Bill C-18 (Historical)

Online News Act

An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada

This enactment regulates digital news intermediaries to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contribute to its sustainability. It establishes a framework through which digital news intermediary operators and news businesses may enter into agreements respecting news content that is made available by digital news intermediaries. The framework takes into account principles of freedom of expression and journalistic independence.
The enactment, among other things,
(a) applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to specific factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses;
(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting those factors;
(c) specifies that the enactment does not apply in respect of “broadcasting” by digital news intermediaries that are “broadcasting undertakings” as those terms are defined in the Broadcasting Act or in respect of telecommunications service providers as defined in the Telecommunications Act ;
(d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;
(e) requires the Commission to exempt a digital news intermediary from the application of the enactment if its operator has entered into agreements with news businesses and the Commission is of the opinion that the agreements satisfy certain criteria;
(f) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting how the Commission is to interpret those criteria and setting out additional conditions with respect to the eligibility of a digital news intermediary for an exemption;
(g) establishes a bargaining process in respect of matters related to the making available of certain news content by digital news intermediaries;
(h) establishes eligibility criteria and a designation process for news businesses that wish to participate in the bargaining process;
(i) requires the Commission to establish a code of conduct respecting bargaining in relation to news content;
(j) prohibits digital news intermediary operators from acting, in the course of making available certain news content, in ways that discriminate unjustly, that give undue or unreasonable preference or that subject certain news businesses to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage;
(k) allows certain news businesses to make complaints to the Commission in relation to that prohibition;
(l) authorizes the Commission to require the provision of information for the purpose of exercising its powers and performing its duties and functions under the enactment;
(m) requires the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to provide the Commission with an annual report if the Corporation is a party to an agreement with an operator;
(n) establishes a framework respecting the provision of information to the responsible Minister, the Chief Statistician of Canada and the Commissioner of Competition, while permitting an individual or entity to designate certain information that they submit to the Commission as confidential;
(o) authorizes the Commission to impose, for contraventions of the enactment, administrative monetary penalties on certain individuals and entities and conditions on the participation of news businesses in the bargaining process;
(p) establishes a mechanism for the recovery, from digital news intermediary operators, of certain costs related to the administration of the enactment; and
(q) requires the Commission to have an independent auditor prepare a report annually in respect of the impact of the enactment on the Canadian digital news marketplace.
Finally, the enactment makes related amendments to other Acts.

Strong Borders Act

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, as I rise in debate for the first time in this 45th Parliament, I would like to present colleagues with some statistics about what a rare and unique privilege it is to serve in this place, if they will give me the floor.

Of the millions upon millions of people who have lived in Canada throughout its entire history, fewer than 5,000 individual Canadians have served as members of Parliament. Of that number, fewer than 450 have been women, and of that number, by my count anyway, fewer than 40 Canadian women in the history of our country have been chosen to serve as a member of Parliament for five or more terms.

On April 28, 2025, I was honoured to be re-elected by my constituents and joined the ranks of some of those giants, women like Agnes Mcphail, Flora MacDonald, Ellen Fairclough, Rona Ambrose, Sheila Copps and Alexa McDonough. The gravity and honour of standing here, once again, is hitting a little harder this time around.

I am here on behalf of, and thanks to, another special and unique group of people, the people of Calgary Nose Hill, who are unique and special in this particular area of Canadian history too. The people I represent, in a riding that has existed for decades, have only ever elected a woman into federal office. Prior to me, my predecessor, Diane Ablonczy, served as a member of Parliament in an even more select group: women who have served as members of Parliament for seven or more terms.

Getting here has meant that I have had to learn a lot of lessons: how to win primaries, the value of having my dogma challenged, how to earn the trust of my community and my colleagues, how to survive being in a government after an election loss and how to thrive in opposition, how to navigate leadership changes, which battles to pick and which ones to walk away from, but most importantly, how to be humble while refusing to let my voice be silenced.

With that, I would like to acknowledge the six other women in the 45th Parliament who are now part of the “been around for a hot minute and have seen some things” five terms or more club: the member for Carlton Trail—Eagle Creek, the member for Brossard—Saint-Lambert, the member for Vancouver Centre, the member for Algonquin—Renfrew—Pembroke, the member for Humber River—Black Creek and the member for Saanich—Gulf Islands.

I thank my husband Jeff, my family, my staff, my volunteers and the good people of Calgary Nose Hill, with a special and deeply profound thanks to Sean Schnell, his wife Leeta and their children Charlize and Easton for bringing me to this place today.

Colleagues, I pledge the true pledge of being a member of Parliament: to do my job, which is to hold the government to account to the best of my ability. Let us begin.

I rise today in debate on Bill C-2, a 160-page omnibus bill from the Liberal government that raises serious concerns about the capacity of the government to address several crises of its own making. These were not problems prior to the Liberal government taking office in 2015: a rapid influx of migrants that Canada's social and economic infrastructure could not sustain; an open and porous border; and an illegal drug production, trafficking and addiction crisis.

I would like to start with the issue of Canada's fentanyl crisis, because it is important context for new colleagues to understand how we got here. A decade of ultra-progressive policies juiced a deadly problem that really came into prevalence in late 2015. At that time, precisely the same time that the Canadian political landscape changed, Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau had a farther left platform, to put it mildly, than his predecessor government. In 2017, an ultra-left version of the NDP, led by the late premier John Horgan, formed government at the subnational level in the province of British Columbia, the region hardest hit by the drug.

Prior to 2015, right-of-centre governments favoured a crackdown on criminal activity related to the emerging problem of fentanyl, coupled with enhanced recovery programs for addicts. However, Trudeau's incoming government, as well as Horgan's in British Columbia, all had long-held beliefs that so-called harm reduction, taxpayer-funded hard drugs and the effective legalization of hard drug possession were superior public policy alternatives on hard drug crime to those of their predecessors on the political right. Between 2015 and 2023, these governments went on to usher in a dramatic shift away from government policy that focused on criminalizing hard drug production and trafficking.

At the federal level, the Liberal government expanded access to hard drug injection sites, ended mandatory minimum penalties for major hard drug offences and softened bail criteria for all crimes, including those related to the production and trafficking of hard drugs. A currently sitting Liberal member of Parliament even went as far as to table a bill that aimed to fully legalize all hard street drugs across the country.

Then, in 2021, British Columbia's NDP government formally applied for a subsection 56(1) exemption under Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, requesting permission to effectively legalize possession of hard drugs, including fentanyl. In early 2022, Trudeau's federal Liberal government approved the request and allowed for a three-year pilot program. The program was expansive. The government even went as far as to set guidelines that would have allowed recreational fentanyl to be legally provided to children. The results were deadly.

There are people across the aisle who will get their backs up on this situation, but it is the reason we have zombie-like people walking across the streets of urban Canada and rural Canada. Our mothers, our daughters, our husbands, everybody from every demographic has been touched by the crisis that was caused by these extremely failed, ill-sighted policies that literally everybody was telling the Liberals were wrong, but they persisted.

Today, we have this omnibus bill in front of us. As the Liberals did in the former Parliament with Bill C-63, the so-called online harms bill, this bill is trying to suggest to Canadians a false dichotomy: that Canadians have to choose between their civil liberties and fixing epic messes with deadly consequences that the Liberal government set up. That is a false dichotomy and something that this place should reject.

I am going to briefly talk about two components of the bill. I am going to talk about some of the border issues and immigration, and then I want to talk about the civil liberties component very briefly.

This bill is a missed opportunity, on the fentanyl and addiction crisis, to address the real problems of how we got here: the Liberals' catch-and-release bail policies. They could have tabled a bill on that, but they did not, so we are now forced to review this omnibus legislation without understanding whether or not the Liberals are going to address the true cause of this problem: the fact that they do not penalize people who produce these drugs.

The Liberals could have increased penalties for people who produce these drugs. As the leader of the Conservative Party said during the election, these are mass murderers, and they should be treated as such. The Liberals also failed to put in place compassionate measures that would allow for life-saving intervention for people who have lost agency due to addiction.

These are the measures that we need to actually stop the drug production crisis in Canada. Are there other things? Sure there are. Are there things in this bill that Parliament could look at? Sure, but again, the Liberals have purposely structured a bill where Canadians have to choose between their civil liberties and trying to fix a deadly mess that the Liberals made.

On immigration, here is a little history for colleagues who are new to this place. The Canadian consensus on immigration can be boiled down to this: Do not bring more people into the country than our social and economic infrastructure can handle. By that I mean our health care system, our education system, and our capacity to provide language acquisition and provide jobs and housing as well. That is the basic consensus that our pluralism is based on, because if people are housed, if they have access to work, if they have access to health care and if they can speak one of Canada's official languages, then pluralism can be maintained, but the Liberals broke that promise.

