44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 13, 2022 10:00AM
Madam Speaker, I find the Conservative Party interesting. I understand the Conservatives actually had an election platform issue on which all the Conservative candidates were saying they supported what is taking place in Australia and the Australians' approach to dealing with it. That is the approach this bill is a reflection of. Therefore, it seems to me that the members of the Conservative Party are saying, once again, that even though they would have made the commitment to do something, they obviously met with someone. Something has caused them to change their minds. Now they do not believe government should play a role in Google search engines or Facebook. They are saying we should just have trust in Google and Facebook, because they will work it out with all the other media outlets.
Why did the Conservative Party once again abandon an election platform? Is it the change in leadership? Is it the so-called new direction that the Conservatives are taking? Why did they abandon that policy commitment to Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, our party is not beholden to Facebook, and we are not beholden to Google. We do not take our marching orders from big corporations like that. We are not listening to special-interest lobby groups and informing our policy decisions based on that. Too often, we see that from the Liberal side of the aisle.
As I outlined in my speech, this is talking about our small-town news and print media. Quite often they are the best at providing the most up-to-date local, relevant information that people want to see and hear. They do appropriate and proper journalism.
What we are seeing from many of these large organizations is basically government-subsidized opinions. That is not what Canadian taxpayers want. What they want is to see better respect for the taxpayer dollar, but also to have media outlets that are going to provide them with true, accurate and reliable journalism. That is what our small-town papers do. They are the ones that are going to be left out, and the bill would do nothing to help those people.
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
As this is very likely the last time I will rise to speak in 2022, I want to offer my condolences to the friends and family of the Hon. Jim Carr. I also want to wish everyone happy holidays, including you, Madam Speaker.
That being said, my colleague spoke a lot about the importance of local media. As I said before, representatives from the local newspapers La Voix de l'Est, La Pensée de Bagot and the Journal de Chambly, and even Radio M105, a great community radio station that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, all came to see me to say that legislation was required and action absolutely needed to be taken.
The Liberals have invested a lot in ads on GAFAM and other platforms, and the Conservatives are pushing for a form of libertarianism on social media and with GAFAM. This goes against the importance of news reporting that respects a code and aligns with what journalism should be. Journalism is about providing information on local current events and reporting real news, not disinformation.
What does my colleague think about the importance of local media for democracy and for a healthy news ecosystem?
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Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. We talk about our local news media or our local papers, and maybe someone is fortunate enough to have a local TV station. The local news media that is present in Quebec is obviously going to provide the local news and perspective for Quebec, and the local news media in Saskatchewan is going to provide our perspective, but when we see a bill like this, it is not going to boost and enrich the ability of the organizations to do what they are going to do. We are hearing the government say it is absolutely going to do that, but the reality is we always see that it is our small towns and our rural and remote communities that have people who have a diminished voice in this country. They are the ones who are always the first to lose out. They are the first ones to be eliminated because of decisions like this that are made.
We need to support and promote our small-town papers and our small-town TV and radio stations. The bill would not do that.
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Madam Speaker, my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands made an impassioned defence of this idea of unbridled deregulation. I find it somewhat questionable, because when giant corporations form monopolies we see that many of the impacts on Canadian society are negative ones.
Does he not agree that the federal government, and governments of all sizes, have a role in limiting the negative impacts of monopolies in our country and in our economy?
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Madam Speaker, we definitely do not want to see monopolies. Right now one of the biggest monopolies in the country is the amount of tax dollars that the CBC receives. I think the money the CBC receives could be better utilized and allocated to other means, and we have a good platform of what to do with the over billion dollars that heads in that direction.
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Madam Speaker, there have been discussions among the parties, and if you seek it, I believe you will find unanimous consent to adopt the following motion.
