Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: Not since the State of the Union, senator, I will admit, but I keep in constant contact with Secretary Walsh, my colleague who, according to CNN, at any point now could be named head of the NHL Players’ Association. I’m just hoping that he continues to honour his invitation to me to appear at the Boston St. Patrick’s Day Parade. We have a good relationship.

I think that trade unions, to be honest with you, senator — you bring up a very good point — will be important allies. These are brothers and sisters who work across the border. I can tell you, under the stresses and strains during COVID and dealing with the Trump Administration, I found allies before I ever envisioned myself being Minister of Labour. I found allies in the trade unions, such as operators, engineers and others, who were working on various issues that we were working on, senator, like Keystone XL and trying to get that pushed forward and on Line 5.

Those are extraordinarily important relationships because we have an administration now that is raising the bar both on how they view workers and trade unions in their country and also, remarkably, with the Inflation Reduction Act, which could be one of the most seminal pieces of legislation in terms of lowering emissions in the world. This is a very different problem than I had when I was dealing with the Trump Administration, I can tell you, where it was very difficult for me to look at Canadian businesses who saw the bar being lowered. Now they are seeing the bar heightened. It is a good problem to have, but it is a big challenge, I acknowledge, in making sure that we look after Canadian workers with our most important trading nation.

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: Right off the top, senator, I will get you a more detailed response than perhaps I am able to provide at this time. As I said, we are committed to reducing the gender wage gap and increasing financial equality in the workplace.

In 2018, we provided $3 million over five years to introduce pay transparency for federally regulated private sector employers, and we will continue working to support women in the labour market, particularly through pay equity legislation and pay transparency, as well as Canada-wide early learning in child care and the good work that I think we’ve done with provinces on that score. I think that will have a huge effect.

I would be happy to get back to you with particular answers to those questions.

[Translation]

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, the federal government is bargaining with nearly all of the unions representing more than 300,000 public servants. Some of those unions have outrageous demands, clearly, which would add billions of dollars to the deficit as your own Treasury Board has said. The government and the unions are clearly on a collision course. Canadians should brace themselves for the largest strike in Canadian history.

As Minister of Labour, do you think the government should table legislation to pre-emptively prevent a strike? Or if you decide to allow Canadians to be held hostage by a civil service strike, how long do you think the government should wait before tabling back-to-work legislation?

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: I cannot speak directly to the quote, but I could just say that we’ve never produced more oil than we are right now. That is a fact. The prosperity that it brings to every corner of this country is a fact. Climate change is also a fact, and the future competitiveness in the industry is a fact.

Alex Pourbaix — I deal with Mr. Pourbaix, the Chief Executive Officer of Cenovus in Calgary. I would not call him a tree hugger, but he sees the competitive sense in this. He came out and said there is huge opportunity in lowering emissions, working with the government on lowering emissions and increasing renewables.

By the way, it is worth noting too that the province of Alberta by a country mile leads this country in wind and solar — by a country mile. The thing that we also have to make sure that we are going to do, and this came out in the federal Economic Statement, is make sure — just because they are producing winds and solar does not necessarily mean that they embrace workers. Some of them don’t. Some of them are looking for non-union workers.

We want to make sure that any tax credit we give to companies that are building up renewables are worker-friendly, much as the Biden Administration has done. I still cannot get over it. Dealing with the Trump Administration in my two years as natural resources minister, they were not worker-friendly either. Now we have an administration, a trading partner and a great friend and ally that is challenging us — and our biggest customer by far of oil and gas — to match them on lowering emissions, building up renewables and looking after workers. Good problem to have.

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: Yes, we are working on that, senator. We’re referring to what is sometimes referred to as gig workers. We see it sometimes. One, albeit, it is provincial jurisdiction, but an example, of course, is Uber.

We are seeing similar models in long-haul trucking. You have a lot of people who are private contractors, it is an industry that is growing inordinately and it is called Drivers Inc., but there are sometimes abuses within that model. People are not aware that they have, as de facto employees, benefits that are accrued to them, whether it be sick leave, paid leave, EI or CPP — all the things that we take for granted.

Our job is to make sure that where there are de facto employees in a situation within a federal jurisdiction, that we look after them, that they are aware of their rights and obligations and that they have access to them.

The good news is that we have a huge, growing industry, and it is probably the biggest part within my jurisdiction, which is long‑haul trucking. We just have to make sure that all of the employees there get the basic rights that every worker in federal jurisdictions in this country should be accrued.

Hon. Pamela Wallin: Honourable senators, I give notice that, at the next sitting of the Senate, I will move:

That the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy be permitted, notwithstanding usual practices, to deposit with the Clerk of the Senate a report relating to its study on the state of the Canadian economy and inflation, if the Senate is not then sitting, and that the report be deemed to have been tabled in the Senate.

