Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Hamilton Mountain.
I go back to the question that I asked the member for Provencher a few moments ago. He answered it by saying that I like to set up lobs for him to hit out of the park. The only problem is that he inadvertently did that to me as well, in his response. That is because the next part of the Conservative platform, immediately after the part that I read, says, “It will: Adopt a made in Canada approach that incorporates the best practices of jurisdictions like Australia and France.”
What the Conservatives ran on is quite literally what we have before us now, with the exception of the fact that the legislation that we have here is even more transparent. I am finding it more and more difficult every time I come here. I was saying earlier that I never imagined I would be reading the Conservative platform into the record in the House of Commons so much, but here I am. Conservatives ran on this. They even referenced the best practices of Australia and France. They literally ran on what we have before us now. It is just like pricing pollution. The Conservatives ran on pricing pollution. This all happened under two years ago.
Now Conservatives come into the House and are so incredibly opposed to these ideas. With absolutely no shame, they are just completely brushing them aside as though they never had any interest in them whatsoever. Meanwhile, 338 Conservative candidates literally went knocking on doors in the last federal election, trying to sell Canadians on voting for them, because of what they were promising to bring in. Pricing pollution was one promise, and this exact legislation on digital advertising and the revenues that are associated with it was another.
I am at a loss that the Conservatives can do this with a straight face, as well as that they can come in here and can speak so adamantly against these concepts that they would have, presumably, been debating in their ridings under two years ago. They would have been sitting there with other candidates, pushing for these ideas and policies. Now they are just totally tossing them aside as though there is no way that they could have ever conceived of supporting them.
I will tell the House why I think this legislation is so important, as well as why it is so important to give the resources and tools to media outlets that are seeing their work exploited by these big tech firms. We all scroll on Facebook or Instagram or wherever it might be and come across stories. We are choosing that to be the location that we go to get the information.
I got a real kick out of it when I heard the member for Peterborough—Kawartha say earlier that people want to get on the biggest platforms, and that is where they want to share their information. It reminds me of people who say to artists, “Would you like to come and hang a painting here for exposure?” Exposure is not what artists really want; no, they want to be paid for the work that they do.
The member for Peterborough—Kawartha used the exact same logic by saying that people want the exposure from Facebook and Instagram. In her view, of course they want to put their stuff there, because that is how they are going to get exposed. These outlets do not need exposure as much as they need supports to survive and to continue. That seems to be completely lost on Conservatives.
I want to use an example of how misinformation happens, why we need press out there with the resources and tools to properly investigate and why this is so important. We do not have to go any further back than yesterday.
Yesterday, there was a big, false, misinformation-based story about the Prime Minister being investigated by the RCMP. We had one question in question period about it yesterday, but not a single one today. That is because even Conservatives have come to the conclusion that they probably could not exploit that one as much as they would like.
I will tell members what happened yesterday. An organization called Democracy Watch, which I do not know much about, had finally received a response to a freedom of information request. It interpreted, intentionally or not, information in that freedom of information report to mean that the Prime Minister was being investigated by the RCMP, so at 8:19 a.m., Democracy Watch tweeted out that the Prime Minister is being investigated. That was retweeted by Andrew Coyne of The Globe and Mail at 9:22 a.m.
The member for Leeds—Grenville—Thousand Islands and Rideau Lakes, my neighbour, then posted something at 10:52 a.m. in which he said, “Breaking: [the Prime Minister] and his former senior officials are facing an RCMP investigation, four years after the Prime Minister was found guilty of breaking ethics laws”, and it goes on and on, and then he adds another tweet.
I will note that the member has not, since this all happened, retracted this, apologized for it or suggested that he got the information wrong.
However, I do not want to skip too far ahead, because after he did that, the National Post tweeted it out at 12:55 p.m. Then, of course, it was tweeted by the Conservatives' favourite media outlet, Rebel News, which was really late to the game, because it did not tweet it until 1:29 p.m.
This is how misinformation gets spread like wildfire in today's day and age. It is all because this one organization misinterpreted the information in a response it received after it had requested information from the RCMP. Then, because we have organizations that could actually do the follow-up and look into the issues, we were able to determine that what had been claimed was categorically false. It was fake news. Rightly or wrongly, this one organization called Democracy Watch set off a series of events that spread like wildfire.
I am sure the Conservatives fundraised on that. There was a solid five and a half hours between the first tweet and when the National Post finally issued its correction. I am sure the Conservatives did not miss an opportunity to put some links in there to their website for donations. However, the point is that we need legislation like this because we need to have those independent agencies that are able to fact-check, look into issues and properly research information.
The Kingston Whig Standard, one of the first newspapers in our country, has literally been around for centuries, but it does not have the reporting capabilities that it did at one time. So much in The Kingston Whig Standard is just information that is being recirculated by its parent company, with very little local coverage. At least in the Kingston area, we can depend on other news agencies, such as the Kingstonist, for example, which has taken on a new format and actually goes out and researches and digs into these issues and does not just spread these pieces that it happens to see somebody else tweet out.
If our objective at the end of the day is just to receive information that has been tweeted out in 140 characters or less, then I think we are pretty much going to be in a very difficult situation when we are relying on that information to actually tell us the truth. I think that is what this comes down to.
I know that my time is limited and I am looking forward to sharing it with the member for Hamilton Mountain, so I will conclude by saying that this is important legislation and that it is something we can all adopt. It is certainly something that the Conservatives ran on in 2021. This bill is very important for us, and I think this entire House should adopt it.