Madam Speaker, Bill C-10 is an attack on the freedoms of Canadians, Particularly in its present form, it fundamentally threatens our way of life. Officially, the bill is about changing the Broadcasting Act to bring online streaming services under broadcasting regulations, but it now also seeks to create a framework whereby social media companies and users can be directly regulated by the unelected bureaucrats at the CRTC.
Social media platforms today are the primary place where public debate takes place. They are the public space. They are like radio and television, where large companies broadcast artistic content through limited airwaves. They are the place where all kinds of conversations take place between free individuals expressing and critiquing important ideas. Previously public and private conversations now all take place in this online space. Therefore, any regulation of social media is necessarily regulation of speech, of debate and of that public square.
Broadcast regulation is not about combatting hateful content. There already are Criminal Code provisions dealing with this. Certainly there is a case for regularly re-evaluating those provisions, but broadcasting regulation is about shaping content with other objectives in mind, such as seeking representation of what is deemed Canadian content and establishing quotas for representation of certain views or experiences. Applying this approach to social media means that the government would have dramatic capacity to shape the content which is shown and the user experience on social media.
The algorithms that shape this experience are already fairly opaque in terms of what is seen by whom and why. For this reason, Bill C-10 is a particularly dangerous form of state censorship. Normally, censorship is explicit and transparent; people know who and where the censors are. However, in the world envisioned by Bill C-10, the dialogue happening in the public square, what we see and cannot see, is shaped by state-directed algorithms advancing certain kinds of content over others, sometimes without our knowing about it at all.
Whether individual users are treated as broadcasters or not, their content and who sees it would be controlled through state regulation of social media platforms. In a free society, the state must not take it upon itself to control the flow of information in the public square, but Bill C-10 would create control by default.
At one time, being Liberal meant adhering to the values of freedom, believing that the free exchange of ideas leads to ideas being measured and conclusions being drawn that best harness the wisdom and experience of the wider community. However, today we are seeing increasing efforts to create fear about the implications of free and open discussion. We are warned about misinformation and fake news, about the dangers of populism and public confusion and about the need to trust authority. Some are using these warnings to push us toward an illiberal reality whereby growing state control is justified and powerful people are less likely to be held accountable.
Let us not shy away from the fact that in a free society, people are going to say stupid and false things on the Internet. When that happens, there is no need to engage in hyperbolic moral panic. Just tell them they are wrong and tell them why. Truly liberal people do not freak out about the fact that other people do not believe things that are true. Totalitarian control of the flow of information, even in pursuit of truth, inevitably leads to the suppression of contrary opinions which, in the long run, could turn out to have merit. Free societies allow competition between different ideas to be lived out and allow people to come to conclusions based on what they observe.
There used to be so much optimism about the online community's capacity to usher in a small-l liberal golden age of free and equal debate and competition no longer dominated by powerful industrial actors or governments. However, now, perversely, politicians who call themselves Liberal are pushing a return to reactionary state control of the flow of information and creating regulations that advantage strong incumbent players.
In the midst of this situation, I am proposing amendments which seek to protect free societies from foreign-state-backed interference. When foreign states control our airwaves and shut out contrary voices, that undermines the free exchange of ideas that Canadians want to see.
When I asked about this proposed amendment around foreign content, the government claimed that it did not have a position because it wanted to let the committee do its work independently. However, now we can see clearly from government communications that the Liberal MPs are being directed by the PMO. Would it not be ironic if, while seeking to censor the speech of Canadians, the government failed to act in response to the efforts of foreign states to control our airwaves. The government must fix Bill C-10 or withdraw it.