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Harder, P.C., seconded by the Honourable Senator Bellemare, for the second reading of Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.

Senator Miville-Dechêne: In a nutshell, we don’t know the value of this content shared on the internet.

As we speak, a lot of private deals are being struck between Google and certain Canadian media outlets. We don’t know the value of these contracts, but we do know that Google, faced with the “threat” of the coming law, is making deals with the media. The fact that Google is doing this means that it sees value in doing it. In our capitalist world, few private companies make deals if they don’t feel the need to do so.

In a way, the platforms are admitting that this journalistic content has value. Based on the rumours we’ve heard, we know that most of the agreements currently require the payment of 30% of the cost pertaining to journalists, based on the number of journalists on staff.

Still, you’re quite right in saying that there is too little transparency in this bill and a lot of unknowns. At some point, the hammer will fall. The government will want to know how many agreements there are and will wonder if that is enough for the law not to apply, as was the case in Australia. Then there will be a race because Google does not want legislation, does not want arbitration and does not want agreements to be imposed either. The government is betting on the platforms — and Facebook does not seem to be doing this — signing agreements before the law goes into force, because that way, the law will not apply. That is what the Government of Australia and the Government of Canada are betting on.

Hon. Paula Simons: Honourable senators, on January 12, Postmedia, the country’s largest newspaper chain, released its first-quarter fiscal update. The quarter begins in September and ends November 30, and it has traditionally been the most lucrative one for Canadian newspapers since it includes the back‑to-school period, Black Friday and the run-up to Christmas. But, this quarter, Postmedia’s numbers were bleak — a net loss of $15.9 million.

Twelve days later, the other shoe dropped. The company announced that it would be laying off 11% of its editorial staff across the chain. That means paring already gutted newsrooms right down to the bare bones.

Those cuts weren’t the only blow. Staff at the biggest Prairie newspapers — the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun; the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun; and the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and the Regina Leader-Post — were told that they would never come back to their once-vibrant newsrooms again. The newsrooms have closed. The few staff remaining will work from home, as they have been since the start of the pandemic.

The Calgary Herald building, a hilltop landmark, has been sold to U-Haul. It’s almost too on the nose to be real. The Saskatoon and Regina buildings are also for sale.

Now, Postmedia has a complicated lease agreement, which means it can’t divest itself of its Edmonton site so easily. For now, the elegant five-storey building, which sits on one of downtown Edmonton’s most historic corners, stands empty and abandoned — a ghostly reminder of the days when newspapers were powerful forces for community and democratic good.

Of course, it’s not only Prairie papers that are in trouble. Postmedia papers in St. Thomas, Sarnia and Owen Sound, Ontario, are now publishing only three days a week. And just this week came the parallel announcement that New Brunswick’s major papers — the Telegraph-Journal, Moncton’s Times & Transcript and Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner — would be daily no more, publishing only thrice weekly.

These papers — like so many across the world — have had their economic model derailed by digital disruption. Their advertisers, large and small, have moved to online sites, such as Craigslist, Kijiji, Autotrader, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Google and Facebook. Their subscribers have stopped paying — either because they were happy to get their news for free online, or because they could no longer see the value in paying more and more for papers that were shrinking and shrinking each passing year. More than that, local newspapers are facing fierce online competition for their readers’ attention. Once upon a time, papers had regional monopolies — not just on advertising, but on our time and our interest.

Today, Canadians can access the news of the world in real time, whether their tastes run to The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post, or to Fox News and the Daily Mail. Whatever your taste, there’s a news site for you. You are no longer limited to getting your news from your daily paper, your hometown radio station or your local supper-hour TV newscast.

Meanwhile, new digital competitors are popping up across the country trying to serve readers who are interested in specific topics or specific points of view. Many of these publish award‑winning journalism about the climate — about Parliament, about social and technological issues — but they have a reach and an ecumenicism that they cannot match that of the broadsheet daily paper.

In some ways, Canadians have never had as many options to be informed. Information from around the world is literally at our fingertips. But, in other ways, we have never known less about what is going on in our own cities and towns without local reporters to cover city council and school board meetings, without local investigative journalists digging into local scandals, without local feature writers telling local stories.

And so now we have before us Bill C-18, which is designed to throw a lifeline to struggling news sites, large and small, all across the country. The premise is deceptively, intoxicatingly simple. Google and Facebook have lots of money. As Senator Miville-Dechêne has told us, they have pockets full of it. They dominate the Canadian advertising economy. The government estimates that those two companies alone command 80% of Canada’s advertising market, and they surely share links to Canadian news sites — links they don’t pay for. So why not ask them to pony up to support the newspapers, newscasts and news sites because advertising revenues have evaporated?

