44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 30, 2023 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for sharing his information around the importance of us having Canadian stories at the forefront. I would be remiss if I did not quickly mention something applicable to the bill.
This April, Vancouver Island's annual film festival will be kicking off again. Last year, the then festival director Hilary Eastmure was talking to The Discourse, which is a local media outlet, about the importance of this film festival. She talked about the importance of local film being seen alongside films around the world. She talked about the importance of “smaller stories” and how they “reveal something really intimate about people's daily lives and challenges that they face.” She talked about the directors in last year's film festival, including three Iranian directors, two of whom were women.
I am wondering if the member could share a bit about why he feels the Conservatives are continuing to fundraise on misinformation around Bill C-11, instead of putting forward sound solutions that could move us forward with protecting and supporting Canadian cultural content.
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- Mar/30/23 5:52:21 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength”. Those are the words that repeat again and again throughout Orwell's legendary Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book is not just about massive government control by Big Brother over the citizenry. It is also about how such control is enabled by the abuse of language.
We can always smell a rat when words are used to mean something other than what they say, and this bill is filled with such false words. Let us start with the very premise. The government purports to apply the Internet to the Broadcasting Act or to apply the Broadcasting Act to the Internet, even though the Internet is not a broadcast instrument. Television and radio are broadcast instruments; online streaming is not. This might seem to be merely a matter of words, but then we go through the semantics and we catch other nice little white lies.
For example, the Liberals use the term “Canadian content” in their talking points and their press releases. Supposedly, the entire raison d’être of this bill, its reason for existing, is to promote Canadian content. Which two words appear nowhere in the 50-page bill itself? It is the words Canadian content. Not only is such content not defined, and it is impossible to define it, but it does not exist in the entire bill. Therefore, we have entire apparatus of bureaucracy that would have tentacles across the entire World Wide Web within Canadian borders tasked to do something that the bill says does not even exist. Why is this important? It is important because if the bureaucracy in question has its powers circumscribed to defining and promoting Canadian content, but there is no limit on what Canadian content actually means, then we give that agency limitless powers to control what people see and hear online.
What is Canadian content? Is it posts about maple syrup, beaver tails, hockey and maybe lacrosse? No, that is not in the act. Is it music made by Canadian musicians? No, it is not necessarily; in fact, many Canadian musicians are no longer considered Canadian because their record labels have been sold to foreign entertainment companies. Is it books that are written by Canadians? No, that is not the definition either. We have absolutely no idea what it is. In fact, we can be very sure what it is not.
Here is an example, and this will send my opposition, because they will be in the opposition soon, friends across the way into a fit of rage. Obviously, the Canadian commentator who is most widely viewed and listened to around the world today is, of course, Dr. Jordan Peterson. That is just a numerical fact when we look at the view counts that he has garnered. I see the rage across the way among those who think he is anything but Canadian. Sure, he was born in rural Alberta. Sure, he was a professor at the University of Toronto before he was censored there. However, he surely cannot be Canadian: He does not use the right pronouns, he does not mouth the right talking points and he does not meet the current government's view of Canadiana. This Prime Minister has described people who disagree with him as un-Canadian. Surely, the bureaucracy that he appoints would have to agree.
If the association of psychologists, which gives out licences to practise in Ontario, does not believe that his views permit him to continue to practise in his field and if a university is effectively banning him from teaching his classes, what would stop yet another powerful bureaucracy from saying that this man is not Canadian enough to be considered Canadian content and therefore should not be found online by Canadian users? The answer, of course, is that nothing would stop that from happening when they give the power to the state to control what people see and say online.
The government members across the way would say not to worry; that the bill does not apply to user-generated content, once again with the fancy, confusing words.
To use real language, “user-generated content” is “stuff people post online”. The Liberals say the legislation would not apply to that, unless it does. Let me read the section of the bill: “specify that the 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, unless the programs are prescribed by regulation”. We have to make sure to read the fine print.
Later on, the bill would specifically exempt user-generated content. This is the stuff that everyday Canadians post every day. The Liberals say the bill would not apply to any of that, unless it is posted on a platform that uses it for revenue generation. Are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram in the charity business, or do they generate revenue off of the posts that go online?
