44th Parl. 1st Sess.
June 20, 2023 10:00AM
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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Madam Speaker, I had posed a fairly precise question to the member opposite, and I think the Conservative Party does owe an explanation to Canadians. They campaigned on and promised to bring forward legislation of this nature that would do what this legislation would do. Even in their platform, they make reference to Australia's and France's legislations, which this legislation is modelled after. There is no cop-out or an excuse.
Why did the Conservative Party backflip and flip-flop on this issue? They promised Canadians they would support it.
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Madam Speaker, this is exactly the type of misinformation the Liberals want their controlled media sources to spread to Canadians. The reality is that, when he raises that issue of Australia, Australia amended its legislation so that Facebook and Google could work with journalists to create deals to support journalism in ways that go directly to journalism, outside of the legislative framework, understanding that they cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach. The Canadian government has been ramming through this bill without amendments, and I have to ask why. I think it is because its members want their colonial downtown voices of Toronto to keep controlling the media and keep shutting out voices.
The parliamentary secretary is a member from western Canada. Do members know that there are no members from western Canada in the Parliamentary press gallery? There might be one, but I think it is zero, and we have to change that, so we should be looking at ways that other witnesses suggested. Certainly that is what the Conservative Party would be suggesting to support journalism instead of lining the pockets of wealthy corporate executives and their shareholders, who are hoping Canadian tax dollars will squeeze out the last vestiges of their dying business models, which we have no responsibility to pick up.
We need to be supporting young diverse voices as they enter the career of journalism in a way that is accountable to Canadians' free-speech rights.
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Madam Speaker, I would also like to give a shout-out to my colleague from Lethbridge for fighting the heavy hand of big, bossy government, which has struck again with this bill. It has almost become a cliché, and its latest offender is this bill, Bill C-18. It is sad to see the Liberal response to an important and relevant modern issue concerning the place where bureaucracies, news providers and digital technology intercept.
We are here to debate a bill that would fix one problem, instead of the one that actually needs it. It proposes solutions that would not work, and is backed by a minister who has yet to accomplish an actual win during his tenure. In other words, it is business as usual from this minister and the government. The incompetence is often confused with malice, and I can assure members that it can be both. On the surface, Bill C-18 seems like a pretty innocent bill. The gist is that small independent news providers should have a chance to compete with the big fish and earn their fair share of revenue in a free market. That is fair enough as a concept, but when we dig deeper, we find that this piece of legislation is deeply flawed, and it would not accomplish the stated goal.
Over the past eight years, we have witnessed an unprecedented erosion of freedoms under the Liberal government, particularly with Bill C-11, the censorship bill, as just one example. It was among the worst bills ever brought to the House, with an alarming opposition from industry, experts, creators and even their own friends, not just once, but twice, thanks to the member of Parliament for Lethbridge, who is not allowed to speak.
During those same eight years, we have also seen an alarming growth in the size and the power of the federal government here in Ottawa, with new abilities to regulate, to give and take away, to pick winners and losers, and to define right and wrong. A government that is big enough to do anything or to be anything is the same government that is big enough to take anything or everything away.
The overbearing approach, whetted with incompetence, adds icing to the cake of this Liberal failure. Because there are no longer proper safeguards in the new powers that the government has given itself, there is no justification on any of the decisions. Some of the most senior ministers do not read emails. Others are not briefed, and some simply are place holders in organizations where it seems like nobody is in charge.
There is no accountability, and Bill C-18 is the epitome of this. It is big government, limited freedom and crippling incompetence all combined into one bill. The political calculation here was that the Liberals might be able to force Google or Facebook to pay for links and to pay their fair share, saying at times that upward of 30% of the costs for every news outlet would be covered by these two companies. However, when we dig into the bill, we see the opposite is true because the publishers post links themselves to increase traffic and get more revenue. We heard that, over and over, at committee. It never made much sense to begin with, but when we found out from Facebook that news is only 3% of its overall feeds, it now makes even less sense.
Beyond the minister's initial miscalculation, he has no answer as to how he would deal with Canadians overall getting less news as a result of this bill, unless, of course, he is going to stop all of the government advertising or, even more ludicrous, the Liberals are going to stop Liberal Party advertising, let us say, during a campaign. Of course, the minister is not going to do that. Even if he were threatening to do that, it is a completely empty threat. It is more empty rhetoric and bluster that Canadians would end up paying for.
Let us go piece by piece and break it down. My first point is big government. Here in Bill C-18, the CRTC would be back on centre stage, much like it is with the censorship bill. Bill C-18 would give this unelected, unaccountable body of bureaucrats sweeping new powers. It would be responsible for ensuring that big social media companies, such as Facebook and Google, reach licensing agreements with various new outlets and, if an agreement cannot be reached, it would have the power to step in to appoint a mediator, and then an arbitrator, to do the job, giving the government the power to pick the winners and losers, in a free market.
Who would benefit from these deals? It would not be the small and local independent organizations that actually need our help. Rather, it would be large, established groups that can afford the high-priced lawyers and can curry favour with the CRTC and, by extension, the government.