The bill requires Facebook and Google to enter into negotiations with news organizations: from the very largest, to tiny papers with owner operators, to Indigenous and campus radio stations. If they can reach private agreements, they will be exempted from the bill’s provisions. But if those exemptions are not granted, companies will be required to enter into binding, final offer arbitration.

It’s a tempting proposition, especially when promises are being thrown about that Bill C-18 will force Google and Facebook to pay for 20 to 30, even — as Senator Harder suggested this week; the first I have heard that number — a full 35% of the operating costs of Canadian newsrooms. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, perhaps more modestly, has estimated that the program should bring in about $329.2 million a year.

But the idea that we can or should force two American tech giants to underwrite the independent news upon which Canadians rely is a logical and ethical fallacy. The bill seems premised on a core proposition that the reason print media outlets have lost their revenues is that Google and Facebook are somehow stealing news stories and then monetizing them to sell ads, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how digital advertising markets work.

Facebook’s algorithm privileges content that generates engagement, and a story about the Kamloops school board or a Senate debate isn’t sexy or juicy enough to do the job. Sadly, yes. A 2021 study for Nieman Lab found that less than 4% of posts viewed in the Facebook news feed actually linked to news stories, and since then Facebook — pivoting to video to fend off the challenge of TikTok — has retooled its algorithm to show people even less news.

Jean-Hugues Roy, Professor of Journalism and Media Economics at Université du Québec à Montréal, estimates that Facebook made $198.8 million in revenues stemming from Canadian journalistic content in 2022, but that was actually down from $210 million in 2021.

Professor Roy posits that, of that sum, about $99.4 million could be shared with the Canadian news industry. But even that rather rosy estimate will be far from enough to subsidize the costs of newsrooms across the country — and especially not if that sum keeps declining.

For its part, Google doesn’t post ads on its news site at all. Google News makes no money. It’s really there as a loss leader to keep people on the site longer.

It’s not that Google and Facebook benefit hugely from sharing news: They get little or no direct economic benefit from sharing news content.

Google and Facebook are advertising behemoths who dominate the internet and the advertising market with an unrivalled and unprecedented power. According to the Transnational Institute, in 2021 Google was the most visited website in the world, with monthly traffic of 92.5 billion visits. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the second most visited site, with 34.6 billion monthly visits. Facebook comes third, with 25.5 billion visitors a month.

The only Canadian website that ranks in the top 20? Pornhub, with 3.3 billion visitors a month, gives them the peculiar distinction of attracting more views than Reddit or Bing.

Yes, Google and Facebook have a stranglehold on eyeballs and advertisers. I’m not asking for you to sympathize with them. I’m just asking whether it’s sensible to demand that they underwrite Canadian newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and news sites, including tiny websites whose work is almost never shared or indexed on those social media platforms at all.

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?

Back in June 2021 when we were debating Senator Carignan’s Bill S-225, a bill with parallels to Bill C-18, our Transportation and Communications Committee heard from the witness Edward Greenspon, the former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, who was by then the President and CEO of the Public Policy Forum.

Here’s what Mr. Greenspon told us in 2021:

. . . 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. In fact, it was rare to find an advertiser that had enough of a market share, more than 1% or 2% of a publisher’s total revenues, to do so. In contrast, I can well imagine a platform accounting for 10% or more of a news organization’s revenue under this system. They have massive public policy agendas of their own, including tax policy, regulatory oversight, data, et cetera.

He went on to warn us, “You are here to strengthen the independent press, not to create new dependencies.”

We should heed his advice now. With Bill C-18 we are creating an even greater economic dependence and giving Google and Facebook even more power than they already have over what we read and what we see — and, indeed, what we think.

The mechanisms proposed in Bill C-18 render us even more vulnerable to their corporate decisions, decisions over which Canadians will have absolutely no control.

As we watch the slow-motion meltdown of Twitter, accelerated this week, it seems to me naive — nay, foolhardy — to assume that Google and Facebook will be golden geese whose golden eggs can sustain our free press in perpetuity. If and when Google and Facebook are no longer cool or fashionable or trustworthy, where will that leave us?

I have many other questions about the bill as we move toward committee study. Realistically, how much will small, rural and ethnocultural or Indigenous papers and radio stations actually benefit from this program even if they negotiate collectively? How much should we want to subsidize large players such as Rogers or Bell Media or failing legacy firms like Postmedia, especially if that makes it harder for innovative start-ups to compete with them?