Do members know about that thing called “advertising”? That is revenue. Literally every single post that every Canadian puts online is used to generate revenue for an online platform. Therefore, everything that is posted online is captured by the essence of the bill. These are more weasel words. If they were going to regulate everything everybody posted online, and they believed they were justified in doing so, why would they create an exemption that does not apply to a single, solitary post? Of course, it once again is a use of Newspeak, putting in words that say exactly the opposite of what they mean.
I want to quote Michael Geist, who is no Conservative. He is a former critic of mine, actually, and not traditionally a friend of people on this side of the chamber. He said:
To be clear, the risk with these rules is not that the government will restrict the ability for Canadians to speak, but rather that the bill could impact their ability to be heard. In other words, the CRTC will not be positioned to stop Canadians from posting content, but will have the power to establish regulations that could prioritize or de-prioritize certain content, mandate warning labels, or establish other conditions with the presentation of the content (including algorithmic outcomes). The government has insisted that isn’t the goal of the bill. If so, the solution is obvious. No other country in the world seeks to regulate user content in this way and it should be removed from the bill because it does not belong in the Broadcasting Act.
If the Liberals did not intend to deprioritize, silence and push down the voices of some, why would they even include these provisions in the bill in the first place? The answer is that they want to regulate what can be heard and seen. They want to create the false perception that people can speak merely because they can post things online, but frankly there is no reason to post something if no one is allowed to see it. It would be like screaming into an empty forest.
Furthermore, the fact that the government would give the power to a state regulator to alter the algorithms of the Internet is, frankly, terrifying. Who are the shady operators in the back room who would be manipulating the algorithms that bring our newsfeeds and social media posts onto our screens? What are their motives? What is their direction? None of these things are defined anywhere in the bill or by the testimony of the head of the government agency that would be charged with implementing them.
In a world where we are already overly controlled by technology, they would alter algorithms. We can think of the devastating power of artificial intelligence. We know it because there is plenty of artificial intelligence on that side. In reality, the ability of a government bureaucracy to alter those algorithmic powers is indeed an enormous and unforgiving power.
I will quote Orwell: “This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance.” That is exactly what we are talking about here because algorithms determine everything that appears on our devices.
It is mathematical programming that puts those things in front of our eyeballs. Right now, that programming is determined by a raw human emotion: greed. There is no doubt about it. The social media platforms want to make money. How do they do it? They give people stuff they want to see. One might take issue with the fact that they want to make money off that, but that is just the reality. The outcome is that we see what we want.
The economic motivation for the bill is also greed. It is the greed of the broadcasting corporations that want to dominate eyeballs, but instead of dominating them by producing things people want to see, they would dominate them by having more power over the regulator that determines what people get. That is also motivated by greed. Both of these profit motives are going to exist, one in the free world where people choose for themselves and another in the coercive world where bureaucrats choose for them.
However, do not ascribe any angelic motives to the bill. It is nothing more than a dirty alliance between big government and big corporations. Big government wants to control the citizenry, and big broadcasting and entertainment corporations want to control the advertising revenue. That is precisely why Bell, Rogers and all the other broadcasting corporations have come pleading for the bill to be put forward and advanced on their behalf, not on behalf of everyday people.
Here is the decision: Do we want the content on our phones and screens to be determined by the click or by the clique? The bill proposes to have it done by the clique. All the brilliant artists whose parents are not rich enough to have agents that will promote them with news and entertainment bodies and corporations will be shut out. It will be the rich kids, whose parents dream of them being famous, who will be able to go to these entertainment companies and have the ability over the years to get record labels set up. Those rich kids always had a head start; those shut out will be the poor kids who learned how to play the piano in their basements and would otherwise have posted it online and had it go viral. They will not have the political influence in Ottawa, in the CRTC, to get themselves on the big screen. This is once again protecting the privileged behind a wall of gatekeepers.
On this side of the House, we believe in a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. We believe everybody should get ahead by their own merits, and we believe that Canadians are intelligent enough to decide for themselves.
Let me address one other issue about social media platforms. The government claims it wants to crack down on them because they are making too much money. The bill would not affect their profit or their bottom line by one penny. It proposes to keep all the content we see on those same social media platforms. Our broadcasters do not compete with social media platforms; they compete with other Canadians who are fighting for share of voice and share of eyeball.