I move:
That, notwithstanding any standing order, special order or usual practices of the House:
(a) Bill C-278, An Act to prevent the imposition by the federal government of vaccination mandates for employment and travel, standing on the Order Paper in the name of the member for Carleton, shall now stand in the name of the member for Niagara West and be placed in the order of precedence at the same place and stage as Bill C-285, An Act to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act, the Canada Labour Code and the Employment Insurance Act, and be deemed to have been reported to the house pursuant to Standing Order 91.1 recommending it not be designated non-votable, and the order for the second reading of Bill C-285 shall be discharged and the bill withdrawn;
(b) Bill S-202, An Act to amend the Parliament of Canada Act (Parliamentary Visual Artist Laureate), standing in the name of the member for Bow River, shall now stand in the name of the member for Cloverdale—Langley City; and
(c) Bill S-4, An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Identification of Criminals Act and to make related amendments to other Acts (COVID-19 response and other measures), be deemed adopted at report stage on division and be deemed adopted at the third reading stage on division.
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All those opposed to the hon. member moving the motion will please say nay.
It is agreed.
The House has heard the terms of the motion. All those opposed to the motion will please say nay.
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Madam Speaker, several of my colleagues have spoken in the last day and a half about a member who is no longer with us. Over the number of years I have been here, we have lost a number of members in different ways. It is not just a member from one group or one caucus. It is a member of the House. We are 338 members and it is one of us. We all know the role that we have here. We know the commitment people make to be in this position. It is an honour and a privilege to do it, but we all understand the loss when we lose one of our 338 members. It is always a hardship. I recognize the challenges we have as members and losing one of us is a tragedy for us all.
Moving onto Bill C-18, I had been on the heritage committee before but I came back onto the committee when it was just getting to the bill itself, the amendments and going through the legislation.
There probably is not a heritage minister who I have not seen in committee at one time or another. They all know I speak about weekly newspapers. I talk about how important they are in Canada. There is probably not a heritage minister who does not know that I would be up here talking about weekly newspapers and supporting how critical they are to our communities.
The bill's purpose refers to including the sustainability of news businesses and independent local ones. In my riding I have a minimum of 15 papers, and some other ones that people would say are not weekly papers, in communities in my riding.
These are phenomenal pieces of communication that are important to the riding and important to the communities. We saw what was initially set out in this piece of legislation, as I came to be back on the heritage committee, and there were many amendments that could have made this piece of legislation much better, but it was not improved.
That is the challenge in being on the committee. We are trying to work through it. Our job is to improve legislation. This bill could have been improved, but it was not improved enough.
I have many community newspapers in my riding. We have had Brooks Bulletin since 1910 from one family of three generations. The Strathmore Times goes back to 1909. The Bassano Times is more recent, from 1960. The Three Capital Hills paper is 107 years old. The Vulcan Advocate is from 1913. The Drumheller Mail is from 1911.
These are long-standing weekly papers in the community. They are very important for those communities. They really were hopeful that this legislation would be something that could help them. I have talked to a lot of the papers individually and in groups. They said that we should work for them and make this a piece of legislation that will support them. They are weekly newspapers.
I know my colleague to the west of me has worked for a weekly newspaper. It is an interesting challenge. My father had a weekly newspaper that I had the opportunity to spend time working at, especially during the summers when I was not in university.
It is often a one-person or two-person operation. People are working those deadlines to get those news stories out. They are getting out in the community and taking pictures. They are rushing to make a midnight deadline so the paper can be produced and they can go home before the sun comes up. They can get that local story out and get the local activities out that need to be promoted in the community. This occurs all across the country.
My riding happens to be home to the Brooks Bandits. The Brooks Bandits are a junior hockey team. There are 132 teams in this country in many of the smaller communities. Who covers those 132 communities? It is the hardest hockey championship to win in this country. The teams are in the smaller communities, like Okotoks, Drumheller and Brooks. The Brooks Bandits have won that championship three times in the past. Who is covering that? It is not the CBC. It is not Bell Media. It is the local newspapers.
One could say that it is just local hockey players. Well, guess what? Who was the MVP in the Stanley Cup? It was Cale Makar. Where did he play? He played for the Brooks Bandits. Nobody in the major media paid any attention to him until he was the MVP. That is the level of coverage that local communities do. For the 132 teams across this country, for example, and for many people sitting in the House, those teams are covered by weekly papers.
The weekly papers often have one or two employees. One of the amendments that I was asked to work on was for the owner-reporter, which was the one reporter working there, to qualify for this. Under the legislation, there had to be two journalists, and the owner-operator could not be one of them. What nonsense for weekly newspapers. They are often ma-and-pa operations. Often the editor-owner is a writer and has one other person writing with them. We did get an amendment that reduced it from two to one and a half, but that was not enough. Bassano Times is a one-person operation of a newspaper in that community of 1,200. It is one person, and it does not qualify for this.