What guarantees do we have that companies will spend their subsidies to increase news coverage as a net increase as opposed to paying down debt or rewarding their executives? Is it reasonable, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated, for CBC and Radio-Canada — already funded by the government — to receive, by far, the largest share of this new money? What will be the impact on our respect for copyright law and the principles of fair use and to our obligation under the Berne Convention, given Bill C-18’s somewhat cavalier hand waving away of traditional copyright protocols?

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?

My friends, I was a professional journalist in this country for 30 years. I believe that responsible journalism is essential to the health of a civil society. It’s easy to look at the crisis in Canadian journalism and exclaim, “Something must be done!”

Well, this is something, but what will it actually do? Not, I fear, what we would like.

Thank you, hiy hiy.

Hon. Colin Deacon: Would my seatmate kindly take a question?

Senator Simons: I have contemplated it long and hard. Here is the challenge: Many of these small independent sites are struggling for market share both in terms of readers and advertisers because they are competing with the legacy dinosaurs, shall we say.

There is a strong argument to be made that if you prop up traditional broadsheet newspapers with a failing business model, you will inhibit the capacity of new competitors to come into the marketplace. On the other hand, as I said in my speech, some of those new competitors serve rather niche markets and do not give the broad community coverage that a local daily newspaper did. I’m very torn and I think those companies are too. Some of them initially came out quite critically of Bill C-18 and the premise that they will have to somehow band together — because there are no newspaper unions in this country. They will have to find other similarly situated companies and come together as a collective and then go together to negotiate with Facebook and Google.

How will they pull those collectives together? Do they have the legal bench strength to go toe to toe with two of the world’s largest corporations? It is a very interesting question.

Some of those small publications have already made successful deals with Google — more with Google than with Facebook — but they have made successful deals to showcase their work. Whether those deals are going to get ripped up now and whether Google and Facebook are actually going to be less likely to be supportive are very good questions. We just do not know yet.

Senator Simons: I would love another five minutes, with the indulgence of the chamber.

Senator Simons: That is a very good question. I wish I could answer in French, but I think it would be better for everyone if I answered in English. It will be easier for both of us.

[English]

You are right. I have also been critical of the idea of the government funding journalism through the local journalism fund.

It is a very difficult proposition to have an independent press that is reliant on government subsidies, no matter how arm’s-length they are.

It is also very problematic to have newspapers be so dependent upon two corporations instead of on the traditional subscriber base and traditional advertisers.

I have spoken with academics such as Vivek Krishnamurthy at the University of Ottawa, who suggests that the more appropriate model would have been tax credits — very robust and generous tax credits, so that if you subscribe to a Canadian publication, online or in print, you would get money back. And if you were an advertiser and you placed your advertising in your local weekly newspaper or your local daily newspaper or on your local radio station, you might also get a subsidy back from that. That would allow consumers of news and purchasers of advertising to vote with their eyes and vote with their feet and have there be a direct correlation between what people want to read and what people want to support and getting money back from the government so that it sort of — it washes the money, like Pontius Pilate.

We have painted ourselves into this corner. I have spoken recently with publishers of small-town community newspapers who are in despair because one of the bread-and-butters of their market was that the local town would advertise in the local paper. If you had a bylaw hearing, if you were announcing some city change, the town spent money in the local town paper. Now they do not do that. They buy a much cheaper ad online or they don’t even buy an ad; they just make a post on Facebook. As a result, if we do not support our local media, it dies. If we are going to make a choice in this country that we do not care about having local news, then that is exactly what we’ll end up with, with no local news.

I also met a couple of weeks ago with Jordan Bitove, the new owner and publisher of The Toronto Star, a very big name in the Toronto business community, who said that he is knocking on the door of the big banks and the big car companies, saying, “Hey, put your display advertising back in the paper because if you don’t, there won’t be a paper.”

We have choices to make too, and I’m not sure that we have made the right ones.

Hon. Brent Cotter moved second reading of Bill C-22, An Act to reduce poverty and to support the financial security of persons with disabilities by establishing the Canada disability benefit and making a consequential amendment to the Income Tax Act.

He said: Honourable senators, last October, as Thanksgiving was approaching, I happened to be in my car listening to a radio phone-in show in Saskatoon. People had been asked to call and share what they were thankful for. One woman phoned in and, when asked, she said:

I am thankful because I have enough. Perhaps I could wish for more or have more, but I have enough to live a fulfilling life, and I am grateful for that. I have enough.

I pulled the car over to the curb, and I thought about how beautiful a thought that woman had just shared with me.

Most of us have enough, certainly financially. I don’t know about all of your circumstances, colleagues, but I expect that we all have enough. I do, and I am grateful.

