard the protection of their freedom of expression. We have to enshrine the right of a Canadian to express their opinions, create content and speak freely so our rich Canadian culture is accessible to all. Frankly, without this in place, I have no trouble finding Canadian content on the World Wide Web, and I think that is something that is really important. We have an amazing set of artists who get out there.
One of the big pieces, after spending many hours in the heritage committee listening to amendments being debated, is that we failed to see any movement from the government on having a real conversation. We were voting on amendment after amendment, not even reading those amendments into the record. There was no idea of what we were debating most of the time, other than for those of us who had our package in front of us. Anyone who was following at home were completely out of luck. They did not even know what we were discussing. That is not the transparency that Canadians request from their parliamentarians. This is not the level of debate we should be having in the House.
I understand that members opposite will say that, “Oh, this is because the Conservatives were filibustering.” We were raising valid concerns that had been brought to our attention. There are tons of witnesses who want to present on this very important topic who have been silenced by the government, the NDP-Liberal coalition. There are people who want to make this the best possible legislation that it can be.
Quite frankly, I do not believe that we are at the best. I think that it is incumbent on each and every one of us parliamentarians to send the bill back to committee because, ultimately, we can do better, and we must do better. Just because something is difficult, just because we have an arbitrary timeline because the government really wants to get it passed by the summer, does not necessarily mean that is what we should do.
The Liberals dragged their feet on the previous iteration of the bill and let it die on the Order Paper when they called an unnecessary election last fall. The fact is that somehow this is now a priority for them, and they are trying to ram it through Parliament, rather than have a serious conversation and inviting digital-first creators to have some dialogue to make sure these changes we are making are actually going to benefit the sector and benefit Canadians. Ultimately, is it going to be something we will be proud of?
I am quite concerned that what we are doing is actually changing what Canadians will see online without any debate, completely behind closed doors, and it has been very clear from the expert testimony that the bill would allow the CRTC to regulate user-generated content. That is why, through a series of vital amendments, the Conservatives tried, we really did try to work with members opposite, to fix the bill.
I get it that the members opposite like to say, “The big bad Conservatives don't support artists, and they don't support creators.” That is not true. As someone who grew up dancing, singing and in a band, I understand that there are a lot of needs of artists. I understand very clearly that this is something that is so important, but we have to do it right. We have to do the right thing for the right reasons, otherwise it is not right, and this is not being done for the right reasons at the right time in the right space.
I would urge all members to simply take the bill back to committee to allow us to have some meaningful conversation and debate on these amendments. At a very minimum, could we read the amendments into the record, so all members and everyone who was listening at home could at least know what we are discussing prior to us doing it? Also, there were errors when it came to translation. They were fixing the fact that the translation in the original bill was incorrect. That is how rushed the bill was. Not even the translation was accurate. That is just another example as to why we need to slow this down and send the bill back to committee to ensure that we have an opportunity to provide Canadians, especially those who create user-generated content, with the best possible bill.
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Madam Speaker, does the member not realize that the Conservative Party, for hours and hours, whether in second reading or in committee, went out of its way to try to kill the bill? The Conservatives do not like the legislation, so they brought in a huge number of amendments to the legislation as a way to, again, prevent the legislation from passing. Then this particular member stands up and effectively said, “We just want to make a few amendments to it, and then we'll pass it. We can make it a better piece of legislation.”
It seems to me that the member is maybe not even consistent with some of the remarks from some of her colleagues today. The amendment is to kill the bill. The Conservative Party does not support this bill.
I would ask the member this: Does she support the CRTC?
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Madam Speaker, it is awfully condescending of the member opposite. Despite the fact that there are many members in this chamber on his side, he constantly asks questions. He monopolizes the floor in here on so many occasions. For whatever reason, there are a number of members in here who are not allowed to speak. They are not allowed to ask questions, and so here we are. We are debating. We are trying to have a conversation here, and the member is concerned about trivial antics and trying to point fingers. I am here to try to make sure that Canadians have the best possible legislation, and that is exactly what Conservatives are going to fight for: the best possible legislation.
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