Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in the House.
As I rise today, it is a bit like Groundhog Day. I am rising to speak on Bill C-11. The reason why it is so familiar to me is because I rose to speak on virtually the same bill in the last Parliament, when it was known as Bill C-10. I am rising again today on this issue because, once again, it is before Parliament.
There are certain issues that perhaps do not transcend from one Parliament to another, perhaps they are more temporal in nature, however, this issue has only become exacerbated with the passage of time. The issue and the pressing need to address the Broadcasting Act, to modernize that legislation and bring it into the 21st century has become even more acute and more critical. Thus is the reason why it has been presented by our government and why it is being debated today, and being debated with urgency. I do believe that the passage of this type of legislation is urgent.
When we are talking about the Broadcasting Act, we are talking about fundamentally Canadian content. We just heard a very impassioned speech by my colleague from the Bloc Québécois, talking about the importance of promoting English Canadian and French Canadian cultural content. This has been a critically acute issue for Canada for literally decades. The principle reason is because of our geographic proximity to our friend and ally, a nation whose president was in this chamber literally short of a week ago, a cultural behemoth that has the potential to overshadow and really eclipse content that is being produced in other nations, including the nation that is its most proximate neighbour.
We realized this many decades ago, and that is why we put in place, as a government, as parliamentarians, protections for Canadian content, so we could have Canadian stories told, told via television, film and music. Those were important protections. Those protections were put in place in legislation that hearken back to a different era, when people received their content through things like the radio. It is not coincidental that in French, when people talk about the CBC, it is called Radio-Canada, because that was the principle medium for the transmission of communications, including entertainment at the time.
Radio and television dominated the landscape for nearly a century. However, things have changed. In the old era, what we would do and what we continue to do today is put, as a condition of a licence for a television or a radio broadcaster, that it must invest in Canadian culture and Canadian artists. That has produced significant results.
However, the status right now is very different. I will include myself as one of the Canadians who have changed. Times have changed. Canadians are not using cable very much anymore. I think I might be one of the rare households in this chamber that still has cable. I use it for watching things like the Toronto Blue Jays, and God bless them today on the opening day of the season. I hope they have great season.
Independent of sports, most people are consuming their content online, on streaming services. Streaming is everywhere. People stream on their phones, in their cars, on their televisions. Many people are enjoying this.
I was actually looking up some of the statistics, and it is quite startling. Right now, eight out of 10 Canadians, or 80% of our entire country, uses at least one streaming service. Just in 2016, one year after our government took office, that number was five out of 10. Again, I will include myself in the people on the outside looking in back in 2016. People would talk to me about streaming Netflix and I did not know what they were talking about. I am being quite honest.
Now, not only am I streaming Netflix, but we have a Disney account, and my kids want me to get Amazon Prime, which I really do not know about. There is a number of different streaming platforms that people are attracted to or are already using. Six out of 10 Canadians, or 60% of the country, subscribe to two platforms or more.
However, the basic point is that while we have, on the radio and television side, things like Bell and Rogers contributing to Canadian content, which is a good thing and it is something we want to continue, streaming platforms, such as the Amazon Prime, YouTube, Crave, Netflix and Spotify, are broadcasting to Canadians, using Canadian content to market to those Canadians, but they are contributing absolutely nothing to the flourishing and development of more Canadian content on their platforms. They do not have the same requirements applied on those platforms as are applied on standard radio and television broadcasters.
There is the problem. From a very basic perspective, what are we here for as parliamentarians, if it is not to identify problems and seek to address them for the benefit of Canadians. That is something quite fundamental, and I think all 338 of us try to do that every day, that we are privileged to hold these types of positions.
Nevertheless, the legislation has not kept pace. I found it quite fascinating that the last time the Broadcasting Act was amended was in 1991. I was in my second year of university at McGill at that time. I do not even think I had an email address at that point. I think I got one my fourth year. It was really long and basically never used, because in order to use it, I had to walk into a separate office on the west floor of the building to access something called email. At that point, the Internet was mainly the purview of the U.S. military that had invented it years before.
There was no such thing as smart phones. There was certainly no such thing as apps. We were living in a completely different world and that was merely, on my account, about 32 or 33 years ago.
Back then, given that landscape in 1991, the Broadcasting Act was perfectly useful and suitable to the landscape as it was then. It dealt with radio and television broadcasters, because that was where people found their content, and we ensured that those radio and television broadcasters were promoting Canadian content.
It is now 2023 and the landscape has changed dramatically in the last decade, but certainly in the last few years. What we are seeking to do with this legislative amendment to the Broadcasting Act is to ensure that we promote, and continue to promote, great Canadian stories dans la langue de Molière, mais aussi en Anglais wherever those stories are found.
This bill would give the CRTC the ability to require that online streaming companies that profit from playing Canadian content, including Canadian music, film and TV shows, make financial contributions to support Canadian creators. This is a critically important objective.
What I am equally pleased about with the bill is that if we are to reopen a piece of legislation, we may as well improve upon it. We are modernizing it to deal with this new online landscape. We are also doing something that is quite targeted and deserves some attention. We are promoting the diversity of Canadian creators. What do I mean by that? We are promoting indigenous creators.
I spent a lot of time in our first Parliament working on indigenous language protection when I was the parliamentary secretary to the then minister of heritage. What we heard, in all the consultations we did and in all the work that turned into what is now the Indigenous Languages Act, which thankfully got support from everyone in this chamber, every party, as it should have, was that in order to promote indigenous language, the restoration and revitalization of those languages, we needed to ensure that we were also supporting indigenous creators. This bill would do that. It is an important aspect.
