Bill C-10 (Historical)

An Act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other Acts

This enactment amends the Broadcasting Act to, among other things,
(a) add online undertakings — undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet — as a distinct class of broadcasting undertakings;
(b) update the broadcasting policy for Canada set out in section 3 of that Act by, among other things, providing that the Canadian broadcasting system should serve the needs and interests of all Canadians — including Canadians from racialized communities and Canadians of diverse ethnocultural backgrounds — and should provide opportunities for Indigenous persons, programming that reflects Indigenous cultures and that is in Indigenous languages, and programming that is accessible without barriers to persons with disabilities;
(c) specify that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) must regulate and supervise the Canadian broadcasting system in a manner that
(i) takes into account the different characteristics of Indigenous language broadcasting and the different conditions under which broadcasting undertakings that provide Indigenous language programming operate,
(ii) is fair and equitable as between broadcasting undertakings providing similar services,
(iii) facilitates the provision of programs that are accessible without barriers to persons with disabilities, and
(iv) takes into account the variety of broadcasting undertakings to which that Act applies and avoids imposing obligations on a class of broadcasting undertakings if doing so will not contribute in a material manner to the implementation of the broadcasting policy;
(d) amend the procedure relating to the issuance by the Governor in Council of policy directions to the Commission;
(e) replace the Commission’s power to impose conditions on a licence with a power to make orders imposing conditions on the carrying on of broadcasting undertakings;
(f) provide the Commission with the power to require that persons carrying on broadcasting undertakings make expenditures to support the Canadian broadcasting system;
(g) authorize the Commission to provide information to the Minister responsible for that Act, the Chief Statistician of Canada and the Commissioner of Competition, and set out in that Act a process by which a person who submits certain types of information to the Commission may designate the information as confidential;
(h) amend the procedure by which the Governor in Council may, under section 28 of that Act, set aside a decision of the Commission to issue, amend or renew a licence or refer such a decision back to the Commission for reconsideration and hearing;
(i) specify that a person shall not carry on a broadcasting undertaking, other than an online undertaking, unless they do so in accordance with a licence or they are exempt from the requirement to hold a licence;
(j) harmonize the punishments for offences under Part II of that Act and clarify that a due diligence defence applies to the existing offences set out in that Act; and
(k) allow for the imposition of administrative monetary penalties for violations of certain provisions of that Act or of the Accessible Canada Act.
The enactment also makes related and consequential amendments to other Acts.

Canadian Heritage

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the Liberal-Bloc coalition cutting off debate on its Internet-censorship bill is an act of cowardice by this government. It is doing this because it is afraid of the public backlash against going down in history as the government that trampled over Pierre Trudeau's Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In my riding of Saskatoon West, constituents have made it clear that they do not want this Prime Minister to censor their social media posts. Bill C-10 will censor Canadians' Facebook and TikTok posts.

Will the government do the courageous thing, reverse course and stop Bill C-10 ?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Lethbridge told an Alberta newspaper that Quebec artists support Bill C-10 because they are outdated and rely on government grants as they are not able to make a living off of the art they are producing. She added that Canadians do not want the songs, films and material these artists produce.

Offering a weak apology on Twitter is not enough to make up for insulting thousands of artists across Quebec and Canada.

Will the minister join us in condemning these ignorant comments, which show a complete lack of knowledge of Quebec culture and unbelievable contempt for Quebec creators, and call on the Leader of the Opposition to apologize for his member's misguided comments?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, 30 years have passed since the Broadcasting Act was last updated. That was before social media.

Back in 1991, a “web giant” meant a massive spider in a horror movie. The Internet was slow as molasses, and people were more likely to have pagers than cell phones. Thirty years ago, the Conservative Party still had the word “progressive” in its name.

My question is for the heritage minister. Does he think we can afford to waste even more time before we pass Bill C-10 to modernize the Broadcasting Act?

[Thomas Owen Ripley]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for the question, Mr. Housefather.

Perhaps I will begin by reiterating that the government's position, when it tabled Bill C-10, was acknowledging that there will be many smaller services that are not scoped into the act because of that requirement for there to be a material contribution. The goal was not to scope all those smaller services in.