Many in this wondrous, prosperous country do not. Today, as we begin consideration of this bill, I hope you will give thought to a part of our population who disproportionately do not — people with disabilities — and how this bill can help, a lot.

I rise today in support of Bill C-22, the Canada disability benefit act. This is the beginning of a very special journey for the Senate and for all of us in this chamber. As we work toward building an inclusive society in this country, the commitment to meaningful financial support for people with disabilities is a key component of that foundation — the commitment of a generation.

My favourite Gary Larson cartoon — you expected something like this — depicts a school playground. In that school playground is a children’s slide. At the top of the slide, there is a little boy about to slide down. At the bottom of the slide are two spiders who have spun a web across the bottom of the slide. Just as the little boy is about to slide down, one spider says to the other, “If we pull this off, we’ll eat like kings.”

Well, this project will not lead to people with disabilities eating like kings, but my guess is that for the last generation, or maybe even a few years ago, the hope of people with disabilities of an initiative like this probably felt about equal in prospect to those two spiders’.

My remarks today will be divided into five parts. First, I will speak about Bill C-22 as a pillar in the delivery of meaningful change in the lives of people with disabilities in this country. Second, I will speak briefly about what the disability benefit will provide in alleviating working-age poverty for people with disabilities. Third, I will discuss the content of the bill briefly, what it will achieve, time frames and the accountability measures in place to ensure that our government delivers on our collective commitment. The fourth part is a bit about the level of support for the bill, and the fifth is a somewhat personal conclusion.

First, the proposed Canada disability benefit is a cornerstone — perhaps the cornerstone — of Canada’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan. The action plan is a roadmap to create a more inclusive Canada. It has four pillars: employment, so that we can take action to address long-standing barriers in the labour market and workplace; second, accessible and inclusive communities, so we can address barriers that prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in their communities; third, a more modern approach to disability, so that we can address challenges, among other things, in accessing, for people with disabilities, federal programs and benefits; and, fourth, financial security, so that we can reduce poverty and improve financial security for hundreds of thousands of persons with disabilities.

This comprehensive approach — a four-legged stool, so to speak — seeks to address what has been decried by so many for so long: the marginalization of people with disabilities. Many have communicated this eloquently. The renowned actress Emma Thompson said it bluntly. “Being disabled,” she said, “should not mean being disqualified from having access to every aspect of life.”

A basic degree of financial security is not the answer to every aspect of access and inclusion, but without it, access to the basics of life and the chance to experience a fulfilling life is much, much diminished.

I’m sure that we all agree that no Canadian with a disability should be living in poverty. The values that guided past governments of every stripe to reduce poverty and create benefits for seniors and children are the same values that have been used to create the bill before us today. I am talking about equality, fairness and inclusion — Canadian values, values that guide us and define us as a country and bring out the best in us. These values guided the Government of Canada to create benefits for seniors and children, and those same values guide us today in the creation of the Canada disability benefit to help reduce poverty among low-income, working-age Canadians with disabilities.

I note with some pride, as a Canadian, that the bill before us committing the government to a meaningful disability benefit was adopted unanimously in the other place.

One of the great things about this country is that, though we may have our disagreements, even profound ones, about how the country should be governed and by what principles, we come together, as we so often do, to address the circumstances of our most vulnerable citizens. This is such a time.

Honourable senators, another remarkable aspect of this benefit is that it has never been done before. As I understand it, Canada will be the first nation to establish a meaningful income supplement for working-age Canadians with disabilities.

Second, briefly, I will speak about the living circumstances of people with disabilities — the case, essentially, for Bill C-22. Working-age Canadians with disabilities are among the most financially vulnerable of our citizens: 23% live in poverty and, in some cases, severe poverty. This is more than twice the poverty rate for people of that age group. For people with severe disabilities, the poverty rate is 31%. This is, quite frankly, unbelievable and, I think you would agree, unacceptable in a country such as ours. And that was before the COVID pandemic when financial vulnerabilities for so many Canadians became even more acute. According to a Statistics Canada survey last year, two thirds of respondents with disabilities said that they were having trouble making ends meet, and one third of respondents with disabilities said their incomes had dropped because of the pandemic.

Overall, with the implementation of this bill, we will be able to dramatically reduce the number of working-age Canadians living in poverty.

The third part of my speech is about the legislation itself. The bill will create the process by which the Canada disability benefit will be established and implemented. The proposed legislation will provide a legal framework for the benefit and authorize the Governor-in-Council to implement the bill’s benefit designs through regulation. Though brief, the bill has been subject to intense scrutiny by representatives of the disability community and — this is a long title — the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities. That is a mouthful, to be sure; it’s known as HUMA, for short.