What the bill would actually do is simply take money and opportunity away from the individual citizen to have his or her voice heard in entertainment, news, discourse and everywhere else and concentrate it once again in the hands of the politically powerful, the well-connected and those who can find favour with the government. On this side of the House of Commons, we exist to decentralize power, to disperse it among the many instead of concentrating it in the hands of the few.
That is why we rise today with such alarm that the Prime Minister would censor debate on a censorship bill. I do not know if, in the century and a half of this august chamber, it has ever happened that a government has done so. It is an appalling precedent and one that should concern every freethinking Canadian citizen.
We inherit our rights not from the state, not from a powerful government bureaucracy, but as a gift from God. Freedom is written on every human heart. We all have the ability to express ourselves culturally, politically and in every other way, not because the Prime Minister has bestowed us with that right but because we are born with it. Conservatives would make sure people have that right.
The bill is designed to take away that right and concentrate it in the hands of the few. Members should not take my word for it but listen to Margaret Atwood. Again, she is no friend of Conservatives, but she said: “All you have to do is read some biographies of writers writing in the Soviet Union and the degrees of censorship they had to go through—government bureaucrats.... So it is creeping totalitarianism if governments are telling creators what to create.”
Those are her words. She said “creeping totalitarianism”. If anyone else in Canada had used those terms, they would have been called an alarmist. She is part of the literary establishment in this country, possibly among the most well known. She is someone with whom I agree on almost nothing because our views are not at all aligned. However, she understands one thing and that is that the power of words can only exist in concert with the freedom to express those words.
I am sure that she would vigorously debate most of the things that I say on the floor of the House of Commons, but that is only possible if there is freedom to debate. Disagreement is the lifeblood of democracy. It is the worst system of government, except for all the others, as the great Winston Churchill said. It is messy, frustrating and arduous.
Every day and every way, it would be much easier to have, as the Prime Minister has suggested, a basic Chinese Communist dictatorship where a powerful hand can decide something on a whim. That was the reason he admired it. He said they decide on the spot what to do and impose their decisions without any debate. That would be a lot easier in the short run.
Often, we are told there is too much partisanship and disagreement in Canada. There are places in the world with no partisanship and no disagreement, and they are terrible places to live. I would rather live in a place where we are allowed to disagree and speak out. That is who we are as Canadians.
The question is: Who decides? Do we allow a small group of privileged insiders close to the Prime Minister decide what we think, say and believe, or do we believe that every single Canadian is endowed by God with the ability to decide for themselves?
I believe every Canadian has that ability. That is why we will stand up every day, in every way, for the section 2(b) rights of freedom of expression. That is who we are and what we believe. It is the common sense of the common people united for the people's home, my home and our home; Canada, let us bring it home.
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- Mar/30/23 7:42:12 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise and to speak to this debate tonight. In 2023 alone, I have held 15 constituent round tables of two hours each. I have heard from a couple of hundred constituents on a variety of issues, and this is among the top issues that constituents have raised with me.
I am not an expert to the extent that the member for Lethbridge is. She has done such fantastic work for our party on this issue. I am not as eloquent as our leader was tonight in his articulation of the issue, but I am here to represent my constituents.
I have been around here for 17 years, and today there is not only an observation about Parliament but also an observation about Canadian society that, if anything, we have to be a society that has more conversations not fewer conversations.
We need to be more open to approaching political debate and trying to persuade people. We need to be more open to being persuaded. Having as free of an Internet as possible, of course with safeguards for criminal justice issues and those kinds of things, and using the means available to us and the technology available to us is absolutely critical to the functioning of our democracy and the furtherance and the betterment of our society.
I have been watching and studying this, as I have been listening to the debate and also preparing for today, and I recognize that many experts have said that, under this bill, user content would be subject to CRTC regulations. The government has said, no, that is not the case. However, experts have come before committee and said, actually, it is the case.
The bill went to the Senate, and the Senate, dominated by Liberal-appointed senators, believed the experts. The senators came up with a reasonable amendment to address the issue. The Liberals in the House, led by the Prime Minister, decided that they were going to reject it. They were going to reject the wisdom of the senators who studied this and the experts who appeared before the Senate.
The senators came up with a common-sense amendment to address the issue. Liberals rejected it. The experts raised an alarm, and what did the Liberals do?
These are not hard-core Conservatives, by any stretch. These are people who, when we were in government, would appear before a committee and they used to be widely respected by Liberals. They are people like Michael Geist.
