44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 20, 2023 10:00AM
- Jun/20/23 6:40:30 p.m.
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I have already called out the member once today. I do not think she wants me to call her out again about the heckling.
I want to remind the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre that she should address all questions and comments through the Chair and not directly to the member.
The hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.
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Madam Speaker, I think Canadians expect more from us than to act like goons in the House of Commons.
Would the member explain why her party consistently neglects to protect small start-up independent online publishers and news media outlets in Canada?
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Madam Speaker, I am certain the member for Winnipeg Centre was not referring to my colleagues as goons. I am sure she has more respect for her fellow members in the House than that.
The member and her party are the ones in the coalition with the government of big business, the government that gave money to Loblaws, for example. I think that before she accuses the official opposition of such acts, she should really take a look at who she is in bed with first.
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to Bill C-18 tonight.
The question I have for Canadians watching this evening is this: Does the Prime Minister want to control what they see and hear about him on the Internet? My colleagues have already mentioned what the Prime Minister has done, with previous examples. Jody Wilson-Raybould is a classic example of trying to control people in this House. He has also overlooked foreign interference to win elections, frozen the bank accounts of protesters and established mandates. There are countless other things showing that the Prime Minister's ultimate goal is control. He is not quite comfortable unless he has full control.
The predecessor to Bill C-18 is Bill C-11, the way I see it. Legislatively, the Prime Minister has already implemented a censorship bill. It has been called that by many people, including the Conservatives, and he rammed it through the House. I became very familiar with the previous iterations of this bill, Bill C-10 and Bill C-11, and he has now censored by law, through the CRTC, user-generated content. He wants to control it. He might not like the video that I post on YouTube. Freedom of speech still reigns in this country for now, but the Prime Minister may say he does not really like what the member for Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies is saying, so off he goes and he can no longer be on YouTube or social media.
We already see that the Prime Minister is gaining control by censoring Canadians, but let us look at what Bill C-18 would do, not in an opposite way but in another corner of what censorship does. This is by influencing what big media have on their newscasts.
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The question is on censorship and what the Prime Minister considers he is doing in a positive way to influence media in his favour. This is the way I phrase it: Who does not get the money and who gets the money? This is from an article entitled “Sue Gardner: Bill C-18 is Bad for Journalism and Bad for Canada”. On who does not get the money, she says, “This process will benefit big legacy media companies at the expense of startups and indie publishers.” She goes on to say, “Meanwhile, many small and indie publishers are actually excluded from C-18; the bill excludes operations that employ fewer than two journalists, and excludes those ‘primarily focused on a particular topic’ in favour of those that make general interest news.”
That is a question we have to ask when talking about control. Small publishers are much harder to control, and big media is a lot easier to control. Just give them millions and billions of dollars and away we go.
Let us talk about who is getting the money. The same article says:
If news organizations became dependent on money from the platforms to sustain their operations, as they surely would with the passage of Bill C-18, this dependence would create an incentive for them to pull their punches in how they covered the platforms.
That is an example where media might say it does not want to go after someone because, after all, they are writing the cheques.
What is even more concerning, based on what I have alluded to regarding the control of big tech, is the control of government. This is from the same article:
For journalism to be trusted, it needs to be—and perceived to be—independent from government, and willing and able to be critical of government.... Bill C-18 deepens government involvement in the industry. This creates an incentive for the industry to be soft on the government, and it will further reduce trust in journalism.
That is not from me; that is from this writer. They continue: “And anything that reduces trust in journalism is dangerous—especially right now.”
I started by talking about who gets the money. Let us look at what the money looks like.
I have an article by Samantha Edwards entitled “What to know about Bill C-18, the proposed law that could affect Canadian news publishers”. It states:
A report from the PBO said of the around $329-million the bill would generate for news outlets, around $247-million would go to broadcasters such as the CBC, Bell, Shaw and Rogers.... “The fact that three-quarters of the money will be going to broadcasters, some of which are the richest companies in Canada, plus the public broadcasters which are heavily subsidized already, undermines the government’s whole premise of the bill”....
What is the temptation? I have already talked about it. The temptation, of course, is about somebody writing cheques for millions and billions of dollars: Is the media going to be as truthful to the public as it should be when reporting about them? What is its first goal? Is it to provide news and truthfulness to Canadians? Right now, the government is saying that if the media wants a big cheque, they have to say this or that. We know the Prime Minister is already about control and wants to control what people say about him. Will he use this as a heavy stick? I believe he will.