In the spirit of “Nothing about us without us,” the disability community has provided extensive advice and commentary to the minister and her department and to the HUMA committee. HUMA held six meetings on the bill, heard from 36 witnesses and received 153 briefs.

I have read all of the testimony at these meetings, and I would say that the discussion was universally spirited and constructive, confirming the strong all-party commitment to this bill.

This scrutiny led to nine amendments, each of which I think strengthened the bill. All were adopted by the other place in its unanimous support for Bill C-22. I want to mention the key themes of the bill and will highlight a number of house amendments as I do.

First, in its preamble, the bill makes a powerful commitment to address the financial circumstances of people with disabilities. Let me read 3 of the 10 paragraphs of the preamble:

Whereas working-age persons with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty than working-age persons without disabilities, because of economic and social exclusion;

Whereas persons with disabilities often face barriers to employment, including work disincentives such as the loss of income and other benefits as a result of becoming employed;

Whereas Canada aspires to be a world leader in the eradication of poverty, and Parliament, with a view to this objective, enacted the Poverty Reduction Act . . . .

You can see the sense of the bill. The bill is then structured, mainly around section 11, to enable the minister to develop regulations to implement the benefit. There is admittedly a limited amount of detail here. The bill identifies the key requirements for these regulations. These are some highlights: the development of eligibility criteria for the benefit; the conditions to be met to receive the benefit; the amount of the benefit; requiring benefits to be indexed to inflation — this was a provision introduced as an amendment at the HUMA committee and adopted unanimously; developing an application process that is without barriers; and a system of reconsiderations, reviews and appeals.

A second amendment to the bill adopted in the other place, and before us as a part of the bill, is the tightening of the focus on the adequacy of the benefit. This amendment added section 11(1.1) to the bill. The provision now reads:

In making regulations under paragraph (1)(c) respecting the amount of a benefit, the Governor in Council must take into consideration the Official Poverty Line as defined in section 2 of the Poverty Reduction Act.

While the legislation could have been more prescriptive and detailed on some of these issues, there is something to be said for doing this work through regulations. It provides a greater degree of flexibility and contributes to the ability to get the disability benefits into the hands of recipients sooner.

Two additional aspects of this issue commend themselves to me, and I hope to you.

First, the bill commits the minister to a timely and highly inclusive process involving the disability community in the development of the regulations implementing the benefit. In the spirit of “nothing without us,” this was another amendment to the bill. The minister’s commitment is that the disability community will be involved in every step of the policy and program development regarding the benefit.

Second, while there is an element of trust embedded in this commitment, there is also a rich reservoir of trust on the matter for which Minister Qualtrough deserves a great deal of credit, and which I hope will be respected by all of us. A sign of that reservoir of trust is that a vast majority of the disability community — I have counted — is comfortable with the structure of the bill before us and strongly supports its passage in its present form.

A third element of the bill is its time frame. What is critical for people with disabilities is the time within which the benefit will be implemented and benefits become available. This is understandable. Every month of delay leaves hundreds of thousands of Canadians in a state of poverty. Too much time has already elapsed, and I hope that you will, for this reason alone, see value in the urgent consideration of the bill.

The House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, or HUMA, heard this message loud and clear, and let me repeat a couple of passages they heard. From Rabia Khedr from Disability Without Poverty:

If we wait for this legislative process to determine all of the details of a perfect benefit, its arrival will be too late . . .

Krista Carr, the Executive Vice-President of Inclusion Canada — a sort of designated disability community leadership asked to work on the financial pillar of a disability — said:

My final plea to you as members of this committee is that if you truly want to make a historic impact on the lives of people with disabilities in this country, and I know you all do, you will do everything in your power to ensure that this bill passes as quickly as possible so that we can get . . . this benefit into the hands of people who desperately need it.

In my own province, Inclusion Saskatchewan has communicated the same message in its support of the bill.

To give effect to this urgency and put the department’s feet to the fire, so to speak, the bill was amended to require a series of reports and deadlines for implementation. There are four key features. First, the bill comes into force no later than one year after it receives Royal Assent. Second, there must be a report to Parliament within six months after coming into force on the commitment to engage with the disability community in the development of regulations. Third, there must be a report back to both houses of Parliament one year after it comes into force. Fourth, after that year, after three years and then every five years, there must be parliamentary reviews.

These provisions will enable Parliament to oversee the bill’s implementation to determine if it is reaching its goal and to change course if needed in the future.

I want to speak briefly about one other important dimension of the disability benefit — one that will present challenges and great opportunity.

