44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 27, 2023 11:00AM
Mr. Speaker, the fact that we are debating Bill C-11 in a political context and in terms of what my constituents see as a barrage of false information about it taking away freedoms is very distressing. However, it is also not perfect legislation.
I want to tell my hon. parliamentary colleague, the parliamentary secretary, that I absolutely could not agree more that this bill does not affect freedom of expression. That is protected in the Broadcasting Act and in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. However, likewise, I do not understand why the government removed Senate amendments that make it very clear the bill would not affect user-generated content. I am concerned about that because I think it needlessly confuses the situation. We need to pass Bill C-11 to protect Canadian writers and Canadian artists in a context where their access to work has been declining rapidly because of online streaming services.
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Mr. Speaker, I could not agree more with the speech given by my dear colleague from Shefford.
I just want to say a word in English.
When the member for Lethbridge was speaking, she talked about “the big unions”, as if artists are represented by big unions. I think she may think that is true, but there is no collective bargaining among artists. There is a group called The Writers' Union, a volunteer association of people who try to write for a living. There are no union bosses in the artistic community.
Does the hon. member for Shefford agree that the member for Lethbridge is confused on this point?
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- Mar/27/23 2:00:42 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, over the next two days, members in this place will have the great honour of meeting some of the finest Canadians they will ever know. Members of the International Association of Fire Fighters are here for their 30th legislative congress. They will be meeting with all of us with the agenda they bring forward for their safety and taking care of all of us.
They demand that we get rid of the forever chemicals, the per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, that contaminate their gear. They demand we do better at firefighting at our airports.
It is an honour to meet with them. We welcome them to Ottawa and thank them for their work every single day.
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- Mar/27/23 3:10:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, something pretty shocking happened in this place last week. I refer to the statement made by the hon. member for Don Valley North.
I am pretty scandalized that anonymous smears from CSIS end up destroying reputations with no real opportunity to respond. It is not like CSIS ever gets anything wrong. Just ask Maher Arar.
What the heck is going on here? Will an inquiry find out who in CSIS thinks it is okay to leak to the media? It is wrong.
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- Mar/27/23 3:34:34 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, petitioners are asking that the House consider the current ecological, social and economic crises and the way in which they are interconnected; that the importance be recognized of making decisions based on scientific evidence; and that it find ways to ensure that the environment and sustainability matter in the decisions we make.
Petitioners particularly want us to focus on the challenge of environmental education across society, relying on indigenous knowledge in the way we understand the decisions we have to make. Petitioners ask, therefore, that the House of Commons take a leadership role in enacting a Canadian strategy to support educators, communicators and community leaders, as well as governments, to focus on healthy and sustainable paths to a sustainable, survivable future.
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Madam Speaker, I very much welcome this legislation coming forward, although I share some of the concerns of the hon. member for Victoria. Many of our allies and other donor countries did not have the problems we have had as a country with getting aid workers into Afghanistan without tripping up into the rules against terrorism. I welcome this legislation. We need to get it through quickly.
I was totally moved by my colleague's speech and her emotion about this issue, but our colleagues in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. did not have the problems that were created for us by the very strict and overly narrow definitions of terrorism that tripped up our aid efforts. Does she have any thoughts on what we can learn from this experience going forward?
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Madam Speaker, this is very difficult, because we did want this legislation. We wanted to see the carve-out for humanitarian help.
My question for the member is very specific. I am looking at the way the legislation is drafted and imagining that we vote for it to get to committee to think about how we might be able to improve it at committee. I am not sure we will be able to, so my question for her is this. Has she or her caucus been able to figure out if there are fixes to this change to the Criminal Code that will actually work for what we need?
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Mr. Speaker, at this point we are looking at legislation that we know is urgently needed but quite flawed. It need not have been so complicated to create a carve-out for charitable organizations.