I remember that in 2016, first of all, the Liberal government essentially implied that I was racist for suggesting that the Liberals should not lift the visa requirement on Mexico, because there would be false asylum claims made. Guess what: It was like I was Cassandra, doomed to know the future and have the Liberals call me racist. Honestly, what did the Liberals have to do last year? They had to reverse the visa imposition on Mexico. Then there was the next Cassandra moment. I said that maybe we should not let people who have reached the safety of upstate New York illegally cross the border into Canada and then claim benefits here while their asylum claims, which will likely be rejected, linger for years in Canada's broken asylum system, which the Liberals broke.

I said that maybe we should close the loophole in the safe third country agreement. Once again, the implication was that Canada was anti-immigrant if we were to suggest that we restore order, balance and fairness. There are people who apply legally to come into Canada, who do everything right, are waiting for years and never get the chance to come here, or they want their children to come here. The government essentially rolled out the red carpet at Roxham. There was literally a red carpet with the RCMP pulling the luggage across the border and “#WelcomeToCanada”.

What do members think happened when the Liberals sent the message “#WelcomeToCanada” to people who were already in upstate New York? They enabled an industry of people. There were human traffickers telling people how to make their way into Canada. What happened was that our asylum system was broken. It was abused.

Now, the Liberals have this bill, which has a few minor provisions that would do a couple of things that I am concerned about. It would delegate more authority to the minister in vague ways, and it would delegate more responsibility into regulation. If there are problems with the system, why are they not just laying it out in this legislation to make it clear so that we will not have endless judicial appeals, which is also part of the problem here? People could appeal and appeal because too much authority would be put onto the minister, and there is vagueness and an endlessly changing regulatory structure. That is part of the problem here too. I need to look at this bill in more detail on those provisions to understand what is happening here.

There was the minister's performance in question period. She should get someone to practise with her. This is not going to get easier for her. Seriously, this is too big of an issue. She needs to be able to understand and explain why Canadians should vest more power in a minister who does not even know the numbers that are on her own website.

The bigger problem that I have with the immigration provisions in the bill is that they do not address the bigger problem that is facing Canada's immigration system right now, which is that the government does not track exits. Did members know that the government does not coordinate information to track when people leave the country? It does not publicly disclose when people who are on expired visas, or who have deportation orders, actually leave. There is no way for parliamentarians to look into the data to see whether the government has enabled people to leave the country when they have no legal right to be here.

What happens in that situation? First of all, it sends a message to the world that they can have all of the processing on the front end, but there is no consequence on the back end if they do not have a legal right to be in the country. It incentivizes people to come here because they know the system can be abused.

The second thing that happens is that it pushes people underground. It creates an underground economy. We have to have empathy for people who come to Canada because there is a promise of Canada. We cannot blame the housing crisis, the health care crisis and the jobs crisis on people who are drawn to our country and our pluralism by every promise that makes it good. We have to blame the Liberal government for failing the system so badly that people feel their only option is to go underground, into an underground economy where they live in slave-like working conditions.

That happens here in Canada. It happens because the Liberal government has failed so profoundly on this file with minister after minister for a decade. The fact that in this bill the Liberals did not have any sort of plan to departure-track, to coordinate information across departments that already gather this information, and to express to Canadians and people who are here on expired visas how they will enable them to leave the country is only going to exacerbate the problem, particularly with the vagueness in some of these provisions. That is a huge problem. Again, I do not understand why the Liberals would have put in this border component, and all of these missed opportunities and the immigration component with the following.

There are some pretty big poison pills when it comes to civil liberties that every Canadian should be concerned about. If passed, Bill C-2 would allow CSIS, police and peace officers to demand personal information from online service providers without a warrant, based only on vague suspicions of potential crimes or legal breaches based on any act of Parliament.

The Liberals today said that it is not personal information and we should not worry about it, but guess what. Whether or not I use an online service, or where I use an online service, if I depart from an online service, start an online service or use an online service for an amount of time, everything that Bill C-2 says it would do involves my personal information. That is none of the government's business, certainly not without a warrant. There has to be a line drawn here.

The government has severely under resourced our information-gathering departments. Sure, it takes time to get a warrant, but most police departments, after the “defund the police” movement, are so underfunded that they do not have cybercrime units. Now the government is trying to shortcut this by taking away the civil liberties of law-abiding Canadians, and that is not right. At the end of the day, like anything else the government does when it comes to removing civil liberties, it is law-abiding Canadians who get punished, not the criminals.

When I read this bill, I see a road map of ways for criminals to avoid being tracked on where they could legally do this snooping stuff. What is going to happen? Hardened criminals who understand how to get around the system are going to get around the system, and then a government, which unlawfully used the Emergencies Act, froze Canadians' bank accounts, introduced censorship bills Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, and introduced Bill C-63, wants to insert itself. Can members imagine if the Liberals were to retable Bill C-63, with all of their suspicion of hate crime stuff? That bill would couple with this bill to form a mega Voltron of censorship and oppression. I am not being hyperbolic. The government has, over and over again, at every opportunity, taken away Canadians' freedom of speech. Every bill that it has passed has been designed to control speech. My constituents should not have to make that choice.

I am going to bet I know what happened with this bill. Some of these departments have had this policy sitting on the shelf for literally years and more savvy ministers have said, “Not today.” More savvy PMOs have said no, but there is a green minister, a green Prime Minister and a perfect cover, which is the fentanyl crisis. Some bureaucrats said that this is harmonizing with other things and that it is not going to have a big implication on Canadian civil liberties, and these guys fell for it. They did not politically question this. They did not think about what was in the best interests of their constituents.

How do I know that? The Liberals did not put a charter statement in for this. I cannot wait to see that charter statement. It is going to be dance, dance, kitty, dance, I am sure of it. I am positive, because the information that I talked about is personal information. Even if this bill passes, I guarantee it will be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court.

It is not just that. My colleagues have talked about Canada Post opening mail. Was Canada Post consulted on this provision? I heard it was not. My colleagues heard that Canada Post found out about this after the bill was tabled. How are Canada Post employees going to deal with opening up fentanyl envelopes? That is new. What about the telco companies that this provision would affect? There are things in the bill that give the government unfettered access into telecommunications companies. I am no fan of Canada's telcos' oligopoly, but where we can agree to agree is that I do not want the Liberal government further inserting itself into the management of Canada's telecommunications companies.

There is another concerning component as well, which I saw this morning. The International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group is sounding the alarm about provisions in Bill C-2 with respect to powers to allow the government to request information from foreign entities. This raises an important question: Will the government allow for reciprocal requests from foreign governments? Let us say Bill C-63 were to pass, too. Even if it does not, Bill C-2 can have these snooping provisions and would let foreign governments reciprocate on snooping provisions with all the foreign influence stuff that we have had without a foreign agent registry under this geopolitical situation. The fact that there is nothing in the bill that says what this means is crazy.

Also, the government has not shown Canadians any specific situation, evidence or circumstance in granular detail about why we should be giving up our civil liberties to a government that unlawfully used the Emergencies Act and imposed draconian censorship bills, which resulted in news bans in this country. I will not do it. I think the one thing that all of my colleagues from all opposition parties can agree on is this: There are elements in this bill that are worthy of further study that might help fix the mess that the Liberals have made, but we should not have to choose between civil liberties and keeping our country safe.

Reference to Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs

[Karen Vecchio, Conservative, Elgin—Middlesex—London, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to stand in the House to talk about SDTC and the green slush fund, because this gives us an opportunity to look at what is happening here in Canada. My friend from York—Simcoe talked about the way the government is working, or not working, I should say, or is working in a bad direction. My speech focuses on where the loss of trust is, how we have this loss of trust and why we have this loss of trust.

Over the last nine years, we see there have been so many things that have made Canadians, who voted for Liberals in 2015, say that they cannot trust the government anymore. The green slush fund is just another example of why Canadians have lost trust and hope.

What is the green slush fund and why was it created in the first place? When we look at Sustainable Development Technology Canada, we have to look at its mandate. Its mandate was to help Canadian companies develop and deploy sustainable technologies by delivering critical funding support at every stage of the journey. This sounds great. It is something we need, and for decades we did have it.

In the last six years, there was $836 million spent on green start-ups. I am not against any of that, but the issue I have here is there were also 186 projects that had conflicts of interest. When I talk about loss of trust in the government, that is where I really want to focus. We, as a party and as opposition, have been asking for these documents for months.

Last December, in 2023, when the whistle-blowers came forward and talked about what was happening and how this money was being distributed, things started happening. We saw a freezing of the slush fund. The money is not available, which, in turn, is causing a lot of problems for people who are actually running legitimate businesses, who are not able to get the payments they expected and are not able to get the assistance from the government that would help them. However, because the government was allowing people to be eligible for truly ineligible reasons, those payments did not move forward.