In fact, many outlets, such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir and more, have already reached deals. These big media groups might have the ability to negotiate with Facebook or even the federal government. Small mom-and-pop shops find themselves in a very different position. We have had confirmation of that already.
Lobbying records show that there was one meeting about Bill C-18 every four days over the span of eight months. We have had confirmation from the Parliamentary Budget Officer, too. He said that 75% of the money in this bill would go to CBC, Rogers and Bell, leaving only 25% for everybody else, precisely the opposite of the result one would want.
My second point is on limited freedom and forcing companies to pay for news access by mandating agreements in the free market. There would be less news, choice and independence. We have already seen the effects of that. Facebook recently shut down news-hosting services for some Canadians as a result of this legislation. That is a preview of what is to come. It is the most obvious thing that was going to happen.
If Google were to decide to do the same, it would again hurt the small independent producers. Large outlets, such as CBC, CTV or the Toronto Star, would not be affected. One can hardly say the same about the thousands of other independent broadcasters in Canada. The heritage minister can say this is not the intention, but the outcomes remain the same.
That brings me to my third point, which is incompetence. I will be frank. Only in this government could a heritage minister do no consultation, ignore opposing voices on not one but two laws, and fail so spectacularly without consequences. His record leaves much to be desired for anyone who looks critically at the issues and wants to do anything to solve them, whether in the House, in committee or in the Senate.
In front of committee, only a few weeks ago, the heritage minister could not answer basic questions about the legislation. From that bewildering appearance, we gather that he seems to believe the Internet is the problem. That is why he wants to regulate it with Bill C-11 and tax it with Bill C-18. He does not realize that the great equalizer, the Internet, is the place where all voices are heard, where people big and small can spread their ideas. It is the very outcome he wants to achieve.
The bill threatens that. Beyond the minister's crusade, this bill is extremely vague and unclear. It removes the certainties and the safeguards that anyone looking to Canada relies on. The minister likes to claim that he is working for the little guy, that he will not let Canadians get bullied by media giants. Again, that is exactly the opposite of what is happening. He is not working for the little guy. He is working in no way to rectify an issue. He is working to make the government, the CRTC, big media groups even more powerful and less accountable.
One cannot possibly be for big government, higher taxes, bigger bureaucracy, and for the little guy. One cannot have it both ways.
If the bill truly helps independent media, then why on earth would organizations keep speaking against their own interests? We have heard this debate all day long. They would not.
Here is what they do say. Phillip Crawley of The Globe and Mail called Bill C-18 a “threat to the independence of media”. Canadaland's Jesse Brown, no friend of the Conservatives, underlined the risks Bill C-18 poses to Canadians' trust in news providers. Witnesses at a recent Senate committee admitted that this bill would devastate the Internet traffic that media groups rely on.
Canada's Conservatives believe the Canadian news media should be fairly compensated for the use of their content by platforms such as Google and Facebook. The Liberals' approach to this issue through Bill C-18 is absolutely devastating. Not only will it not work, but it also creates a problem we did not have before.
Conservatives have listened to feedback. We tried to implement amendments to level the playing field at the CRTC, ensure journalistic independence and target aid to the smallest, most deserving broadcasters, the person starting their Substack out of their own home. At every step of the way, we were voted down.
This bill should be called the “no online news act” instead of the online news act. That is what it will do in practice. I will proudly vote against this bill. I will vote on the side of the independent media, which will be killed at the expense of a government again protecting its friends in legacy media.
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Madam Speaker, it is disappointing to hear the deputy leader of the Conservative Party taking this position and leading the fight against Bill C-18. Whether it is Bill C-18 or Bill C-11, a great deal of consultations have taken place. One sees that New Democrats, a member of the Bloc, a member of the Green Party, obviously the Liberals and even the former Conservatives, when the Conservative Party was under different leadership fewer than two years ago, supported the legislation.
What has changed, outside of the leadership of the Conservative Party? Why is the Conservative Party moving so far to the right? I would suggest it is going even further right than the Reform Party.
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Madam Speaker, when one lives in an echo chamber of legacy media, one starts to believe one's own nonsense, and this is what we are seeing now.
Why on earth would Conservatives support a solution that only gives 25% to small and independent journalists, the thing we wanted to solve with this bill? Why on earth would we support something akin to Australia that is not like Australia? The member opposite brought this up, but the substantive provisions of the Australian code have never been applied.
This bill is not what was in the platform, so he can stop misinforming the House and get back into his echo chamber, where he is happier.
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Madam Speaker, I believe I heard the hon. member suggest there were not any amendments to the bill. Quite accurately, there were around 96, one which happened to be Conservative. The majority of the Conservative amendments on Bill C-18 seemed to side with the big web giants, actually taking talking points from Google and Facebook to give them the loopholes and stronger negotiating powers instead of supporting Canada's news media. Would the member explain why their party consistently—
Some hon. members: Oh, oh!
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- Jun/20/23 7:24:17 p.m.
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There is some heckling going on, and I ask members not to heckle while the hon. member is asking the question. I am sure the hon. member who is going to answer wants to hear the whole question.
The hon. member for Hamilton Centre has the floor.
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Madam Speaker, would the hon. member like to explain why their party consistently neglects to protect small start-up, independent online publishers and news media outlets in Canada?
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