We have already talked about the control that Bill C-11 gave to the CRTC. The CRTC is influenced by the Prime Minister and cabinet. It says it clearly right in the bill. I have an article from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute entitled “Extortion, Dependency and Media Welfare—The Liberals’ Bill C-18”. About halfway through, it states, “Those in favour have no qualms about creating a news media industry permanently dependent upon the good graces of the two most imposing powers in the lives of citizens these days: Big Tech and Big Government.” As a former chair of the access to information, privacy and ethics committee, I saw how powerful big tech was and is, and the government working together with these guys is a really scary thing for those who care about freedom in the country. I will go on: “All involved will huff and puff self-servingly, while the [Prime Minister's] government happily renders media companies ever-more dependent on federal funding.”
It is not me saying this but articles that are concerned about the very same measures that this controlling Prime Minister, who has already implemented a censorship bill, is now trying to use to covet those two big entities so as to have the narrative go his way.
One interesting bit of testimony I saw when I was doing some research, because I knew I would be speaking to this, was from Liberal Senator Paula Simons in her speech from the Senate debate. Here is a clearly Liberal senator, a former media person, who is very concerned about what this bill brings if passed. I will read a couple of her quotes.
“More than that, I’m asking if it’s wise. How independent can the Canadian news media be if they are so deeply beholden to the goodwill and future economic success of two foreign corporations?” She is referring to big tech in this instance.
She goes on to quote Mr. Greenspon, from 2021, at a Senate committee: “...inviting the platforms to negotiate deals with individual publishers can badly distort the information marketplace. People have expressed concerns for decades that advertisers influence news agendas.” This is exactly what I have been saying. This is a person who has been in the industry her whole life. He went on: “They have massive public policy agendas of their own, including tax policy, regulatory oversight, data, et cetera.... You are here to strengthen the independent press, not to create new dependencies.”
Here is another quote from the senator: “And are we comfortable giving unprecedented new regulatory powers to the CRTC to intervene in the business of print journalism and to require mandatory media codes of ethics, given the free press has never before been subject in any way to the authority of the CRTC?”
I will finish with this. Who controls the CRTC? We already heard that it is cabinet and the Prime Minister. Members heard my question, the question that I started with: Does the Prime Minister want to control what we see and hear about him on the Internet? Absolutely, yes.
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Madam Speaker, talk about being paranoid.
It is interesting. The member talked about Bill C-11 and how the government wants to censor everything. He then went on to Bill C-18 and said we are going pay off the media so that the media will give us nothing but positive stories. The real manoeuvre, no doubt, is the fact that we were able to fool the Bloc, the NDP and the Greens into supporting the Liberals in bringing all of this together to pass this kind of legislation so that the Prime Minister of Canada would be almighty and powerful. That is the type of tinfoil hat talk that I think we are seeing across the way.
Does the hon. member really believe what he is talking about? Is this the type of thing he is promoting through his social media?
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Madam Speaker, what the member just asked me would be funny if it were not so scary.
This is from a Liberal senator appointed by the Prime Minister: “And are we comfortable giving unprecedented new regulatory powers to the CRTC to intervene in the business of print journalism and to require mandatory media codes of ethics, given the free press has never before been subject in any way to the authority of the CRTC?” That is from a Liberal senator.
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Madam Speaker, I am rather shocked by my colleague's comments. I do not know what his point is.
My colleague is currently questioning freedom of the press and freedom of expression. There is nothing about that in Bill C‑18. That does not make sense.
Since he likes quotes, I will share one with him. Annick Charette, president of the biggest union of French-language news media employees, said that negotiating on unequal terms or without any obligation to achieve results rarely yields positive outcomes. She believes that Ottawa has the best possible legislative tools.
What does my colleague think about that?
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Madam Speaker, I appreciate the Bloc, but normally its members are more opposed to the Prime Minister. Apparently they want to carry his water tonight for him.
I have quoted many media individuals. I have eight quotes, with even more in the documents, that note exactly the concern that I have been bringing forward. It is a concern about government overreach and control regarding what is seen and heard on the Internet.
The member can say that he trusts the Prime Minister. It is interesting that the Bloc would trust the Prime Minister. I did not think its members did, but it sure sounds like he does tonight.
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Madam Speaker, I look on social media. I just heard the term “tinfoil hats”. That is certainly a growing theme in the House of Commons these days. Facts seem to be a thing of the past. As a long-time academic, I cherish facts.
Getting back to the debate, the Conservatives brought forward amendments that attempted to block the CBC from accessing compensation from web giants that profit from sharing CBC content. There is that kind of attack on the media. Certainly the Conservatives have a leader who constantly attacks freedom of the press. Actually, he refuses to respond to questions from the press.
I wonder if the member can explain how the Conservatives' position can possibly be fair to the CBC. I know they pick and choose whom they talk to. They do not really seem to appreciate freedom of the press. However, do they not understand that the CBC also provides important news information to Canadians?