We can talk about the conflicts of interest. We can talk about whether it was the CEO or board chair, but we can look at the conflicts of interest that were occurring in SDTC as well. This all goes back to looking at accountability and transparency, which is something we have seen very little of over the last nine years. For a Prime Minister who was going to have sunshine and said that everything was going to be fine and that they were going to be clear, accountable and transparent, which is what he was running on in 2015, that is exactly the opposite of what we see here in 2024.

The loss of hope is one of the biggest challenges we are having here in Canada. When I had this opportunity to speak on this motion, I spoke to my friend from Oshawa. He was talking about what we can talk about, because he was looking at the censorship issues here in Canada. There are Bill C-63 and some of the other things the government has come out with, like with Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, which are just a whole bunch of bills that come together that continue to impact Canadians negatively.

My friend from Oshawa was talking about censorship. I thought I would talk about trust and hope and how this is just another example of how Canadians have lost trust in the government and have lost hope for the future. When we look at the data, it is very clear. We see the data between 2014 and 2024. People ask where the hope is and what can they see for their futures. As a mom of five, and I am very proud of being a mom of five, I am now watching my children, who are between the ages of 21 and 30, asking what the world is going to look like for them. How are they going to get ahead? I will add more to that.

I think it comes down to something very simple. If we look as of 11 a.m. today, we had $1.356 trillion in debt here in Canada. This number makes me very queasy, knowing that just 10 years ago, under the Harper government in 2014, our debt was $648 million. That is $648 million compared to $1.3 billion in nine years, which is just absolutely ludicrous. We know that is just wasteful spending and unaccountable spending as well.

Things like the current number of people working in Canada and the GDP are all data points we need to look at when we are talking about the economy and why we are talking about things not working. If we do not have a strong economy, everything starts falling apart. We have to look at the economy as a piece of this puzzle that has created so many drastic problems for people. On employment specifically, we have seen a decrease in employment. In Canada, as of October 2024, we currently have 33,977,000 people working, which is 60.6% of the population.

Just 10 years ago, we had 61.6% of the population working, which was over 28,930,000. This matters because at the end of the day, it is those people who are employed and paying taxes on their employment or pensions or whatever it may be, who are putting back into the system. It is really important that we have people out there working because it also adds to our GDP.

I had a great conversation about this with the member for Wellington—Halton Hills. We were talking about what the GDP looks like and why it is important to understand the GDP-to-population ratio. When I talk about the number of people working being down to 60.6% from 61.6% just a decade ago, we then have to look at where our GDP is, and that is where these numbers become astounding. I compared the numbers for Canada, looking at 2014 to 2024, but also looked at GDP in the United States. I am not looking at total GDP, but looking at the increase because that is giving us the hope for prosperity. When people see an increase in our GDP that looks healthy, they know that there is hope for their businesses, for their future, for their employment and for their children's future as well.

In 2014, we saw a 2.87% GDP growth rate. In the United States, it was very similar at 2.52%. Today, when we are looking at the data, it is not a full year, but in 2024, our GDP growth rate right now is 1.34%, compared to the U.S. at 2.77%.

If we want to look at entire years, in 2023, we can look at Canada at 1.25% compared to the U.S. at 2.89% in 2023. When GDP growth rate is down, that is when people start losing great hope. What are they going to do when it comes to employment? How are their businesses going to survive? In the last few weeks, we have had many discussions with the people in my riding talking about how they are going to survive if we cannot have good public policy and legislation and the United States is talking about putting a 25% tariff on items coming from Canada. For people within my constituency, the moment that was announced, the phone started ringing. In my riding and in many areas of Canada, we are exporting 80% of our goods.

I spoke earlier to a gentleman who builds scoreboards, so we can watch some of those great NCAA scoreboards and know that they were built in London, Ontario. Eighty per cent of his markets are U.S. high schools and universities. If there is a 25% tariff, his business will close, so we have to make sure that the government is doing the right thing. That is what we have seen over the last week and a half.

Down in the United States, they talked about our leader, but, honestly, looking at the current government on its last leg, or actually on its last toe, it is really hard to know that it is doing the negotiating for the future of Canada when we do not feel confident in our own economy and our own strength. Therefore, when we are sending team Canada down to the United States, we need to make sure team Canada has some very strong representatives from the Conservative Party. When we become the government, we need to make sure that we have a very strong relationship so people like Jeff in my riding do not lose their entire business because of bad policies and relationships with the United States. It really comes down to the importance of making sure we have those trade relationships, making sure we have good policy, and making sure that our economy will continue to have drive.

Going from those GDP numbers, we have to look at other issues. Here in Canada, we are currently at a birth rate of 1%, which does not replace our Canadian population. We need 2.1% for replacement. For me, I step back and say that I have done my job; I have five kids and I am doing really well. I step back and think, why are other people not having children? For me, it is pretty darn simple. I can sit there and look at my own children. My son, who is 28 years old, is running his own business and I absolutely love what he is doing, but it is difficult starting. As a starter-business owner, he can do a great job, but then he also has to pay for his rent and his food and everything else. For him, it would probably be better right now to get a part-time job and have his actual career on the side so that he can pay for the groceries and pay for rent.

The way that this economy is right now, when people are paying almost $2,000 a month for rent and utilities, it is darn hard to get ahead. I feel bad when I say to my kids that I paid $220 a month in 1991 when I was in university to live in the worst place ever in a London residence when I was at Western University.

I have friends whose children are paying $1,600 a month just to live in a four-bedroom house or apartment. Mine was $220 a month. We have to look at the debt load being applied to our children.

We are seeing a rate of 1% increase. We know that the cost of student debt has increased. In 2014, when people were graduating, it was about $12,800 for student debt. Now in 2024, it is way over $30,000. We are not using the data on the rent increases that we have seen on many of our students who are using the food banks.

Why are we having these issues? It is because we have a government that does not spend wisely and continues to increase our debt for future generations to try to dig out of.

When I am looking at the cost to our students, 10 years ago student debt was a little over $12,000. Now I look at students in 2024 with a $30,000 debt load trying to rent an apartment starting at $2,000. Can members imagine trying to pay off student debt, get food in the cupboards and actually pay the rent. If they want a car and insurance, well, holy cow, they would need to be lucky.

I look at the people who live in my riding, which is very rural. People need a car to drive from home to work. There is no public transportation, nor is there really a business plan for that at this time because of the population and how few people would be using that.

We have to look at our children today, who have these exorbitant costs, whether they are paying taxes, and we have this great debt of $1.3 trillion, or whether they are paying for food, and the cost of inflation. It is very difficult for our children to move forward.

I am going to talk about my son who is hopefully going to be a plumber soon. He had taken a few years off school and then decided to go into plumbing. The opportunities for him in plumbing are endless. People say, “Hey, you're an apprentice? Great, we'd love to take you on.” We are looking, all the time, for people to have these opportunities.

I think of my son and the fact is that he will probably have a job in about six months. Fantastic, but I bet it will take a long time for him to actually get out of my basement. After becoming a plumber, how would he pay to get into a house or to rent something, when he still has to buy his food and all of those things? He will be very fortunate because he is not going to have student debt.

That is very unlikely for the majority of the population in this country. He will still have the extraordinary costs of buying tools and supplies. Plumbing is not a cheap job to start off with, so starting his own business will be very very difficult.

Once again, the idea of being able to say, “I have got a job. I have graduated from school. I am going to go forward. I am going to get married. I am going to have children. I am going to have that white picket fence,” those dreams that we talked about in the 1980s, they are so gone for this group of people that are part of Generation Z.

It is going to be difficult because when we look at productivity, it is one of our greatest challenges. We are going through a mental health crisis. I urge everybody to read this book that I have read called, The Anxious Generation. It is talking about Gen Z and what they are going through. I love to read it and ask myself, what am I doing, and how am I screwing up my kids?

I was listening to one colleague last night who talked about Dallas and Dynasty. He was talking about the government being very much like that, and having amnesia. Those were good years.

I think of the stress that my own children and all of their friends are looking at in 2024. When I graduated from university, my debt load was probably about $6,000 or $7,000, very minimal compared to what people are going out with now. I was also able to buy a house when I was 25 years old for $122,000. I was also able to get a job and, this is the best part, that paid $12 an hour, but that was okay because it actually paid the bills. That $12 an hour, back in 1993, after graduating, paid the bills. It paid for my house.

Now we have lost hope. We have lost hope for this future. I look at my five kids and I love them to pieces. I do not know how many of them will be moving home when it comes to trying to find affordable living.