As many of you know, the provinces and territories presently provide a range of benefits to people with disabilities. The goal of the disability benefit is to build upon existing benefits to meaningfully enrich people’s lives. For this reason, it will be critical for the federal government to work with provinces and territories — I’m advised that this work is already under way — to ensure that the provinces and territories sustain their commitments to persons with disabilities. In other words, the Canada disability benefit will not result in clawbacks of other existing benefits.

Indeed, with good cooperation, I’m hopeful that well-integrated supports will further enrich the lives of beneficiaries. For greater transparency, agreements with the provinces and territories are required to be made public — another HUMA amendment. To that end, I’ve indicated to the minister that beyond sponsoring the bill, I would be willing to help in any way I can in the dialogue with provinces and territories to facilitate optimal outcomes in the best spirit of federal-provincial-territorial cooperation.

Is there support for the benefit? The answer is that nearly everyone is supportive. First, Canadians in general strongly support the creation of a Canada disability benefit. A 2021 Angus Reid survey reported that nearly 9 out of 10 Canadians are supportive.

Support for the benefit was also expressed in an open letter to the Prime Minister from 200 prominent Canadians, including former parliamentarians. Over fifty senators themselves wrote in support. Academic, business and union leaders, economists, health care professionals and disability advocates have all expressed the same message. As I have noted, the bill passed unanimously at third reading in the other place.

We will give the bill meaningful consideration in this chamber and at committee, but the judgment of elected representatives of Canadians and their collective and unanimous judgment deserves, I think, special consideration.

Canadians with disabilities themselves have made it clear that this pillar — the financial security pillar — is their most urgent and highest priority. That message was conveyed, I’m advised unanimously, in a range of ways: an online survey to which 8,500 people responded; round-table discussions with the disability community and with experts; Indigenous-led consultations on a separate track of consultation; and an online petition signed by nearly 18,000 people that the other place received.

This is hardly surprising when one considers the statistics mentioned earlier. Each one of those statistics is a person with a disability, struggling to cope in really difficult circumstances. There are many everyday costs related to a disability that are not there for others, including housing, medical expenses and disability supports. Of course, it is not just about the money. Poverty takes a ruinous toll on mental health. Hopelessness, exhaustion, anger — these best describe the emotional turmoil of being a person with a disability with seemingly no way of getting out of poverty.

Finally, to make a long story short — I said that in a speech recently, and someone in the audience yelled out, “Too late for that!” If you said it today, you would be right as well.

Many parliamentarians in the other place played a meaningful role in bringing this legislation to us — MPs Bonita Zarrillo and Mike Morrice in particular. I would like to especially acknowledge the work and efforts of the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion in getting us close to the finish line. As Minister Qualtrough said in the other place:

The ultimate goal is to improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of persons with disabilities. Disability Inclusion: This is the kind of Canada we are—the kind of Canada we should always do our very best to be.

In closing, I want to take a moment to personalize my remarks. I want you to think about someone you know. We all know someone — a friend, an acquaintance, a family member — with a disability. The struggles they face. The challenges they must overcome, often with your love and support. The strength and perseverance they show just to survive in an often unwelcoming world. My daughter Kelly and her friends come to mind as heroes to me in this respect.

Someone once said, wisely I think, “Sometimes the things we cannot change, end up changing us” — for the better. That is so with my daughter Kelly and so many of her friends. I am grateful for that, as I know to be the case for so many of you in the relationships you have in the world.

In my family, we are fortunate. My daughter won’t need this benefit to manage in the world. She is nevertheless a great champion of what we are doing in the Senate today and in the days ahead. I would not want it, or her, to be any other way. Some anonymous person once said, “I wouldn’t change you for the world, but I would change the world for you.”

Well, in a meaningful way, we have a chance to do just that — to change the world for hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens who really need us. What an opportunity. What an honour.

With that, colleagues, I respectfully ask you to consider and pass this legislation in a timely fashion. Thank you.

Hon. Patricia Bovey: Senator, I wonder if you would take a question?

Senator Cotter: I would be pleased to, Senator Bovey.

Senator Bovey: Thank you for sponsoring this bill. I think it’s a very important one — you and I have talked about some of the issues our Canadian colleagues face.

You mentioned that the federal-provincial agreements are to be made so there won’t be clawbacks. I wonder if you can confirm that, based on the discussions you’ve had with the minister. As you know, I’ve been working with one young person with a contract from my office, and it was to be clawed back by the Manitoba government by two thirds. We managed to extend the contract, so it was only clawed back by one third. I fear that what we’re paying is far from close to a living wage.

I would really appreciate more discussion, if you can, regarding what the ceasing of these clawbacks would be so that the federal funds can really top up their financial situations.

