Senator Miville-Dechêne: Like you, Senator Gold, I take my work in the Senate very seriously. I believe in the principle of restraint that you talked about and that you explained in your speech.

As you know, Bill C-11 is very important to me when it comes to defending francophone and Indigenous minorities in Canada. We will see what comes of all this, but the idea is to try to defend minority languages. In that sense, I’m of the opinion that Bill C-11 is more important than my two amendments that were rejected. However, as a former journalist, I care a lot about facts and, quite frankly, I didn’t understand what you were getting at when you criticized the amendment to subsection 4.2(2). I will just mention one point that made my hair stand on end.

You said that sports games that are rebroadcast on platforms like YouTube will not be able to be taxed or used to help fund our culture. However, that isn’t at all the case because when we rewrote the amendment, we specifically kept paragraph (c), which indicates that we can include the fact that the program or a significant part of it has been broadcast by a broadcasting undertaking that is required to be carried on under a licence — as is the case with sports — or is required to be registered with the CRTC but does not provide a social media service.

I simply don’t understand how you can say that a loophole is being created and that we won’t be able to include sports at all in Bill C-11. It’s quite clear that this is part of the amendment.

Senator Gold: Thank you for your question. With respect to our constitutional role, no one is denying what the Constitution Act, 1867 says. But in my speech — and I’m sure you were listening — the Supreme Court made it clear that because of the understanding from 1867 onward of our complementary role, it was not necessary to specify the circumstances under which senators would exercise restraint as a matter of principle, a self‑imposed principle of restraint, because it came with the understanding, which all of us share and should share, of what our role here in this chamber is vis-à-vis the role of other institutions in our government, including the elected officials.

It is a question of what the appropriate and responsible thing for the Senate to do is. This is not a case where, in my humble opinion, the message is about the disagreement with 6 of the 26 amendments — and again, colleagues, the motion focuses on and our practice in the Senate focuses at the message stage on talking only about the message. There are Speaker’s rulings on these points.

Again, I am not invoking procedural arguments to stifle this discussion. I’m just trying to appeal to your experience as a legislator and to those of us with perhaps less experience to remind us what this debate is about and what it’s not about.