That is very difficult for me as a parent, thinking about what I did or did not do to set them up properly. It is not that I do not think I have set them up properly. They have been in great school systems. They have had amazing teachers over the years and amazing opportunities, but when it comes to them actually stepping outside the house, going and buying their own things, trying to create their own credit limit and trying to rent a place, mom and dad are very necessary. That is what we are seeing with this generation: Those in generation Z are really having to depend on their families, their parents. We have a generation of people, my generation, who are not only paying for their own bills but also helping their children out. The children cannot afford to pay for bills right now, with the cost of living and with their own student debts. This is something that we did not see 20 and 30 years ago. We now see that hope lost.

Those are the things that I think of when we are looking at the green slush fund and we are looking at where the government is and asking about what has gone wrong. We can say that it is poor direction, poor administration and poor ideas. There are ideas where we are throwing out money, but we should ask what we are actually sometimes getting in return. We have talked about very many social programs. Some have had a positive impact, and some have had a negative impact. I would really love to see what the cost rationale is for some of these things. For every dollar spent, are we actually leveraging a better Canada, or are we just throwing our money away? Those are the concerns I have.

We look at the birth rate of 1%; we are trying to get a new workforce in this country and not being able to do that. We look at our extravagant student debt load. We look at the rate of people being employed in Canada, which is less than 60% right now; many of those are people paying bills so that other people can have benefits. We are looking at our GDP being at less than 1.25% right now. These things do not give us a lot of hope. They do not give the businesses that are trying to get into business more hope either.

That is why I wanted to talk at the last minute on the green slush fund and what it has done to start-ups. We have seen start-ups that have had to drop 30% of their labour force because what they were doing with the government stopped working. Because of the failure of the government on this technology program, which had been existing for over 20 years, we are now seeing technology companies having to decrease. It has actually taken away the competitive nature that was in place for so many years when it comes to technology in Canada. We have taken that away.

Those are some of the greatest concerns that I have moving forward. In the last 20 minutes, I have spoken about how we have seen nine years of the government creating greater debt and less hope for the next generation. We have seen a lot of stress. I do not see it getting better under the government.

We have talked about there needing to be an election. As everybody knows, I plan on retiring. If there is an election tomorrow, I am praying that we win with a Conservative majority. At the end of the day, we need to ensure that we have good programs and fiscal responsibility to get on track. These are things that I have great concerns about. I do not know whether that will be the case if we continue under the government for the next year that we are scheduled for. I can see that our GDP will only continue to decline, our debt will only increase and our hope will only decrease as well.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, it is always an honour to rise on behalf of the outstanding constituents of Oshawa and to speak to the question of privilege. I just want to take the opportunity as well to wish members of the House and my constituents in Oshawa a very Merry Christmas. I do not know whether I will have an opportunity to rise in the House again before the break, but certainly we need some more Christmas spirit around here. I think the best Christmas gift we could get the people of Oshawa would be a carbon tax election, because the government is not worth the cost or the corruption.

My speech this evening is going to be more or less about censorship, disinformation and misinformation. The Liberal government is moving down a spiral of authoritarianism. It is a very deceptive government that is definitely not about transparency as it originally promised it would be. It is a government using every single legislative tool to censor and to control.

Around the world, government censorship is constantly being used to silence opposing opinions, suppress transparency and accountability, and consolidate power. We see this form of government censorship in several countries: Russia, China, North Korea and, yes, Canada. After nine years of the NDP-Liberal government, we are witnessing a new level of government censorship more than ever before in Canada. The issue today is about contempt of Parliament and about fraud.

The government's censorship threatens the very foundations of our democracy. Without the ability to demand production of documents, speak our mind, express our views and challenge the status quo, we are left with nothing but the hollow illusion of freedom. The government censorship we are witnessing here today is not about protecting Canadians from harm or ensuring public safety. Instead it is about silencing dissent, shutting down debate and consolidating power. It is about covering up corruption and fraud.

With respect to the question of privilege, we are addressing government censorship regarding the failure to produce documents ordered by the House on the scandal involving Sustainable Development Technology Canada, otherwise known as the Liberal billion-dollar green slush fund. However, while the power of the House is supposed to be supreme, the Prime Minister's personal department, the Privy Council Office, decided to execute the order by telling departments to send in documents and censor them through redaction to cover up corruption and to cover up fraud.

This form of government censorship completely breaches a member's privilege because the order from the House did not say to redact. The government has opted to defy the House and to censor information in the SDTC documents at every single step of the way, as it does not want Canadians to know that through the green slush fund, $400 million has gone to Liberal insiders. It may be twice that amount because the Auditor General could not complete the full audit.

The scandal as well, it is really important to recognize, compromises two current cabinet ministers and one former cabinet minister. I would like to say that it is a surprise that the government would behave in this manner, but based on the government's track record, government censorship and fraud are nothing but the expected. In other words, for the government, it is business as usual.

Perhaps this is a very good time for my colleagues to talk a little bit about a history lesson. Remember the Liberal sponsorship scandal? The last time the Liberals were in power, they funnelled $40 million to their friends and orchestrated a sophisticated kickback scheme. Then they got caught at fraud, corruption and cover-ups.

The best predictor of future behaviour, I would suggest, is past behaviour. Is the SDTC scandal part of the latest Liberal kickback scandal? Where did the money go? This one scandal is at least 10 times greater than the sponsorship scandal. It is another in a long list of scandals that the Liberals are trying to cover up through censorship.

I should probably define what I mean by censorship. Censorship is “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” I would suggest “politically unacceptable” is why the Liberal-NDP government champions censorship. I should probably define a few other terms. Misinformation is “the inadvertent spread of false information without intent to harm”. Disinformation is “false information designed to mislead others and is deliberately spread with the intent to confuse fact and fiction.”

Another word is a controversial new term, malinformation, used to describe the NDP-Liberal government, a “term for information which is based on fact, but removed from its original context in order to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” In other words, malinformation is “true but inconvenient” for the government and its narrative.

Under the guise of combatting disinformation and hate speech, the government has implemented policies that give it the power to silence voices, censor information and withhold documents that do not conform to its own woke ideological agenda. This censorship is spreading across Canada, through our institutions, not just here in the House of Commons.

We saw this last week when independent journalist Ezra Levant was arrested for simply filming and reporting on a pro-Hamas rally occurring in his own neighbourhood. Instead of arresting provocative pro-Hamas supporters who spewed hate, celebrating genocide while chanting “from the river to the sea”, an independent member of the press was arrested for simply doing his job, arrested by the very police who have sworn to protect his charter rights.

We wonder why Canadians are questioning whether this is the country they grew up in. When a Jewish man gets arrested by Toronto police in his own neighbourhood while supporting a vigil for families whose loved ones were massacred and kidnapped on October 7, while members of the hateful mob are allowed to continue their mockery of the victims' suffering, we have to ask ourselves why the government condones this hateful behaviour, censors first-hand accounts of cruel anti-Semitism and supports police who discriminate. When governments and our institutions condone this behaviour, it is as if they give a stamp of approval, and that definitely is not okay.

What about the government's history of pushing through authoritative legislation? Let us take a look at that. Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, according to the NDP-Liberals, aims to modernize the Broadcasting Act. However, it harms Canadian digital creators by limiting their services and ability to reach global audiences. It also allows the government boundless powers to regulate digital content and gives it the authority to control what Canadians can and cannot access online.

This is a direct assault on the freedoms of expression and access to information that have flourished in this digital age. Instead of letting Canadians choose for themselves what to watch and listen to, the government seeks to impose its own narrative, prioritizing state-approved content over independent voices and diverse viewpoints. Our young, bright Canadian content creators are being stifled. If other jurisdictions also decide to put forward legislation like this, it will mean Canadian content will be a lower priority for the rest of the world and that could damage our entertainment exports.

The government's censorship does not stop there. Bill C-18, the Online News Act, also allows the government to get in the way of what people can see and share online. This bill requires Internet companies to distribute royalties to newspapers whose content is shared on a site. It demonstrates the government choosing to side with large corporate media while shutting down small, local and independent news, as well as giving far too much power to the government to regulate without limitation. As a result, local and independent media outlets that might challenge the government's narrative are left vulnerable, and those that conform are rewarded.

Common-sense Conservatives believe we need to find a solution in which Canadians can continue to freely access news content online, in addition to fairly compensating Canadian news outlets. However, when we offered amendments to the bill that would address these several issues, the NDP and the Liberals voted them down.

Bill C-63 is another testament to this government's continuous commitment to censorship. The online harms act would create costly censorship bureaucracy that would not make it easier for people experiencing legitimate online harassment to access justice. Instead, it would act as a regulatory process that would not start for years and would happen behind closed doors where big-tech lobbyists could pull the strings.