Senator Cotter: Thank you for the question, Senator Bovey. I know that you — and many other senators in this place, and members of Parliament in the other place — are often working on an individualized basis to assist people with disabilities in order to minimize their vulnerability and enable them to get ahead in the world.

The messages I hear from the minister and her office are that a — kind of — line in the sand is no clawbacks. As you will know, a lot of this has been delivered through provincial jurisdictions. These will be direct payments to people within federal authority.

A lot of the provincial regimes differ from one another. In some places, the situation you described could exist, but in another province, perhaps, it doesn’t — but something else might create a challenge. The receipt of money triggers other unfortunate moderations and consequences.

I think those will probably end up being negotiated on an individualized, federal-provincial-territorial basis so that the fit achieves the goal of, essentially, no clawbacks — no loss as a result of the generosity of this benefit, which will be significant in dollar terms when it’s put together.

I can’t tell you more in detail, except that there is this — kind of — line-in-the-sand commitment on the part of the federal minister. I’m supportive of that, and, as I’ve said, if there are ways that I can help both the minister and provincial leaders make that fit together, then I’m keen to do it, and I think it will be a success.

I hope it will occur in a really timely way. Your passage of this bill would officially unlock that process.

Thank you.

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Harder, P.C., seconded by the Honourable Senator Bellemare, for the second reading of Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.

Hon. Pat Duncan: Thank you, Senator Cotter, for your sponsorship of this bill. I appreciate the intent, as you’ve so eloquently described, and I have full respect for our colleagues in the other place.

Because you mentioned in your speech that you’ve pored over all the documents, the testimony and so on, as well as pored through the bill, my question is as follows: Where in the federal‑provincial-territorial consultations do the Workers’ Compensation Boards, which are independent of government, fit?

I’m thinking of a long-term claimant with something, such as a diagnosis of PTSD, where sometimes you will get the Workers’ Compensation Board saying, “No, you’re fit to return to work, or we’re done; you’ve reached the limit.” Yet a doctor would still diagnose that person with a disability.

Would this be of assistance to them? Is this subject to the clawback? Where does that consultation fit?

Senator Cotter: I’m not very knowledgeable on the specifics about the link to workers’ compensation, but I do know that there has been consultation and dialogue with — let me call it — the insurance industry. When you think about workers’ compensation as a form of insurance, where workers and employers pay into it, to try to figure out the intersection there as well — and the minister and her office have advised me that they have identified that, and have been working to ensure that people are not damaged by the benefit where they would get here, and it would not undermine benefits to which they’re legitimately entitled to in other ways.

I will make a further exploration about the workers’ compensation point because I think it’s a very good one.

Hon. Éric Forest: My first words will be to thank you from the bottom of my heart for agreeing to sponsor this bill, which is so important and speaks to our values of solidarity and equity.

My concern is a bit on the periphery of the bill because there are still many things to define, including eligibility criteria and what this eligibility will entail. The devil is often in the details, and I hope that this complementary information will be delivered quickly.

In listening to you, we realize that there are persons with disabilities who benefit greatly from the love and support of the people around them, and you yourself are a living example. However, we know that in Canada, more than 10% of taxpayers don’t even file a tax return. Many of those people are isolated and have disabilities. They are the most vulnerable members of our society.

This may not be germane to the bill, but I really want to know if we will be able to create certain tools in order to identify these people. We are currently unable to reach them because we don’t know who they are. What’s more, they get lost in administrative limbo because they don’t file tax returns, yet they’re the most vulnerable people in our society today.

[English]

Senator Cotter: Thank you, Senator Forest. It’s a very legitimate question, and an important one.

One provision of the bill provides access to the bill’s implementation and delivery to income tax information, so people who are obtaining tax credits, for example, will be able to be identified. You are right that there is a black hole of people disconnected from government in all kinds of ways, largely through their impoverished circumstances and disability. I think the bill — if it does not fail — will not achieve its objectives unless it can reach out to those people.

What has happened with respect to this bill and the conversations that have been going on for too long, really, in the last couple of years, in particular, is that the disability communities at the national, provincial and local levels are unbelievably engaged with this bill. I hope, perhaps, with support from the government, there is a way in which outreach can be made to those folks so that they will know about the bill. There’s a commitment in here that making application, and the like, is intended to be disability barrier-free, so hopefully it will be possible through that kind of outreach.

Speaking from my own personal experience with Inclusion Saskatchewan, with whom I’ve worked a little bit over the last number of years, it feels to me, in a really lovely way, that they have their fingers on — I don’t want to say every family in Saskatchewan that has someone with a disability, but I think the local communities know, and their commitment to this bill is so powerful that it won’t be a perfect success; yet, I think, it will be a far greater success than one might think, sitting in Ottawa, reflecting about it.