It also addresses persons with disabilities. We talk a lot about changes to things like the accessibility act. We talk about the Canada disability benefit act that we are rolling out. At the same time, we need to ensure that people's sense of inclusion and understanding of persons with disabilities is enhanced by ensuring that persons with disabilities are seen and included in the Canadian content we all absorb.
The same can be said for people of diverse sexual orientation. The LGBTQ2 community is specifically mentioned in this legislation as a group of creators whose content we want to promote.
I will finish on this idea of other diverse creators, which is Black and persons of colour. As a racialized member of this chamber, this has been a weak spot for our country, quite frankly. Our Canadian content creators need to have an applied focus that directs them to enhance and empower the voices so Black persons and persons of colour can see themselves reflected on what they are consuming on television, in film and on musical platforms when they are streaming. It is important for all Canadians to be able to see themselves in the content.
I need to address an issue that was raised repeatedly in the last Parliament and it has been raised repeatedly during this Parliament about this bogeyman of restricting freedom of expression. I have two broad responses to what I feel is an improper and incorrect attack on this legislation.
It is logically flawed to posit that this is a challenge to freedom of expression. It is also inaccurate in terms of the substance of the bill. It is a logical flaw.
On the logic of this kind of argument, the fact that we have been promoting, for decades now, through financial contribution requirements, things such as radio and television broadcasters, those promotion efforts would have restricted or diluted the creation of Canadian content as opposed to enhanced it.
We know for a fact that the enhancement has occurred by ensuring that broadcasters, in that physical and traditional context, are required to apply money and funds from their profits toward the creation of Canadian content. We have had, on the musical side, the Arkells and The Tragically Hip. We have had Rush and Drake from my city.
On the television side, we have had everything from the Beachcombers to Kim's Convenience and everything in between.
We do not get those great Canadian success stories without that applied directive to ensure there is financial enhancement in the industry by broadcasters to support creators. Therefore, with that simple logic, if this model were flawed, it would have diminished the amount of Canadian content as opposed to enhancing it, and the same reasoning applies here.
The same would apply for ensuring that online streaming companies are classified as broadcasters. What we will see, far from diminishing Canadian expression, is enhanced Canadian expression. What do I mean by that? It is going to compel the Amazon Primes, Netflix and the Spotifys of the world to ensure that they are making Canadian content discoverable and are contributing monetarily from their very healthy bottom lines, balance sheets and profits to the creation of more Canadian content. That is a good onto itself.
However, the argument on the challenge of freedom of expression is flawed even in terms of the bill itself. If there is one thing that changed between the last Parliament and this Parliament is that, although the framework of the bill is the same, and we heard this argument so many times in the 43rd Parliament, we went to great lengths to ensure that there would be multiple provisions, not just one, that stipulate that this bill was not about restricting freedom of expression.
The bill would not dictate what Canadians can see and do on social media. The bill explicitly excludes all user-creator content on social media platforms and streaming services. Those exclusions mean that the experience for users creating, posting and interacting with other user-generated content will not be impacted whatsoever. Multiple clauses in the legislation explicitly state that the regulations the CRTC imposes on platforms through the Broadcasting Act cannot infringe on Canadians' freedom of expression on social media. Provisions indicate that the act would not apply to uploaded content.
All regulatory requirements and obligations in the bill would only affect the broadcaster or the platform and never the user or the creator. For the individual Jane and John Doe in their basement seeking to upload something, create a music video or put something online about how they are playing the guitar, how their guitar level is increasing or singing a song and uploading it online, this does not speak to them. It speaks to the Amazons and Spotifys of the world, and that is an important delineation that has been emphasized by the text of the legislation.
Why is it important to support these creative industries? It is critical. Not only is it about the value, which I indicated at the outset of my comments, it is about the importance of telling Canadian stories particularly when we are threatened by a sea of non-Canadian stories from our neighbour south of the border. It is also important when we think about what Canadian creators, many of whom I am very privileged to represent in Parkdale—High Park, do for us as a nation.
During the pandemic, we heard extensively about the contributions of Canadian creators to Canadian society. When people were going through difficult times, when there were higher levels of anxiety and depression through lack of physical contact with one another, it was our Canadian creators who were there to support all of us, to tell stories and support us in some of our most troubling times as nation, literally since probably World War II.
Those creators are also economic contributors to Canada. It is not just the people who actually make the film, direct, act and produce the screenplay, it is not just the people picking up the instruments or microphone, it is a whole host of supplementary supports for the industry that contribute to the economic uplifting of Canadian society. For no other reason than the economic benefit, I would hope His Majesty's loyal opposition would support the bill for the economic productivity that stands to be gained by this type of legislation.
It is really important to look at the host of cultural creators who have lined up in support of this bill: The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, ACTRA, SOCAN. I will read what Alex Levine, the president of the Writers Guild of Canada, has to say. He says:
Private, English-language Canadian broadcasters have reduced their spending on Canadian television production every year for nearly a decade, while foreign streaming services have taken over more and more of the Canadian market. This threatens our whole industry, and the tens of thousands of jobs it supports. Canadian broadcasters have long been required to contribute to the culture and economy of this country. It’s time for global streamers profiting in Canada to be held to the same standards.
Mr. Levine is talking about levelling the playing field. It is a very simple concept. If something benefits from Canadian content and access to the Canadian market, it needs to contribute to the Canadian content it is benefiting from. It is as simple as that. By pursuing a level playing field and modernizing this legislation, we could bring the Broadcasting Act into the 21st century. For that reason, I hope every party in this chamber will support this legislation.