The common-sense Conservative alternative to the online harms act is Bill C-412, proposed by my colleague from Calgary Nose Hill. It would keep Canadians safe online without infringing on their civil liberties. It would give Canadians more protections online through existing regulators and the justice system, and would outline a duty of care for online operators to keep kids safe online while prohibiting a digital ID and giving parents more tools.

For another outrageous example of withholding documents and censoring information, let us not forget the cover-up at the Winnipeg lab. The Liberals allowed scientists loyal to the Chinese Communist Party to work at our most secure lab. The Liberals gave them a Canadian taxpayer-funded salary and allowed them to send dangerous pathogens back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where they work on gain-of-function research. When exposed, the Liberals, whom we know admire the basic dictatorship of China, let these scientists escape the country without proper investigation. When Parliament asked for these documents, the Liberals actually took their own Liberal Speaker to court and then censored our ability to disclose those documents by calling an early election. We still have not found out what happened there.

On top of censoring Parliament, let us not forget about the NDP-Liberal government's track record of censoring individual expression. We have seen countless individuals, physicians, scientists and organizations being punished for simply speaking out against the current government's policies. The government froze bank accounts. People were labelled as promoting hate speech and disinformation, or as conspiracy theorists, racists and misogynists, by their own Prime Minister.

We were warned that this could happen. In one of his final interviews, esteemed scientist Carl Sagan noted, “We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces.”

Who is running science and technology in a democracy if the people do not know anything about it? We have seen this technocracy weaponized by governments during the COVID pandemic through various unjustifiable mandates and government censorship surrounding medical research. Now, the new head of the Food and Drug Administration in the United States, Marty Makary, has said on the record that the greatest perpetrator of misinformation during the pandemic was the United States government, and it is the same here in Canada.

The weaponization of medical research is not just an American issue. Dr. Regina Watteel, a Ph.D. in statistics, has written, an excellent exposé on the rise of Canadian hate science. Her books expose how the Liberal government, through repeated grants from CIHR, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, hired Dr. David Fisman, a researcher for hire from the University of Toronto medical school, to manipulate COVID statistics to support a failing government policy.

He was touted as an expert, but his only expertise was manipulating statistics to support government overreach. His sham studies were used to justify some of the most draconian COVID policies in the world and were quoted extensively by the Liberal-friendly media. Any criticism of Fisman's fraudulent statistical analysis has been shut down and censored. Again, this is a Canadian example of a result that Carl Sagan warned us about decades ago: the fall into technocracy, where government-sanctioned expert opinion trumps hard scientific data.

Sadly, the government's censorship has now extended to our judicial systems and other institutions, including the Parole Board of Canada.

While the Liberal justice minister brags about appointing 800 judges out of the 957 positions, we can see the soft-on-crime consequences of his woke ideological agenda. We saw an outrageous example of this last week when the French and Mahaffy families desired to participate in the parole hearing of their daughters' brutal murderer. Locally, Lisa Freeman, a constituent in Oshawa and the inspiration behind my private member's bill, Bill C-320, was recently informed by the Parole Board of Canada that the axe murderer who brutally murdered her father while on parole at the time will be subject to a closed-door review.

In the past, Ms. Freeman has been denied her rights as a registered victim and, as a result, has been continually revictimized, only this time by the very institutions that should be putting her mental health and safety and the safety of victims first. Attending and meaningfully participating in an in-person hearing to deliver a victim statement is not only fair and reasonable, but well within Ms. Freeman's rights, as per the Canadian Victims Bill of Rights under the right of participation. It is crucial that Ms. Freeman be able to express the emotional pain and turmoil the murder of her father caused and continues to cause. She also deserves to be able to gauge for herself the accountability of the offender. This is something she has previously been unable to ascertain.

The brutal murder of her father has not only vastly impacted her life and the lives of her loved ones, but also continues to cause post-traumatic stress, which is exacerbated by the complete lack of care by the Parole Board of Canada for her rights as a victim. It is completely unacceptable that Ms. Freeman is once again being censored by the Parole Board of Canada as they plan to make a closed-door decision regarding the offender's continuation of day parole and full parole without holding a hearing.

It is shameful that the NDP-Liberal government seems to care more about censoring victims than keeping repeat offenders off the streets. What they do not understand is that government censorship does not fulfill the requirement of protecting people from harm in society. Instead, government censorship is the harm to society. It threatens our fundamental democratic values, which we should be championing. To quote the famous author, George Orwell, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

The Marxist communist Vladimir Lenin once said, “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

More and more we are seeing these quotes and Marxist ideas implemented under the NDP-Liberal government. We must stand up for the idea that truth is not something that can be determined by the state. We must insist that Canadian citizens, not censoring politicians, should be the ones who decide what information they believe, what opinions and values they hold and with what content they engage. We must continue to reject the government's idea that censorship is the solution to every problem, though it may be the solution to their problems, and instead embrace the idea that freedom of expression and freedom of conscience are part of the solution of a more free and prosperous Canadian society.

Justice Potter Stewart said, “Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritative regime”. That is what we see with the tired, divisive, Liberal government of today. Canadians have indeed lost confidence in the weak Prime Minister and the corrupt Liberal Party. If we allow government to censor the rights of the people's elected representatives and the Internet; squash individuality, opinions and expression; and curtail our freedom of movement, then indeed the Marxists have won the ideological war.

In closing, Canada is not the greatest country in the world simply because I say it is. Canada is the greatest country in the world because we care and fight for our fundamental, democratic values. We have a history of that people from around the world in other countries would love to have, so these values must not be taken for granted. When we, in Oshawa, sing our national anthem, we take “The True North strong and free” to heart.

The current SDTC scandal, with the refusal of the NDP-Liberal government to release the requested unredacted documents to the people's representatives, threatens the very essence of our democracy, which generations of Canadians died to protect and must be respected and fought for. At our cenotaphs, service clubs and in the sacred House of Commons, the people's voices will be heard.

Canadians are listening today, and they have a core identity. We are proud Canadians. We are not the first post-national state. When people ask us which country we admire the most, we do not say that we admire the basic dictatorship of China. We say we admire Canada.

Hopefully, like most things that criticize the government, such as this speech, the Liberal-NDPs do not decide to censor it. Let us see what they have to say.

[Colin Carrie, Conservative, Oshawa, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I do not like asking questions about this, but the trend of the NDP-Liberal government is toward greater obstruction and censorship. We are looking at the censorship bills Bill C-11, Bill C-18 and Bill C-63, and we cannot forget the Winnipeg lab. Do members remember when we were requesting those documents and the Prime Minister went as far as to take the Speaker to court? He actually called an election to keep Canadians from having that knowledge. I am extremely worried about the precedent we would set if we do not challenge the government on this point.

Could my colleague please talk about the importance of precedent? Enough is enough for the Canadian people with the government. Let us call an election.

[Melissa Lantsman, Conservative, Thornhill, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the member is not going to like what I say about this, but we have been entirely consistent that the solution to bad speech is not necessarily to stop speech. That is what we have seen from the Liberals with Bill C-11, Bill C-63 and, to some extent, Bill C-18. The solution is both more speech and having the consequences in place to actually arrest people who break the law. There are plenty of laws that currently exist in our Criminal Code that have been broken time after time and that would create more civil rest in this country rather than the unrest, the rioting and the behaviour that we have been seeing in the streets. I do not think the solution is stopping Canadians from having their point of view; it is stopping the lawbreakers from breaking the law.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, it will be a real joy to see all our Olympians, of whom we are so proud.

I will get back to the green slush fund scandal, which began with Navdeep Bains, who was then the minister of industry, science and economic development. He was involved in some questionable things. I want to read from one of the newspapers about the time when he stepped down:

...Bains was implicated in a questionable real estate transaction, when former Brampton mayor Linda Jeffrey's chief of staff [Mr.] Punia, shared confidential details about a land purchase with Bains and former Liberal MP Raj Grewal. When Brampton council learned about the behaviour it sent details of a third-party investigation into the matter to the RCMP, because the force was already looking into Grewal's activities involving chronic gambling in Ottawa while he served as an MP.

The City eventually paid about $1 million extra for the land it was trying to acquire, after a group of local businessmen with ties to the Liberals purchased it, then flipped it to the City, after Punia had passed on details of the original offer the City had planned to make for the property, which was owned by the Province.

There is no evidence Bains has any ties to the [business]....

Just because we could not find evidence does not mean that nothing happened. The article continues:

Grewal was charged in September by the RCMP with five counts of fraud and breach of trust for alleged misuse of his constituency office budget while he was an MP, after an extensive investigation.

This was the kind of people who started the fund and then went forward with it. It then got a bit worse, because in 2019, the current Minister of Environment and Climate Change came along. He was one of the people who approved the money for the fund in 2021. He was a member of cabinet, which approved the billion dollars going into the slush fund.