Could the hon. member for Edmonton Manning comment on what they did in Australia, what they did in the U.K. and what our other allies in democratic efforts and in supporting the rights of women around the world did to ensure that their aid organizations could get in to assist?
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Madam Speaker, first of all, I want to tell my hon. colleague from Rosemont—La Petite-Patrie that I totally agree with what he said in his speech. It is so hard to be here and have a debate when some parties are saying that this is not true and that Bill C-11 is regressive and violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Why does he think the Conservatives have become so successful on social media these days with ideas that are completely false? Bill C-11 does not in any way infringe on the right to freedom of expression.
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Madam Speaker, it has been a very interesting debate on Bill C-11. I quite seriously think there is a deeply held belief that this bill is going to hurt freedom of expression that is entirely on the part of members and the Conservative caucus.
I am so grateful, and I am not going to claim that law school makes a person understand everything, but statutory interpretation is one of those things that one gets a good skill for, being able to read a piece of legislation. Where one finds freedom of expression is protected in this bill is in the Broadcasting Act, and then we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which defends freedom of expression.
Nothing in this bill could possibly reduce Canadians' freedom of expression, nor has it ever been the case that anyone, before this debate, has ever conflated protecting Canadian content with censorship.
They are completely different concepts. I am very frustrated at this hour of night that we are still debating Bill C-11 without really debating it, because there were places I wish it had been improved. There are questions of whether there is a two-tiered approach to our cultural industries. However, there is no doubt that creators in this country have been losing the opportunity to make a living because of the competition from online streaming services that are big-time—
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Madam Speaker, The Handmaid's Tale has come up a great deal in this debate, and there is time to actually dig into why. The Handmaid's Tale, written by Margaret Atwood, once adapted to the screen, did not count as Canadian. It is fairly easy to look it up. It is described on Wikipedia as “an American dystopian television series created by Bruce Miller”, an American. For the film, the screenwriter was Harold Pinter, who is British; the director, Volker Schlöndorff, is German; and the score was by a Japanese artist.
They are all very talented people, but Canadian artistic enterprises are trying to find work for Canadians. The wonderful and chilling dystopian novel by the brilliant Margaret Atwood had many other hands bringing it to the screen, and those hands were not Canadian. If we tried to enter it into any kind of Canadian artistic prize category, we would not get it in as a Canadian piece of work, because it is American or international with American producers and Americans own it. That is why it is not Canadian content.
We need to protect Canadian content or our writers and our screenwriters—
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Madam Speaker, the hon. member for Yorkton—Melville is a friend of mine, and I understand that she believes what she is saying.
I cannot see it in this bill. I see nothing in this bill where faceless bureaucrats are going to tell Canadians what they can watch. That is not the case. This bill is about ensuring that our creators in this country would have work up against what is a monolithic, multinational digital media with giants like Netflix, Disney and Crave that are producing an enormous amount of content without a concern for the Canadian voices and the Canadian artists within that content.
Bill C-11 is just updating the Broadcasting Act to deal with that reality.
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Madam Speaker, as the hon. member for Oshawa was speaking, all I could think is that somewhere there is a Liberal war room clipping all of that to use in ads to make sure no one votes Conservative.
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Madam Speaker, there are a number of things about this legislation that I wish were different. I do not think I have ever seen a bill in this place, even the ones I would be persuaded to vote for, that I thought was perfect. However, the difficulty I have in this debate are the exaggerations, and I am pleading with colleagues on the Conservative side. Comparing Canada with the People's Republic of China is just not supportable. It is just not, and it makes it impossible to engage in a thoughtful debate when there are such really damaging claims that hurt our democracy being made in this place.
There are flaws in Bill C-11, for sure, but it is not totalitarian, it is not the People's Republic of China and it is not North Korea. It is Canadian content. If the hon. member wants to call Canadian content mediocre, that is his right, but do not claim that Bill C-11 puts Canadians in a situation anywhere comparable to that of people who live in totalitarian states.
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