Now the government, members from the Liberal Party, call them names. They go to the Internet and criticize them publicly. They go to war with experts who have the courage to disagree with them, the people who have spent their lives looking at these things.
In the House today, it was interesting listening to an NDP member, earlier, down the way, talk about us wanting to debate this issue on behalf of our constituents, like somehow that is wrong and that we are wasting time raising the concerns of our constituents.
The NDP used to stand to debate, overnight, talking about things that the NDP wanted to talk about and debating. Its members used to stand up day after day, alongside the Liberals as well, complaining about the use of closure, every time closure was used. Now the NDP-Liberal coalition shut down debate at every opportunity.
Today, they are shutting down debate and limiting what Canadians hear about a bill designed to limit what Canadians see and hear on the Internet. That is the height of hypocrisy, and it is only in Liberal Canada today that we see this. We have a crisis of civil discourse in Canada.
At the root of this crisis is the fact that people do not feel heard. People do not trust the government. People do not understand the algorithms at play on Internet platforms either. We have those three things at play here, and this bill would exacerbate all those problems.
The Liberal and NDP members will say that the bill does not limit what people can post. Technically, that might be correct, but instead the bill just limits what Canadians see. It is called discoverability. The bill limits what Canadians see. We can think about what the challenge is with that. Right now, we are in a world where people feel like they are not heard, and there is increasing frustration among people who feel like they are not heard.
Right now, Canadians who have something they think is important to say, maybe through poetry, music, speech, dance or some form of the arts, will post it on the Internet. It might be anything in whatever form of expression Canadians have. Let us assume that what they post in this hypothetical situation would go viral today with whatever mysterious algorithms are at play in the social media world. If we are on YouTube searching for something, it gives us a list of suggestions to watch. It suggests things based on what we have watched, and we get a chance to see something. It does a pretty good job of feeding us what we want to see. In that case, the post would go viral.
However, there are two very negative potential outcomes with the legislation. One might be that a person posts some incredible Canadian content that might go viral around the globe today, but under the legislation, it does not meet some vague, undefined criteria laid out by government-appointed public servants. Therefore, it would not be shared. This is not because it would lack popularity but because it would fail to meet what the government is trying to do. Thus, people will not get to see it. This incredible content that would otherwise have been shared would not get shared.
The second thing that people do not talk about as much is this: Let us say the post is one that would go viral otherwise and it meets the government-designed criteria, whatever they may be, and is shared with Canadians on the basis of criteria that are different from what fits with their interests. Therefore, it gets shared with me as I am surfing the Internet, watching YouTube or whatever is the case, and it is shared on the side. However, it is not shared with me because it might be something I am interested in; it is shared because the government thinks I should see it.
Thus, I do not engage with it because I am not interested in it. Now comes the profit motive. The regular algorithms kick in on social media, and because that post has been shared with a whole bunch of people who do not engage with it, instead of sharing it with people on the basis that they would actually like it, the algorithms do not share it with anybody else at a global level. Therefore, people around the world who otherwise would have absolutely loved this amazing Canadian content never see it. The algorithms do not share it because the government has limited the number of people who see it by sharing it with the wrong people according to government priorities as opposed to people's actual interests.
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
Hon. Mike Lake: Mr. Speaker, I am being heckled from the other side. They will not stand up and actually debate today, but they will stand up and heckle me. Then, they will probably ask questions about misinformation without making any arguments or trying to persuade anybody. They know they have the numbers tonight to just ram this through, regardless of what Canadians think. This is the issue we are talking about right now.
I am standing up in the interests of my constituents, who have massive concerns about the bill and already do not trust the government. It has been proven time and time again that the government will take steps against the interests of the constituents of Edmonton—Wetaskiwin, which I will mention is the largest constituency in the country. It has a population of about 230,000 constituents who feel completely abandoned by the government. When they take steps to share their feelings with Canadians and people who might be interested, or share anything on the Internet, they now feel that their sentiments and perspective are going to be further throttled by a government that already does not listen to them, neglects their point of view and never comes to visit or hear what they have to say.
I will wrap it up there. Hopefully, the questions I get from the Liberal, NDP and Bloc members will indicate that they have heard some of the concerns my constituents have raised and reflect that maybe there is an openness to being persuaded in some way.
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