I have one other thing to say about Navdeep Bains. The article reads:

Bains was in the news again when questions were raised last year about his father's involvement with individuals implicated in a Fort Erie Gurdwara scandal. There is no evidence Bains has any ties with the plan and he denies any link.... The Sikh temple had sponsored three priests from India who were given special visas by Ottawa. It turned out the Gurdwara was not even operating and the three men disappeared after arriving in Canada.

We do not have any evidence of wrongdoing, but there is always suspicion. Here we are again with the same thing because the Minister of Environment and Climate Change was part of the cabinet that approved the billion dollars. One of the board members was a lady named Andrée-Lise Méthot. She was the founder and managing partner of Cycle Capital, a company that the Minister of Environment and Climate Change is invested in.

Section 119 of the Criminal Code says that no holder of public office, for example someone like the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, can take an action, for example giving a billion dollars to a slush fund that would be of benefit for themselves, for example his investment in Cycle Capital, which tripled its value through the money given to it from the green slush fund.

I certainly think that when the RCMP finishes its investigation and is able to see the documents, it could be that the Minister of Environment and Climate Change will be back in his orange pajamas again. He, as we know, was a convicted felon. In 2001 he was charged and convicted. He served a year's probation plus 100 hours of community service and paid $1,000 of restitution.

This is the calibre of corruption in the Liberal government and cabinet. It is no wonder things go awry when these kinds of people are involved. The Liberals have been trying to suggest that they need to stand up for the charter rights of Canadians. I certainly wish they would, because they have not.

One is what their record says they are, and if we look at the record of the Liberal government on the matter, we see the chill the Liberals have put on freedom of speech in this country with Bill C-11, the censorship bill. With Bill C-18, the freedom of the press was compromised. Bill C-63, the online harms bill that I just talked about, once again would violate everyone's charter rights happily.

Then there is freedom of religion. I spoke about this before, but since then, things have escalated even further in our country. Have members heard about the persecution that Hindus are facing in Brampton? People were out with knives. There were violent attacks on temples. The government has done nothing about it. Liberals wring their pearls and say that it is unacceptable, but they have done nothing to ensure that the rule of law in this country is enforced.

What is the point of having rules to protect Canadians if they are not enforced, and why has the federal government, which has the highest authority to make sure that rights are protected, done nothing? A hundred or more Christian churches were burned in our country, and again, it is crickets from the Liberals on this. It goes on and on. What has happened to Jewish Canadians is heartbreaking. They have been constantly harassed, and their synagogues and their businesses are vandalized. They have been given death treats and nothing has been done. Certainly freedom of religion in this country is in serious jeopardy.

Furthermore, there is discrimination that happens. We are supposed to be free from discrimination in this country, but it happens even in the Liberal benches. The Liberals are discriminating based on age. They decided to give seniors who are older than 75 more money than the seniors who are between 65 and 75. Similarly, there are violations in the minority language rights; the government has been proven several times in court to not have done what it should have done to protect the minority language rights of Canadians.

Let me sidebar for a moment and say how proud I am to announce that Sarnia—Lambton has the official francophone designation of Ontario.

I am very happy. I worked hard with the francophones of Sarnia—Lambton and I am very proud of our work.

The other argument we will hear from the Liberal benches is that the RCMP does not want the documents. Is it really the case that the RCMP does not want to see evidence of potential crime? The whistle-blower was clear that there was criminality going on, and it is possible that it was with more than one minister. I talked about the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, but actually there is also the current minister who was overseeing the Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund.

There is an agreement that says the board members had to disclose any conflicts of interest to ISED, so the minister would have known about them and not acted. Perhaps that is what would be uncovered when the documents are released. Certainly there is an issue there.

I think that what happened in the slush fund is just another example, and we keep racking up dollars. I think about the number of scandals that have happened in the government since I came here in 2015. This one is $400 million. There was the $372 million the Liberals gave to Frank Baylis to make ventilators when he had never made ventilators before, and they never ended up using any of them. It goes on and on with the different scandals. There was the WE Charity scandal and the huge waste of money there.

Canadians are finding the current scandal particularly obscene, at a time when the number of people going to food banks is the highest it has ever been. There are also 1,400 tent encampments in Ontario alone, and they are spread across the country. At a time when people are struggling, cannot afford food and cannot afford to feed their family and heat their house, there is an incredible waste of money and people lining the pockets of insiders. It is just unacceptable.

When I look at some of the previous things that have happened, I ask myself what we need to do to put in place some accountability so that this sort of thing does not happen. What kind of protection can we provide to whistle-blowers? If it is going on in one department, what is going on in all the other funds?

It is said that the fish rots from the head. The Prime Minister has already been violating ethics laws in the billionaire island fiasco, and he is also under suspicion in the SNC-Lavalin scandal for pressuring a criminal prosecution, which the RCMP is investigating. In the WE Charity scandal, the Prime Minister took an action, by awarding money to the organization, that benefited himself and his family: his brother, his mother and his wife. As I said before, under subsection 119(1) of the Criminal Code, that is illegal. It is not just a mistake.

Therefore we really have to clean up the government, and it does not look to me like we can change the spots on the leopards. Over here on the Conservative benches, we believe in the rule of law. We believe in transparency. We believe in accountability and we believe in trying to be prudent with the use of taxpayer dollars for the benefit of all Canadians.

I think that Canadians are looking for a change. They cannot take the continual rise in taxes that they have seen under the current government, such as the carbon tax, which it is going to increase to 61¢ a litre at a time when people are already struggling. The Liberals want to quadruple it and quadruple the misery.

EI premiums, CPP premiums and all of these things are going in the wrong direction at a time when there is going to be increasing competitiveness from the U.S.; President-elect Trump has clearly put America as a priority, and we are not on competitive ground. We have taxes and a regulatory burden that are going to drive millions of dollars and millions of jobs to the U.S.

The Sustainable Development Technology Canada fund is the tip of the iceberg. We have to get to the bottom of it. As much as everybody would like to move on from this, until the documents are produced unredacted and we can give them to the RCMP so we can get to the bottom of what happened, the Conservatives are going to continue to do what is our job. We are His Majesty's loyal opposition, and our job is to hold the government to account, which means not just saying, “Oh, there's nothing to see here.” It means asking for the documents, doing the hard work to get to the bottom of it and going to committees.

I understand that once the documents are produced, the PROC committee is supposed to look at them. However, I have a little bit of skepticism about that, because with every other scandal that has gone to any committee, NDP members, partners of the Liberals, work together with them. They are still doing it, even though the leader of the NDP made a big deal of ripping up the agreement, effectively saying, “Oh, the Liberals are too weak and they can't be trusted. We're not going work with them anymore.”

The New Democrats are still supporting the Liberals today at committee. What they do is shut down the committee. They filibuster so they do not have to produce the documents, and that is exactly what would happen if this thing went to committee, which is why we have to hold on and wait until the Liberals deliver the documents.

Why will they not deliver the documents? The Auditor General has seen them, although she was not auditing criminality. The documents exist and need to be produced, but what are they hiding? Are people going to go to jail? That is what it is starting to look like. However, we will not know until we see the documents, so the Liberals need to produce them, the sooner the better.

Canadian Heritage

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Mr. Speaker, it gives me great pleasure to stand in the House today on behalf of the Conservative members on the Standing Committee of Canadian Heritage. We submit this dissenting report on the tech giants' use of intimidation tactics to evade regulation in Canada and across the world. The main report failed to adequately explore the state of censorship in Canada, as well as the roles played by tech giants and the current federal government. This dissenting report is required.

I should say that the committee got to hear from 18 witnesses over the course of the study. Many of those testimonies expressed the censorship of Canadians by the government and tech giants in terms of what they can see, hear and say online, with specific nods to the hindrances being caused by both Bill C-11 and Bill C-18.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I move that the eighth report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, presented on Tuesday, December 12, 2023, be concurred in.

It will be interesting to talk today about the concurrence motion coming out of the heritage committee. I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Battle River—Crowfoot.

I have been on the heritage committee for years now, but last month I asked my constituents of Saskatoon—Grasswood for their views on the public broadcaster, the CBC. It was in response to the CBC paying out bonuses that added up to over $18 million, which were approved by the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Privy Council. Of that sum, $3.3 million went directly to CBC executives. Forty-five executives had their hands in the pocket of that $3.3 million, and it averaged out to $73,000 each for one year in bonuses. I could not believe the number. I see that even some Liberals are shaking their heads. They cannot believe that number either just for the executives.

I asked in a mail-out what we should do going forward with the CBC. Should we do nothing or keep it as is? Should we keep the CBC but make some changes, or simply defund it? Defunding the CBC has been the narrative of this party for months, if not a year and a half now, and for very good reason. I had literally hundreds of responses. It was probably the best response I have had in the nine years I have been a member of Parliament. Some 86.5% were in support of overhauling or even defunding the entire operation of the CBC.