I think the challenge is that there is a wide variety of business models in the online undertaking space. You have subscription-based services that we all know well, like Netflix or Crave. You pick your favourite subscription services. More and more we are seeing the launch of advertising-supported business models. You can stream your television content or your music content and not actually pay a subscription fee; rather, the service is selling advertising—

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, what I find unexplainable is the fact that throughout the question and preamble of my hon. colleague he did not mention artists once, not once.

Yes, there is a sense of urgency that I am feeling and that our government is feeling regarding the adoption of Bill C-10, but that urgency comes from artists themselves. We have heard artists from coast to coast to coast saying to get Bill C-10 adopted, and there stands the NDP with the Conservative Party saying that they know better than the artists, the technicians and the musicians. I am baffled by the position of the NDP.

[Thomas Owen Ripley]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for the question, Ms. Dabrusin.

I'm not able to give a definitive amount to that on the spot. It would take us going back and looking at some of the analyses the department has done underpinning that $830-million number to look at how it might intersect with some of the thresholds that are being put forward.

Bill C-10 put down the marker about material manner, but left it a little bit at the CRTC's discretion because not all services are comparable. For example, I would point the committee towards CBC Gem or TOU.TV, which are our national public broadcaster's online undertakings. The department's assessment was that right now those undertakings have about 200,000 subscribers and earn maybe somewhere in the $20-million to $30-million range in revenue each year.

The government's perspective would be that, obviously, our national public broadcaster and its online undertakings have a powerful role to play in contributing to the cultural policy objectives of the Broadcasting Act, yet the intersection with this amendment is that even those online undertakings launched by our national public broadcaster could be excluded if they don't meet the revenue threshold.

Ms. Dabrusin, we'd have to do some further analysis to actually look at the intersection with all the services and assess how that might change our analysis.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to follow up on my earlier question, which was bizarrely not answered, which again reveals the problem here. The government is eager to shut down debate and cannot answer basic questions about what the bill does.

Is the government seeking, through Bill C-10, to give the CRTC the power to regulate social media algorithms, yes or no?

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, since the last time the Broadcasting Act was reformed, we have seen the important and ever-increasing role of platforms on the television, movie and certainly on the music side of things. Our laws and regulations simply have not adapted to this new environment, which is costing our artists, musicians and technicians tens of millions of dollars every year. Bill C-10 aims specifically at correcting this so we can continue to have a thriving artistic and cultural ecosystem in Canada.

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the member opposite and the Conservative Party of Canada know full well that Bill C-10 has nothing to do with content moderation and what people can and cannot post online. In fact, professional independent civil servants from the Department of Justice, including the deputy minister, came to committee to testify to that effect.

It looks to me like the Conservative Party is continuing to mislead Canadians deliberately or unwillingly. I do not understand. It is simply not true. I do not understand why the Conservative Party would not want to force Google, one of the wealthiest companies in the world, to pay its fair share for Canadian artists.

[Alain Rayes, Conservative, Richmond—Arthabaska, QC]

Thank you for that clarification, Mr. Chair, but it's always a pleasure for me. I never try to shy away when I am asked questions, whether they come from a reporter or a colleague in everyday life. I try to answer them to the best of my ability and, if I am wrong, I apologize.

To answer your question, Ms. McPherson, I should say that I have consulted with over 40 organizations in the cultural community since we began our study of Bill C‑10. This is not to say that all cultural organizations agreed with us during these exchanges. However, for all of the amendments that we put forward, or almost—I just want to protect myself, because I don't have all of my data—we made it a guideline to make sure that they represented more than one entity, so that they were not too specific. I don't have the list at hand, because God knows how much documentation I have from all my meetings, but we based it on the concerns of some groups that weren't necessarily against this idea.

That being said, the bill changed along the way, and I apologize for that. If we had known that social networks were going to be included, as a party, we would have invited witnesses who represent those who were left out and whom we did not hear from in committee in the first place. So with this amendment, people that we never had a chance to hear from will now be able to come and talk to us about their concerns. We were surprised, as everyone else was, by what happened.

