Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): If Senator Kutcher would take a question, I have one.

Senator Kutcher: And I promise to answer it.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Would the senator take a question?

Senator C. Deacon: Certainly.

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Honourable senators, my question is for the Leader of the Government in the Senate.

Senator Gold, yesterday, YouTube launched an awareness campaign warning Canadians about the impact of Bill C-11 that is currently before our Senate Transport and Communications Committee.

As reported in The Globe and Mail, YouTube’s Chief Product Officer, Neal Mohan, has very significant concerns about the bill, including the insidious danger of vaguely worded clauses.

In his blog, he also adds that Bill C-11 could “. . . change the personalized experience of millions of Canadians who visit YouTube every day.”

Senator Gold, can you please share with this chamber whether you believe it is appropriate that the Minister of Heritage — your government’s lead on Bill C-11 — is trying to discredit the voices of concern by claiming that YouTube is engaged in a “little scare campaign”?

Senator Plett: Thank you for sharing with us where the bill is. I do not think that anyone in this chamber had any doubt about where the bill is at this point.

Senator Gold, your government’s attempt to discredit voices they do not agree with is alarming. Sadly, this is not the first and only occurrence.

Yesterday, YouTube said:

We have a responsibility to our Canadian viewers and creators to inform them of changes to their online experience. And we think it’s worth standing up for our viewers’ interests and creators’ livelihoods.

You say that this is a little scare campaign. That is what you agree with the minister about.

Senator Gold, do you agree that YouTube has not only a right but a responsibility to inform its viewers and creators about the potential impact of Bill C-11?

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Government leader, in July, the NDP-Liberal government announced its plan for reducing emissions in the oil and gas sector by 42% in eight years, which included a policy option for a cap-and-trade system. To meet these targets, your government would have to halt all new oil and gas projects, in addition to delaying existing ones.

I can get into many reasons why this is misguided, but in a recent National Post article, Robert Merasty, former chief of Flying Dust Cree Nation, argued that this policy will particularly harm Indigenous communities that have already invested in these projects.

As you know, leader, Truth and Reconciliation Day was last week. Your government, again, verbally affirmed its commitment to reconciliation efforts many times, and yet your actions do not reflect this. Mr. Merasty stated that your government’s efforts often fall short of real self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

Leader, knowing that a majority of Indigenous peoples support oil and gas development, as reflected in our Environics Research poll in June, why then would your government propose a policy that would wipe all of that away and take them a step backwards from self-determination?

Senator Plett: Senator Deacon, thank you for your explanation. It would have been nice if the sponsor of the bill had been able to give an explanation yesterday; we probably wouldn’t be discussing this today. However, we did not get that yesterday.

I do have a question before I ask for the adjournment. I am told that there are two Liberal members of Parliament in the House of Commons who have completely opposing views on this. Both of them are from Prince Edward Island. If this is something that all Islanders want, why would those two members have completely opposing views? There is something there that we are not seeing, I think. I might be wrong.

Senator C. Deacon: I think it’s good when parties can have members with differing views on situations. I view that as a positive thing. This is a situation where there is a lack of fairness. Yes, one side is benefiting in a manner that is not justifiable. Certainly in the eyes of the commissioner it is not justifiable and hasn’t been for quite some time, and another side is being penalized for sure. Those MPs are doing a good job of representing their constituents.

We’re talking about having a system that delivers greater fairness across a very small area, and that the change itself was not justified and how it was justified was not accurate. The Employment Insurance system has evaluated that through the Commissioner for Employers for several years and the recommendation keeps being ignored.

Is it a politically divisive issue, and does that benefit one politician and not another? Potentially, but that’s not our job here. Our job here is to try to bring as much fairness to those that are not being properly represented.

Senator Plett: I’m going to simply ask one more, because I do not want this to become a debate. I will probably be speaking to the bill, as I have in the past. As a matter of fact, I was the critic of it in one of its iterations.

Again, I fully support the fact that you let your child finish their temper tantrum and it worked for you. You did not tell me what would have happened if that child hadn’t finished his or her temper tantrum. I absolutely 100% support that it would be wonderful if there were any way of raising a child without ever being in any way forceful. You’re right when you say you may have been disciplined in a way that you should never have. I was disciplined in a way that for years has been illegal, not by my father but by teachers. I don’t know why. I thought I was a model student, but some teachers didn’t agree with that. I had a physical education teacher hold me down on a chair physically while the principal beat the tar out of me with a leather belt.

Here I am; I’m still a senator. I’m a mad senator, I guess, at times. Maybe it’s because of that beating. I don’t think it is.

When I was the critic of this, I had my granddaughter, who was 13 or 14 at the time, write a letter to the Senate, telling the Senate that she supported a form of spanking if children didn’t behave. It’s not that all children don’t believe in it. I don’t think she had ever been spanked. I don’t know, maybe she had. But she thought that was okay.

Even now, in your answer to my question, you used the extreme, which is why I have a problem with this. We’re always using the extreme when we do this about how forceful we are. That on the bum isn’t forceful; that means “Move, you’re holding up traffic.”

We need to talk about what’s legal now, when we talk about this bill. The assault that you and many speakers are referring to has been illegal for years, as I just read. I’m sorry, there was no question there. I will stop there. You can comment. I will take an opportunity to speak to this down the road.

Senator Kutcher: Thank you very much. I think that people in this chamber might be shocked that Senator Plett and I had a lot of commonalities in our growing up.

I still have — as many of you may have noticed — quite severe attention deficit disorder and a learning disability. I always had the seat of honour in the classroom, Senator Plett, which was right next to the teacher’s desk where I could be hit by the medical intervention of the day, which was the yardstick. It was frequent. Whenever I would get it more than four or five a day, I also got to go down to the principal’s office for the — I blame my Dupuytren’s contracture on that. But I’m not talking about that.

The research also shows us that just a mild corrective action, like the spanking that you were talking about, has a profoundly negative impact on kids. The Supreme Court didn’t know that in 2004, because that research is new.

What we need to focus on here is also thinking about children in other parts of the life cycle. If your mom or my mom were having a problem with dementia and they ran out into the street and we grabbed them and spanked them, people would say, “Whoa, what’s wrong with that guy?” If our kid runs out, we grab the kid and we spank the kid, that’s perfectly fine. I don’t think that’s perfectly fine, Senator Plett. I think both are wrong.