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Madam Speaker, it is an interesting thing again. The Bloc tonight and the NDP, again, are supporting the Prime Minister. All I have said tonight is about holding the Prime Minister to account and limiting what he has for power. He is seeking more power and not less. He not only wants to be able to censor online content, but everybody who has actually read Bill C-11 will see that user-generated content would now be censorable by the CRTC, the cabinet and the Prime Minister. I guess I am just a bit surprised that the NDP, once again, instead of caring about democracy and free speech in this country, supports a corrupt Prime Minister.
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Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Thornhill.
I would like to start by giving a big shout-out and thanks to my colleague, the member for Lethbridge, for all of her exceptionally hard work in stopping this dumpster fire from happening, but here we are tonight.
I think it is really important for people to understand why we are here and what is happening, so I want to break down how what we are dealing with tonight would sacrifice Canadians' freedom of speech, destroy Canada's capacity for investigative journalism and divide our country into more extreme views. I will explain what has happened, who is winning and who is losing because of this mess, and debunk the information that the Liberals and their coalition partners in the NDP are using to cover up the impact that the bill would have on Canadian culture and the economy.
What would the bill do? It would create a link tax. It would make digital companies like Facebook, otherwise known as Meta, and Google, with the possibility of TikTok and Twitter following, according to officials, pay a tax to media companies when they post links to the story they create on their sites. The legacy, old media companies want this link tax, because their share prices are dropping, as they did not figure out how to create enough monetizable product to replace print advertising, so they need other, easier sources of income to provide returns to their shareholders and bonuses to their CEOs.
A simpler way of understanding this for someone who is watching is to try to remember the last time they bought a physical newspaper. It was probably quite a while ago. Companies that relied on someone reading the ads in those physical papers did not figure out how to make money when people stopped buying them, so now they want the government to step in with this link tax. To them, this makes sense. They hope that the link tax will be a cheap way for them to replace the revenue they lost from print advertising. However, that assumption is very wrong, and we have proof. This is where things start to affect Canadians in a very negative way.
When confronted with this link tax, Facebook and Google simply said, “Well, if you are going to make us pay this tax, we are just not going to post the links.” This kind of makes sense, because there is nothing that is actually forcing these companies to post the links, and they have more to gain from a business perspective than to lose if they do not follow through.
The administrative cost to these companies of setting up systems to monitor and pay this tax would be very high, while the revenue that news links, particularly Canadian news links, make up is a very small percentage of their overall traffic. Second, Facebook and Google, in posting media links, actually give free advertising to media companies, in that they expose their content to Facebook and Google's massive user base. I will bet that the last time members read a Toronto Star article, they clipped through it on a platform like Facebook, Google or Twitter, and that is free advertising for the Toronto Star.
In testimony, Facebook estimates that it provides about $230 million in free advertising to Canadian media companies and does not get a lot by way of revenue in return. Facebook has said that if the government passes the bill, it is just not going to post the links to these articles, and it has already started banning links to Canadian news sites for that very reason. The government wants Canadians to believe that these companies are the bad guys because of this, but it is this piece of legislation, which the government is insisting on ramming through, that would create big problems for everyone.
Here are a few of them. This would create problems for print media companies, like the ones that are asking for this link tax, because if they lose all the clicks that they would receive from their content being posted on Facebook and Google, they are going to lose a lot of revenue from people looking at digital advertising embedded therein. It also means that fewer people will find their way to their sites and take out paid subscriptions, which means less profits for their shareholders and bonuses for their CEOs. It also means that they are going to fire more journalists. This is why I think traditional media companies were playing chicken through the Liberals with Facebook and Google, thinking that they were just not going to ban the news, which they are clearly going to do.
The second big impact that Facebook, Google and potentially other platforms banning Canadian news links would have is that Canadians would have less access to the news, and some Canadians who post digital content but do not want to be part of this link tax scheme will have their voices silenced as Facebook and Google stop posting their content too.
Small independent firms, like The Line, Canadaland and Western Standard, have all said they do not want any part of this because they have adapted and built their business model around today's reality. They feel that when their links are pulled, their ability to reach Canadians will definitely be impacted, and they are probably not wrong. The fact that the government has not addressed this and has not allowed them to opt out raises a lot of very suspicious questions.
This link tax means that ethnically, regionally and gender-diverse viewpoints that may not have been platformed in the past by mainstream media outlets like the Toronto Star, new voices that have successfully started their own subscriber-based platforms, could be put out of business because of the Liberal-NDP link tax. That means that the same colonial voices in downtown Toronto that have always controlled the news in Canada will still control the news: that is, if their shareholders do not figure out that Facebook and Google are not going to play ball first. This means that the young indigenous woman who wants to start a Substack-based media outlet in her home might never get off the ground.
All this bill does is favour the profits of a few lazy corporate executives whose most creative business growth strategy has been to keep convincing their Liberal buddies to bail them out without any thought for what this means for the rest of the country. That is why we are standing against this bill.