CBC CEO Catherine Tait admitted recently, about two weeks ago, that Canadians want to defund the CBC entirely. She was caught off guard that Canadians were talking about defunding her operation. She said that maybe she should have responded sooner to the public's outcry on how the corporation is compensated by the federal government.

In its corporate plan summary, tabled in the House of Commons, the CBC said viewers are leaving television, especially young people. They are going to streaming devices and have been doing so for many years. That is certainly not a surprise. However, a big surprise to me was the ad revenue. It has dropped another 9.6% in the last 12 months, which is a concern. I think trust in the CBC News organization, as we have seen across this country, has also dropped.

Here we have trust, viewership and revenue dropping, but what did not drop? The bonuses did not drop, surprise, surprise. In the last year, $18 million was handed out, and when Ms. Tait came before the heritage committee for the third time, she talked about the key performance indicators, better known as KPIs. She said that those determine the bonus structure. Amazingly, despite viewership, revenue and trust dropping, the bonuses remained. Why? Well, the CBC honchos, in their wisdom, decided to lower the key standards from a year ago so they could justify the rich bonuses. Only CBC executives would huddle up and determine that despite everything going down, they needed to protect their bonuses. They agreed to this and the Liberals bought in, agreeing to $18 million for the top-up.

Since 2018, CBC viewership has collapsed nearly 50% and the CBC has failed to meet 79% of its key performance targets. Did I mention that the executives who got these bonuses were the same ones responsible a little over a year ago for cutting 800 jobs? These cuts amounted to about 10% of the entire workforce of CBC/Radio-Canada. The federal government, as we know, compensates the CBC. It gives the CBC about $1.3 billion a year, so the public broadcaster, to me, already has a head start over the private broadcasters in this country.

It does not stop there. It is even worse, believe it or not. The CBC was given millions in last year's fall economic statement. It was 21 million gift dollars last year, and another $21 million this year. On top of that, it generates about $400 million in ads, even though, as I just talked about, ad revenue is going down. Canadians need to understand that their government is choosing to give more than $1.3 billion to a company that already makes $400 million in advertising. Canadians are tired of their money being spent on bonuses for absolutely dismal performance.

I questioned CBC/Radio-Canada's CEO at the Canadian heritage committee. Hundreds wrote in to us and others and took to social media to express their dismay about the arrogance and entitlement at a time when so many are hurting in this country. It is astonishing. One person said, “These elites live in their own bubble, protected from us by their entitlements and their social status. They simply do not care what we think, and are shocked that we would speak up against them. It is time to clean out the corrupt federal bureaucracy the Liberals have built.”

Broadcasters need to have accountability and fairness for people to have trust in them. How can Canadians possibly have any faith in an institution that rewards its executives after cutting hundreds of jobs in the last year? Canadians are tired of seeing their taxpayer funds mismanaged by the Prime Minister and his cabinet. It is no wonder nobody trusts the government anymore with their money.

The Liberals fail to see that Canadians are struggling in every aspect of their lives. Their response is that they will give $18 million to the CBC, to their corporate buddies, at a time when a record number of Canadians are heading to food banks. In my city of Saskatoon, there was an outcry yesterday by the Saskatoon Food Bank, which is asking the public for help, as it is running out of the most essential items it gives out.

The Saskatoon Food Bank has seen a 40% increase since 2019, in five short years, yet the CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada believes it is appropriate to ask for millions of dollars in bonuses for executives after letting hundreds go. It is arrogance and is absolute tone-deafness. The CBC was failing to deliver all along on its key performance indicators, so it just changed the indicators. It lowered them from the year before and thought nobody would notice. Well, we noticed, and obviously Canadians have noticed.

The government has no remorse about giving out massive amounts of money, simply handing it out no questions asked. It is handing money over to the public broadcaster rather than supporting small and medium-sized newspapers. That was the issue with Bill C-18, some may recall. It was a bill designed to help the newspaper industry, but telcos and the CBC, the public broadcaster, took it over. They thought they were going to get millions of dollars. It ended up that Google said it would give them under $100 million and they could disburse it, but there we go again. It was the CBC with its hands out; it was right there. The Liberal government is absolutely out of touch and the CBC is out of touch

That leads me to its CEO, Catherine Tait, who was appointed by the government in 2018. Since taking over, viewership, as I mentioned, has been cut in half. What worries me now is that Catherine Tait has not had a bonus in 2022-23—

Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, I wish I had five hours.

I will just say this: Bill C-18 is one small example of what the government has done. Bill C-18 has resulted in the complete decimation of Canada's media ecosystem. There is virtually no local reporting. There is a ban on sharing news on social media platforms.

The government wants an ill-informed, censored population so that it cannot be held to account.

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Madam Speaker, the government has failed on the fronts that my colleague mentioned in two ways: action and omission. On action, the government has censored Canadians through Bill C-11, which has had a massive effect on YouTube creators, censoring who gets seen and who does not. Bill C-18 has resulted in a news ban for online media platforms, so Canadians cannot get the news. It has also put many newsrooms out of work, so now the government cannot be held to account. Now the government is proposing Bill C-63, which will lead to a kangaroo court, wherein any Canadian could be dragged through with vexatious complaints based on their political opinions.

As well, through omission, by not putting limits on facial recognition software, the government can overreach and use Canadians' biometric data without any limitation. All of that leads to a police state, a censorship state, and something that every Canadian, regardless of political stripe, should be absolutely opposing with every fibre of their being.

Online Harms Act

[Michelle Rempel, Conservative, Calgary Nose Hill, AB]

Mr. Speaker, we must protect Canadians in the digital age, but Bill C-63 is not the way to do it. It would force Canadians to make unnecessary trade-offs between the guarantee of their security and their charter rights. Today I will explain why Bill C-63 is deeply flawed and why it would not protect Canadians' rights sufficiently. More importantly, I will present a comprehensive alternative plan that is more respectful of Canadians' charter rights and would provide immediate protections for Canadians facing online harms.

The core problem with Bill C-63 is how the government has changed and chosen to frame the myriad harms that occur in the digital space as homogenous and as capable of being solved with one approach or piece of legislation. In reality, harms that occur online are an incredibly heterogenous set of problems requiring a multitude of tailored solutions. It may sound like the former might be more difficult to achieve than the latter, but this is not the case. It is relatively easy to inventory the multitudes of problems that occur online and cause Canadians harm. From there, it should be easy to sort out how existing laws and regulatory processes that exist for the physical world could be extended to the digital world.

There are few, if any, examples of harms that are being caused in digital spaces that do not already have existing relatable laws or regulatory structures that could be extended or modified to cover them. Conversely, what the government has done for nearly a decade is try to create new, catch-all regulatory, bureaucratic and extrajudicial processes that would adapt to the needs of actors in the digital space instead of requiring them to adapt to our existing laws. All of these attempts have failed to become law, which is likely going to be the fate of Bill C-63.

This is a backward way of looking at things. It has caused nearly a decade of inaction on much-needed modernization of existing systems and has translated into law enforcement's not having the tools it needs to prevent crime, which in turn causes harm to Canadians. It has also led to a balkanization of laws and regulations across Canadian jurisdictions, a loss of investment due to the uncertainty, and a lack of coordination with the international community. Again, ultimately, it all harms Canadians.

Bill C-63 takes the same approach by listing only a few of the harms that happen in online spaces and creates a new, onerous and opaque extrajudicial bureaucracy, while creating deep problems for Canadian charter rights. For example, Bill C-63 would create a new “offence motivated by a hatred” provision that could see a life sentence applied to minor infractions under any act of Parliament, a parasitic provision that would be unchecked in the scope of the legislation. This means that words alone could lead to life imprisonment.

While the government has attempted to argue that this is not the case, saying that a serious underlying act would have to occur for the provision to apply, that is simply not how the bill is written. I ask colleagues to look at it. The bill seeks to amend section 320 of the Criminal Code, and reads, “Everyone who commits an offence under this Act or any other Act of Parliament...is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for life.”

At the justice committee earlier this year, the minister stated:

...the new hate crime offence captures any existing offence if it was hate-motivated. That can run the gamut from a hate-motivated theft all the way to a hate-motivated attempted murder. The sentencing range entrenched in Bill C-63 was designed to mirror the existing...options for all of these potential underlying offences, from the most minor to the most serious offences on the books....

The minister continued, saying, “this does not mean that minor offences will suddenly receive...harsh sentences. However, sentencing judges are required to follow legal principles, and “hate-motivated murder will result in a life sentence. A minor infraction will...not result in it.”