The legislation could have been better. It could have met the purpose that it is was set out for, but it does not. It does not do what we need for weekly papers.
I mean, we have heard already that the money was on the table. Am I out there saying that Google, Meta and Facebook should be paying? Absolutely, and we have said to put the money in a pool and let us get it negotiated. Obviously, 75% of the money is gone. People have figured out that they need to negotiate. However, it is Bell, Rogers and CBC that got 75% of the money already. I do not think the Toronto Maple Leafs and that hockey team need more money. That is not what it was for.
This was for supporting journalists at the weekly papers that are the lifeblood in our communities. Those are the reporters of those single papers who are out there on the weekend, out there on a Saturday night or a Tuesday night, and on Sunday, they are writing the stories. Those newspapers do charity advertising for charities in our communities. Communities in Bloom, which is all across this country, is an example. Local papers are writing stories about how great their communities are doing, such as Communities in Bloom, and they doing it often for free. That is how they get promoted. Weekly papers are very crucial, as is this particular one.
As many ministers have known, I have asked, “Where is the money for your advertising?” Many ministers said to me, “Well it is decided by every department where their advertising dollar goes.”
I have said, “I have had many weekly papers where 30% of their income, because they are small, used to come from government advertising, and that is gone. Where did the Canadian taxpayers' money go?”
It went outside of our country to Facebook and Google. To me, that is hypocrisy. We should be advertising in media productions and weeklies in our own country. That is where the dollars should have gone.
I support the idea of creating the fund, working at it and getting it divided up. Obviously, 75% of it could be done without any interference from the CRTC. However, the weekly paper associations have told me that they would be lucky to get $400 or $500 out of this deal a year. All that will be left are crumbs. They will be working hard to get those crumbs, which is all that is going to be left for our weekly papers. This does not make sense.
What it was set out to do could have been better, but it is not, and that is why it is a challenge for me, for our journalists and our weekly papers.
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Madam Speaker, it is like following a bouncing ball. The Conservative Party said that it liked the Australian model, and put that in its campaign platform. The Liberal legislation is a reflection of the Australian model, and now the Conservative Party is saying that it does not support Bill C-18. The member says that, well, they want to be there for the smaller community newspapers, but a question was just raised that indicated that there has been a greater uptake than expected in the Australian example and community newspapers have benefited by it.
However, the Conservative Party, even though its members talk about the community newspapers, what they are really talking about is empowering Facebook and Google search engines to distribute the money how they feel is appropriate and that they will work with different media.
I wonder if the member does not realize that it is a pretty hard ball to follow because the Conservatives are bouncing all over the place on a very important issue.
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Madam Speaker, I always appreciate a question from the member across the way.
I do not have any problem following the bouncing ball, like that one we see in the hockey games, where we watch the ball and which cup it ends in, and people figure it out and get to win a prize. I can follow that one. The member needs some more practice at that one because I can follow that bouncing ball.
I will give another example of where the legislation had a problem. Where was the indigenous piece in this?
In my father's weekly newspaper, there was a gentleman. He was a war veteran, indigenous, from the Kainai reserve. He started a weekly newspaper with support from my father, a weekly paper, the first one on the Kainai Blackfoot nation, and it was a struggle. This piece of legislation did not have it in there. Why not? Why was it not there?
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Madam Speaker, Le Clairon, Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe, Boom FM, Journal Mobiles, Radio Acton, La Voix de l'Est, La Pensée de Bagot, NousTV and TVME are the local and regional media in my riding. I want to pay tribute to them. They do incredible work. Some of them are community media. However, they are only scraping by. Not everything is rosy.
We need them. They are essential for bringing us the latest news on events, local culture, artists, sports teams, what elected officials are up to. We need them because these stories does not make national broadcasts and the national news. That is why we need information about what is happening in the area and the region.
What are we now telling them? We are telling them to give up, to let the digital giants dominate this market, crush them, suck them dry. Well, I am saying no. That would be suicide.
Why does my colleague not understand this?