I repeat, this amendment is perfectly aligned with what Australia is doing. Moreover, the thresholds it proposes, which were recommended by former CRTC experts, are below those of Australia. So I find these thresholds to be legitimate.

[Melissa Lukings]

I think the current issue is that perhaps the penalties that currently exist in PIPEDA are not strong enough to deter corporations. I'm not saying to put in new regulations—I'm not saying that—but when you're going to do the digital charter implementation act and you're discussing things like Bill C-10 and Bill C-11, it's important to remember that.

I think there is room for improvement. Because we've found that financial penalties don't really seem to impact companies that make a lot of money, fines could instead be based on percentages. The key here is that we need to not have increased regulation. If what we're trying to do is in fact what we say we're trying to do, which is to reduce human trafficking and harm to young people, additional regulations are not going to help that.

Did I answer your question?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, honestly, it is very unfortunate that it has come to this. We have been working on Bill C-10 in committee for months. Things have been going well for months. Actually, I should say things had been going well for months.

There was goodwill from all parties to move forward on this bill. Everyone agrees that it was not perfect at the start, but once we begin working on a bill in committee, we agree to move forward and improve it. That has not been the case for several weeks. In committee, our Conservative friends have been filibustering on the somewhat false basis that the bill could potentially violate freedom of expression.

Recently, on Tout le monde en parle, Quebec's most-watched Sunday program, the Minister of Canadian Heritage said that the cultural sector was losing about $70 million a month without this law. I do not know if the cultural sector is losing $30 million, $50 million, $70 million or $100 million a month without this law, but it has been on the losing end for years since the digital giants entered the market.

We must revisit, review and revamp this act, which is over 30 years old. We must pass Bill C-10. The Quebec National Assembly is unanimous on this. The time for games is over. We must move forward and work on this bill with all the goodwill we can muster.

How long does the minister think we will need to wait before passing a bill like Bill C-10 for our cultural community?

[Elizabeth May, Green, Saanich—Gulf Islands, BC]

Mr. Speaker, to the hon. minister, this is offensive to intrude on committee work. We have a fiction in this place that the committee is the master of its own destiny. It is increasingly a fiction from the day when, in the previous government, Stephen Harper instructed that every committee pass an identical motion that affected people such as members of Parliament in unrecognized parties, such as all Greens and independents, in that we were coerced to show up in committee 48 hours before clause-by-clause began. That process made a mockery of the notion that committee is the master of its own destiny and its own work. This intervention is another offence to this notion. This is the first time in more 20 years that this particular standing order was been utilized to get a committee to report back more quickly than it is normally able to do.

I do think that these principles matter. The irony here is that the hon. member for Nanaimo—Ladysmith who, within the Green caucus, carries the work on Bill C-10 and has done a tremendous amount of work, is right now in clause-by-clause in the heritage committee on Bill C-10 and cannot be here to defend his right to put forward every single amendment that we have worked on so hard.

I am sorry, but we have a bit of an interference—

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my hon. colleague for the question. I completely agree with him on the significant support for this bill in Quebec and across the country. In Quebec, the National Assembly unanimously called for the adoption of Bill C-10, deeming it a major step forward for the artistic and cultural sector.

To quickly answer my hon. colleague's question, I think that time allocation motions remain exceptional measures that we use in exceptional circumstances.

[Alain Therrien, Bloc, La Prairie, QC]

Mr. Speaker, using time allocation to speed up our work is a drastic measure that should be used sparingly.

However, it was the right choice for Bill C-10. Dozens of amendments have been adopted. The Bloc Québécois critic was extremely effective and had several amendments adopted that greatly improved this bill.

We cannot allow the Conservatives to block this bill and jeopardize the future of our cultural sector. It is important because every week spent debating represents the loss of millions of dollars. Quebec's cultural sector and Quebeckers are calling for this bill to be passed before the end of the session. That is why we agreed to proceed in this way.

I have a simple question for the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons. Should time allocation motions continue to be used only in exceptional circumstances?