It is going to cost taxpayers a lot. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the CRTC, is supposed to administer this new link tax. How many more expensive bureaucrats are taxpayers going to have to pay for to administer a program that is going to censor diverse voices and line the pockets of a few corporate executives as they pull the parachute on their flaming wrecks of outdated companies? Could that money not have been better spent somewhere else?
When the Liberal and NDP coalition partners say that this is going to support more local media, that is flatly wrong. It is going to kill regional start-up media in their infancy by preventing their content from being exposed to countless people whom Facebook and Google will simply ban. They are serious about this.
The Liberal-NDP news-banning censorship link tax is not going to hire more journalism, as the Liberals claim. Any money that does come in is going straight to wealthy CEO bonuses and shareholder profit. If this bill was going to result in more journalists being hired, we would see more being hired. Instead, we had the CEO of Bell Media blame the cutting of countless newsrooms and radio stations last week, including the termination of some of Canada's most senior journalists, like Joyce Napier and Glen McGregor, on the instability caused by this bill. We saw the closure of college-level journalism courses for the same reason.
The bill is also going to create more silos, because it is going to force people into tiny silos of content as these other platforms shut down because of these link bans, so it is actually causing more divisiveness in our country.
The Liberals also say that Australia did this. It did not. What happened was that Australia changed its legislation to allow deals to be made outside of the content of this legislation, which is what Facebook did, yet the Liberals are still careening down this path, with the NDP in tow, with all of these negative consequences on display for everyone to see.
What the government should be doing instead is working to create a stable way to support actual investigative journalists, like Bob Fife, “Fife the knife”, the knife that cuts both ways, to be hired. Instead, we are seeing these people being fired. I think that is actually what the government wants from this, less scrutiny.
The government should be allowing people to opt out of this bill. If a journalistic outlet says that it does not want to be part of the ban, the government should allow that, but it is not. It has not amended the bill. It should be telling journalism students and journalists to get a good understanding of how AI is going to change their jobs, how to build a subscription platform and how to get good at research, writing, and video and audio content, because that is what journalism is going to look like. It is going to be so much harder while people are learning those new skills for them to get started as journalists, given how this bill is going to fundamentally transform Canadian journalism for the worse. The proof is already there. It is already happening.
Canadians need to know that the government is ramming this through. We are doing everything we can to stop it, but it is going to go through. The only way to change that is for them to subscribe to content from news articles they trust so it gets right into their inbox and goes around the ban, to punish the Liberals and the NDP for the censorship and for destroying democracy and diversity in journalism through this bill.
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Madam Speaker, I wonder if the member could provide what the Conservative Party meant in the last election when it had incorporated into its platform that a Conservative government would “Introduce a digital media royalty framework to ensure that Canadian media outlets are fairly compensated for the sharing of their content by platforms like Google and Facebook.”
What did the Conservative Party mean when it made that statement?
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Madam Speaker, I can tell members what we did not mean. We did not mean this flaming dumpster fire wreck of a bill that the government is ramming through, in spite of hundreds of people and millions of Canadians saying they do not want it.
I offered solutions the government could have taken that Facebook, Google and other media companies already put on the table, such as creating funds that would go directly to investigative journalism instead of going to the rich corporate executives and shareholders of a few dying media companies.
If the Liberals want ideas for it, we are happy to provide them, but we will be doing that on that side of the House when our party is government.
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Uqaqtittiji, I am going to ask a similar question to what I have asked since the debate started some time ago. It is on the fact that there have not been enough discussions about the positive impacts this bill could have for indigenous producers or the supports it would give indigenous producers.
I wonder if the member agrees that this bill is important, so that indigenous journalists can get the support they need to make sure they are part of providing online news to Canadians with an indigenous perspective.
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Madam Speaker, for us to actually address reconciliation, there needs to be more indigenous voices and indigenous reporting. This bill would do the opposite.
I think about a young indigenous woman who wants to start as a journalist to tell her story and the story of her people, and this bill would prevent her voice from being shared on some of the platforms we need to share on today, such as Facebook and Google. That is why I implore that member, who I know cares about this issue, to go to her House leader and her caucus to say they cannot support this and that this would empower colonial voices in downtown Toronto, who have controlled the media and what Canadians have heard for too long. It is going to line their pockets and the pockets of their shareholders as diverse voices suffer, and that is why it has to stop.
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Madam Speaker, maybe the—
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- Jun/20/23 7:09:35 p.m.
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The hon. member for South Shore—St. Margarets is rising on a point of order.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Lethbridge has been getting up to ask questions, but the Speaker is censoring her due to a faulty ruling, so I urge the Speaker to change her ruling and let the people of Lethbridge have a voice in the House.
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- Jun/20/23 7:09:51 p.m.
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I want to remind the hon. member that a decision has been rendered. If he wishes to challenge the Chair, I think he knows what the rules are around that.
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