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Madam Speaker, I think that is just what I said. I am not sure what he missed in that, but I said this is a piece of legislation that is going to leave them crumbs to do what the member wants and what I want. It is not going to leave them what we think they deserve. This legislation is just not going to do it.
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Uqaqtittiji, Jeanette Ageson, with the Independent Online News Publishers of Canada, is quoted as saying that, with these amendments, small newsrooms that are operated by start-up entrepreneurial journalists would have been left out of opportunities to negotiate with web giants.
Can the member explain the discrepancy between the Independent Online News Publishers of Canada and how he understands this bill to be?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciated the time that the member and I worked on the indigenous committee together. She brings a unique perspective, and I very much appreciated working with her on the indigenous committee.
She is exactly right in saying what the amendment did not do, which was go far enough to fix that. That is what we worked for. It was an amendment that would have given that type of production the ability to negotiate, but it has been left out because it does not qualify.
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Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to participate in debate in the House of Commons on behalf of my constituents in Chilliwack—Hope.
I do want to take some latitude, as I have noted has been given to other members, to pay tribute to Jim Carr. I had the honour to serve as the critic for natural resources during the time Jim was the natural resources minister. I disagreed vehemently with Jim on almost all of his policies, but it was impossible to dislike him as a man. I had the opportunity to travel with him, as critics and ministers often do, and we spent more time together than I think I spent with many family members over that period of time, in places like Mexico, Rome and China. I got to see Jim shine in those scenarios.
I even got to see him dance at the opening of a Mexican playground. A Canadian mining company had opened a playground for the children in the community near its operation, and he was not invited to dance, but he took it upon himself to join in the festivities. It is a memory I will always cherish. He was a good man who loved his family, and he will be missed, not only back at home in Manitoba, but also here in the House. I want to pay tribute to him, and I think of his family and his colleagues, who have all been devastated by the news.
I will move now to Bill C-18, the online news act. We have been hearing all day about some of the issues Conservatives have with the bill, and we think it would miss the targets. It would not do what it is intended to do, and it has been a bit rich to hear members of the Liberal government and its coalition partners in the NDP talk about web giants hoovering up advertising revenue. If we go through the public disclosures of their MP expenses, we will see tens of thousands of dollars in voluntary advertising payments to Facebook, so forgive me if I think it is a bit rich to be hearing about these web giants swooping down to hoover up ad revenue when members of Parliament are feeding tens of thousands of dollars into Facebook or Meta's bottom line.
Let us not get too self righteous here about what we are talking about, because members of Parliament, when they want to communicate with their constituents, as do many Liberals and NDP members, have no problem giving money to those web giants to use their platforms to communicate with constituents.
Members do not simply give to their local papers. They do not simply give to local online news organizations. They have willingly given money from their member of Parliament budgets to Facebook and others, so let us just spare the self righteous sanctimony about the evil of Facebook, when they are voluntarily giving it tens of thousands of dollars a year out of their own budgets.
In Chilliwack—Hope we now have only one weekly newspaper in each community. There is the Hope Standard and the Chilliwack Progress, which serve those communities respectively. It used to be, when I was first elected, that there were two local newspapers in Chilliwack, the Chilliwack Times and the Chilliwack Progress, and they both published two papers a week. We are down from two organizations with two newspapers, for a total of four editions a week, to one edition per week.
However, if we ask the Chilliwack Progress's editor, he is quite bullish about its current situation. He talks about its various revenue streams, and whenever somebody calls into question the paper's longevity and whether the Chilliwack Progress will survive, he assures his readers and the people in Chilliwack that it is on a strong financial footing and that they will be just fine.
Out of those closures of some of those newspapers came innovation. Journalists who had been employed, for instance, at the Chilliwack Times took it upon themselves to gather a couple of other journalists, and they formed the Fraser Valley Current.
They put together an online news service that actually uses Twitter and Facebook to distribute its product to our community. They did particularly excellent work during the flood and mudslide events that took place in and around my community in November of last year. They were on the ground, providing detailed analysis, things that, quite frankly, a weekly newspaper just cannot do. That was born out of innovation. They did not wait for, or need, a government incentive to create this. They went out into the marketplace and have been very successful in doing so.