In this statement, the minister admitted both that the new provision could be applied to any act of Parliament, as the bill states, and that the government would be relying upon the judiciary to ensure that maximum penalties were not levelled against a minor infraction. Parliament cannot afford the government to be this lazy, and by that I mean not spelling out exactly what it intends a life sentence to apply to in law, as opposed to handing a highly imperfect judiciary an overbroad law that could have extreme, negative consequences.

Similarly, a massive amount of concern from across the political spectrum has been raised regarding Bill C-63's introduction of a so-called hate crime peace bond, calling it a pre-crime provision for speech. This is highly problematic because it would explicitly extend the power to issue peace bonds to crimes of speech, which the bill does not adequately define, nor does it provide any assurance that it would meet a criminal standard for hate.

Equally as concerning is that Bill C-63 would create a new process for individuals and groups to complain to the Canadian Human Rights Commission that online speech directed at them is discriminatory. This process would be extrajudicial, not subject to the same evidentiary standards of a criminal court, and could take years to resolve. Findings would be based on a mere balance of probabilities rather than on the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The subjectivity of defining hate speech would undoubtedly lead to punishments for protected speech. The mere threat of human rights complaints would chill large amounts of protected speech, and the system would undoubtedly be deluged with a landslide of vexatious complaints. There certainly are no provisions in the bill to prevent any of this from happening.

Nearly a decade ago, even the Toronto Star, hardly a bastion of Conservative thought, wrote a scathing opinion piece opposing these types of provisions. The same principle should apply today. When the highly problematic components of the bill are overlaid upon the fact that we are presently living under a government that unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act and that routinely gaslights Canadians who legitimately question efficacy or the morality of its policies as spreading misinformation, as the Minister of Justice did in his response to my question, saying that I had mis-characterized the bill, it is not a far leap to surmise that the new provision has great potential for abuse. That could be true for any political stripe that is in government.

The government's charter compliance statement, which is long and vague and has only recently been issued, should raise concerns for parliamentarians in this regard, as it relies on this statement: “The effects of the Bill on freedom expression are outweighed by the benefits of protecting members of vulnerable groups”. The government has already been found to have violated the Charter in the case of Bill C-69 for false presumptions on which one benefit outweighs others. I suspect this would be the same case for Bill C-63 should it become law, which I hope it does not.

I believe in the capacity of Canadians to express themselves within the bounds of protected speech and to maintain the rule of law within our vibrant pluralism. Regardless of political stripe, we must value freedom of speech and due process, because they are what prevents violent conflict. Speech already has clearly defined limitations under Canadian law. The provisions in Bill C-63 that I have just described are anathema to these principles. To be clear, Canadians should not be expected to have their right to protected speech chilled or limited in order to be safe online, which is what Bill C-63 would ask of them.

Bill C-63 would also create a new three-headed, yet-to-exist bureaucracy. It would leave much of the actual rules the bill describes to be created and enforced under undefined regulations by said bureaucracy at some much later date in the future. We cannot wait to take action in many circumstances. As one expert described it to me, it is like vaguely creating an outline and expecting bureaucrats, not elected legislators, to colour in the picture behind closed doors without any accountability to the Canadian public.

The government should have learned from the costs associated with failing when it attempted the same approach with Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, but alas, here we are. The new bureaucratic process would be slow, onerous and uncertain. If the government proceeds with it, it means Canadians would be left without protection, and innovators and investors would be left without the regulatory certainty needed to grow their businesses.

It would also be costly. I have asked the Parliamentary Budget Officer to conduct an analysis of the costs associated with the creation of the bureaucracy, and he has agreed to undertake the task. No parliamentarian should even consider supporting the bill without understanding the resources the government intends to allocate to the creation of the new digital safety commission, digital safety ombudsman and digital safety office, particularly since the findings in this week's damning NSICOP report starkly outlined the opportunity cost of the government failing to allocate much needed resources to the RCMP.

Said differently, if the government cannot fund and maintain the critical operations of the RCMP, which already has the mandate to enforce laws related to public safety, then Parliament should have grave, serious doubts about the efficacy of its setting up three new bureaucracies to address issues that could likely be managed by existing regulatory bodies like the CRTC or in the enforcement of the Criminal Code. Also, Canadians should have major qualms about creating new bureaucracies which would give power to well-funded and extremely powerful big tech companies to lobby and manipulate regulations to their benefit behind the scenes and outside the purview of Parliament.

This approach would not necessarily protect Canadians and may create artificial barriers to entry for new innovative industry players. The far better approach would be to adapt and extend long-existing laws and regulatory systems, properly resource their enforcement arms, and require big tech companies and other actors in the digital space to comply with these laws, not the other way around. This approach would provide Canadians with real protections, not what amounts to a new, ineffectual complaints department with a high negative opportunity cost to Canadians.

In no scenario should Parliament allow the government to entrench in legislation a power for social media companies to be arbiters of speech, which Bill C-63 risks doing. If the government wishes to further impose restrictions on Canadians' rights to speech, that should be a debate for Parliament to consider, not for regulators and tech giants to decide behind closed doors and with limited accountability to the public.

In short, this bill is completely flawed and should be abandoned, particularly given the minister's announcement this morning that he is unwilling to proceed with any sort of change to it in scope.

However, there is a better way. There is an alternative, which would be a more effective and more quickly implementable plan to protect Canadians' safety in the digital age. It would modernize existing laws and processes to align with digital advancements. It would protect speech not already limited in the Criminal Code, and would foster an environment for innovation and investment in digital technologies. It would propose adequately resourcing agencies with existing responsibilities for enforcing the law, not creating extrajudicial bureaucracies that would amount to a complaints department.

To begin, the RCMP and many law enforcement agencies across the country are under-resourced after certain flavours of politicians have given much more than a wink and a nod to the “defund the police” movement for over a decade. This trend must immediately be reversed. Well-resourced and well-respected law enforcement is critical to a free and just society.

Second, the government must also reform its watered-down bail policies, which allow repeat offenders to commit crimes over and over again. Criminals in the digital space will never face justice, no matter what laws are passed, if the Liberal government's catch-and-release policies are not reversed. I think of a woman in my city of Calgary who was murdered in broad daylight in front of an elementary school because her spouse was subject to the catch-and-release Liberal bail policy, in spite of his online harassment of her for a very long time.

Third, the government must actually enforce—

Government Responses to Order Paper Questions

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I support this question of privilege in light of the violation of government's obligation to answer an Order Paper question, but I also add to it, considering how the government has taken steps to take control of the Internet in Canada.

It has done this through legislation like Bill C-11, which centralizes regulatory control of what Canadians can see, hear and post online based on what the government deems “Canadian”.

In addition, I highlight Bill C-18, which has resulted in the government being one of the biggest gatekeepers of news in Canada. This is a major conflict of interest and a direct attack on journalistic integrity in this country.

Now, most recently, through Bill C-63, the government proposes to establish an entire commission, yet another arm of the government, that would regulate online harm.

How can Canadians trust the government to police various aspects of the Internet if it cannot even be honest and tell the truth about the content requested to be taken down? Trust is pinnacle and frankly the government has not earned any of it. The truth must prevail.

Mr. Speaker, you have the opportunity to look into this and to get to the bottom of it, or you can keep us in the dark and allow secrecy and injustice to reign. I understand that you are the one to make this decision, and we are putting our trust in you to make sure that this place is upheld and democracy is kept strong.

News Media Industry

[Claude DeBellefeuille, Bloc, Salaberry—Suroît, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the media crisis has once again swept away a part of our news media and a part of our democracy.

Bell is laying off 4,800 employees. This comes on the heels of more than 500 job cuts at Quebecor and 600 at CBC/Radio-Canada. The entire industry has been imploding for years with no meaningful response by the federal government.

Bill C‑11 is having no apparent impact because the CRTC is making zero progress on the regulatory framework. Bill C‑18 is all well and good, and we will happily accept Google's millions, but the job cuts continue.

When is the government going to take action?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I am not talking about helping a billion-dollar company. I am talking about helping an industry that has been suffering and in crisis for years. As we speak, the only new money to assist our media organizations with Bill C-18 came from Google, which put it on the table. That is like putting the fox in the chicken coop.

There are so many options: an emergency fund, a payroll tax credit for electronic media, a tax credit for advertisers who buy time on traditional media and more government advertising on traditional media, instead of slipping $50,000 into Meta's pocket, like the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party have been doing for the past three months.

When will this government take action?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, this is another sad day for the media, news and democracy.

Bell just announced that it will be cutting 4,800 jobs and selling 45 radio stations, seven of which are in Quebec. The federal government is literally watching our news media die before its eyes by not extending a single penny to save broadcasters.

Meanwhile, there is no emergency funding, as the Bloc Québécois called for this fall. There are no tax credits for electronic media modelled on what is already offered to print media. How many more workers will have to be sacrificed before the minister realizes that Bill C-18 will not save news media in Quebec?