We also have the Fraser Valley News, which is an online organization run, as far as I know, by one journalist who used to work, for many years, in different radio newsrooms right across the country, as most radio news people do. They move around from small town to small town, covering small community events that are ignored by the bigger publications. Don Lehn had the final layoff from the local radio station when it was cutting back on its news services, and he took it upon himself to create the Fraser Valley News, which continues today. Again, he has a business model that seeks online ad revenue, etc. He did not need Bill C-18 to succeed.
We have Fraser Valley Today, which is another online news organization that has come out of when other newspapers have left the town and there is a void. When the newsrooms were cut from the local radio station, there was a void, and it was filled by journalists who wanted to provide a service to our community.
That innovation, the unique business model they have sought out, has been one that has worked for them. My fear was echoed by Jen Gerson at the committee, when she said this about the bill:
[I]t is predicated on a lie. The bill adopts a very ancient complaint of newspaper publishers that aggregation-based news websites and social media networks are unduly profiting by “publishing” our content. However, we know this isn't true. In fact, the value proposition runs in exactly the opposite direction. We publishers are the ones who benefit when a user posts a link to our content on Facebook, Twitter and the like. This free distribution drives traffic to our websites, which we can then try to monetize through subscriptions and advertising.
She went on to say:
I suspect that what we see here is a form of rent-seeking behaviour in which struggling media corporations are using every last iota of their dwindling financial and social capital to lobby for subsidies and regulations like Bill C-18.
I fear that Bill C-18 is going to backfire spectacularly, undermining the very problems it is trying to fix.
Peter Menzies, a former CRTC commissioner, said:
Bill C-18 will only perpetuate a market already distorted by subsidy and it will punish independence.
He went on:
If Parliament values a free press, it will not approve Bill C-18.
He continued:
Bill C-18 is as likely to kill journalism in Canada as it is to save it. The very prospect of it is already perverting news coverage and undermining trust, the commodity upon which the industry depends most. Bill C-18 will permanently entrench the industry's dependency not on the loyalty of citizens, readers and viewers, but upon the good graces of politicians and the ability of offshore, quasi-monopoly tech companies to remain profitable.
Those are some of the people who have been directly involved in the industry. Jen Gerson used to be involved in the traditional news model and has moved to an online subscriber model. She recognizes that this independence and this business model are what work for her, and that organizations who say they need a subsidy model are in fact distorting that market and are going to be competing with her and her organization, which has gone out into the market to seek innovative solutions.
There are local journalists who are struggling, but I think we need to encourage them to use the tools that are available and, quite frankly, to take a look at some of the entities that have succeeded in this market and are innovating and adapting to changes in the way we consume our news.
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Madam Speaker, advertising on Facebook and advertising in community newspapers, both of which I do, has not compromised in any way my wanting to see this bill pass. The Conservatives who advertise on Facebook take the position, after a reversal, that they no longer support the government's bringing in legislation to ensure that companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google are obligated to support media here in Canada.
I wonder how members of the Conservative Party can justify flipping their position from the last general election, now telling Canadians that this bill is bad for them, when in fact the Bloc, the NDP, the Liberals and I believe the Greens—
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- Dec/13/22 5:27:44 p.m.
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The hon. member for Chilliwack—Hope.
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Madam Speaker, the fact that the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc support the bill gives me confidence that our opposing it is the right position to take. Quite frankly, the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberals supported the amendments to Bill C-21 until very recently when they started to hear from their constituents.
What I pointed out was the hypocrisy of Liberal and NDP members standing in this place and talking about this magical hoovering up. I kept hearing that the tech giants are hoovering up all of this advertising revenue when no one was forcing Liberal and NDP members of Parliament to give Facebook and Google money from their members' operating budgets to pay for advertising. That was the part I was pointing out. There is a hypocrisy in crying about that and at the same time feeding the problem.
I will take no lessons from the member on this matter. It is a position that we do not support, and we will be happy to oppose this bill.
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Madam Speaker, as a proud journalist for almost 25 years and having worked for Charles Clark newspaper in High River, I would say that journalists face, much like politicians nowadays, a lack of public trust. We saw that with the Liberal bailout of the media several years ago, and I know many of my constituents are questioning the integrity of journalists.
When there are government subsidies or government bailouts of the free press, what impact is that having on community trust when it comes to Canadian journalism?
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