Canadian Heritage Committee on May 3rd, 2021

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, the amendment that has been made to the motion that I presented on Friday substantially changes its intent. The intent is to get the charter statement sooner rather than later, and that, of course, is so that we know the foundation on which we are debating this legislation. Does it hold up to the charter, given that proposed section 4.1 has now been removed from the bill? I believe that the only way we can answer this question is by submitting it for review and requesting the statement.

Given that the member opposite has asked for that request to be removed, I cannot support the amendment that she has brought forward.

In addition to that, if I understood her amendment correctly, it says “as soon as possible” rather than “the next 10 days”. I'm not sure, and maybe I misunderstood it, but if that is the case, I'm confused as to why we would move in the direction of removing the amendment that was just approved, which is the 10-day clause. I think it's appropriate. The previous amendment strengthened my motion, so I was more than happy to support the 10 days, and it has already been passed.

Again I'll draw attention to the fact that this charter statement is of great importance. A number of qualified individuals have indicated that they have significant concerns. Indeed, I believe that Canadians are rightly concerned, as we have heard over the last number of days and seen reported in the media.

We can also see that the minister, Mr. Guilbeault, is clearly unable to defend the removal of proposed section 4.1 and is unable to communicate to Canadians clearly why that would be necessary. He's also unable to communicate to them where their individual rights to post content of their choice still remain protected. That being the case, I again ask that this review be done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Aitchison is next.

[Scott Aitchison, Conservative, Parry Sound—Muskoka, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I take the government and Ms. Dabrusin at their word when they say they want to get this done quickly. If that is in fact true, her motion doesn't really.... It's not required. What guarantees that the committee will get back to the clause-by-clause review and get this done is by keeping part (c) in particular and suspending clause-by-clause consideration. If it's that important to the minister, he'll get here quickly. If we take that part out and just keep going, he can drag his feet and this will become a war of words. This holds the government's feet to the fire, which I think we need to do so that we can get back to getting this work done.

I do not support Ms. Dabrusin's amendment. I might have been able to support parts of it, but not removing part (c), and since she's bunched them all together, I'm stuck with not being able to support it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

As you may have noticed many times in our deliberations, I sometimes get slightly confused. To avoid that, if you've asked a question or you've made a contribution, could you please lower your electronic hand? I have a bunch of legacy hands everywhere.

Mr. Rayes, go ahead.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for giving me the floor to discuss the new amendment, the one put forward by Ms. Dabrusin.

I don't understand. We're being asked to speed things up, while introducing a new amendment just when we finally achieved a compromise. Everyone voted in favour of Ms. McPherson's amendment.

We can move quickly. As I was saying earlier, the Minister of Justice has access to a wide range of legal and other experts. If everything is so clear for the Liberal government, they should come and explain it to us as soon as possible. We have a meeting on Friday. If the minister were to give us a legal opinion, we could stop talking about it. The minister could come and answer our questions, which would clarify the situation for everyone, and not just for the committee members.

We have an important decision to make about a bill which was flawed from the very outset. Allow me to repeat that there were 118 amendments. That's why everything is taking so long.

With our small teams, we consulted organizations, people in the field and people from the cultural sector, all of whom submitted reports. Basically, the bill was not doing what they wanted. The government also ignored some of the warnings that had been sent. We're not talking here about a minor detail that could be dealt with later, at the end of the process, as we are being told. We're talking about an entire clause in the bill that the government deleted without prior warning on a Friday, hoping that no one would notice.

Ms. Harder's motion is simple. We want a new legal opinion and we want the minister to answer our questions about it. We, the opposition MPs, are not the only ones to request this. Allow me to repeat that some outstanding university professors, legal experts, policy analysts and experts in freedom of expression and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, sounded the alarm following a government decision. It therefore seems to me that the very least we can do would be to wait for this opinion before continuing our work.

I think the Liberals are trying to remove everything that might be harmful to the minister. I'm sorry, but the minister doesn't have to deal with it alone. He has access to all the resources needed. He's the one who introduced the bill that he took so much pride in. And yet, in an interview over the weekend, he was not even able to explain why the bill had initially included this proposed clause, nor why it's no longer there.

In November, the Minister ofJustice tabled an opinion according to which the bill was supposedly compliant with the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In spite of this, there were shortcomings. The Liberals deleted an entire clause that had been proposed, which upset all kinds of people. It was not something minor. Many people condemned it, saying that it was a direct attack on the freedom of social network and Internet users who streamed content. Not everyone was aware of this, because the language is highly technical. We ourselves were sometimes confused about it. We've been asking experts to clarify things for us and we've asking a number of organizations some questions to help us understand the issue. The people being targeted are influencers, people who have a YouTube channel, or who download content from social networks. We're not talking about companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube or TikTok. We're talking about ordinary Canadians who use these networks to speak to one another and to share content. Some artists share their own performances directly over these networks and use them to get exposure. Now, these people are being directly affected by the deletion of proposed clause 4.1 of the Broadcasting Act under clause 3 of the bill, because the CRTC has just been given the power to subject these people to regulation on the same basis as the major digital sector broadcasters and players. We don't know whether it will use this power, but it has it now. That's the door that the government has opened by deleting this proposed clause.

So we can't carry on with our own work while waiting for an opinion from the minister. We need clarification on this point. It's not just a minor amendment or clause that has been deleted. It's not true that the required changes could be made at the very end. We have already gathered some opinions. If some of the other amendments studied previously had been so urgent, red flags would have been raised. In this instance, it was clearly an ill-advised decision by the government. That's clear, because it doesn't even want us to review its decision.

I repeat that Ms. Harder's motion is altogether legitimate. Ms. McPherson proposed an amendment to prescribe a time limit. As she pointed out so correctly, there is nothing to prevent the minister from responding even more quickly so that we can move forward. If he wants to table his legal opinion sooner, then so much the better, because it will speed up the process of helping our cultural sector.

The Minister of Justice needs to do his work and the Minister of Canadian Heritage should appear beside him to explain the ins and outs of this decision to us. The minister needs to give us a legal opinion so that all of the experts and we can analyse the situation that we are currently going through, which constitutes an attack. It's not Alain Rayes who is saying so. If you want to attribute these comments to me, feel free to do so, but they are more than anything else comments from Professor Geist, from the University of Ottawa. He said that he had never seen a government as anti-Internet as this one. That was also the opinion of several former CRTC commissioners, administrators and policy analysts. For the past five or six days, all these people have been publicly making a fuss and telling us to stop.

I'm not even talking about all the Canadians who have been writing to our offices. I'll admit to being a minor player on Twitter, and I don't have as many followers as the Prime Minister, and my tweets had never ever got 400 likes before until I talked about this issue. In my 15 years in politics, I've never seen so many people share the political information I publish.

So it's not just a minor mistake being made by the government, but rather a major one. To set things right, we need accurate information.

I hope that we will stop talking and adopt Ms. Harder's motion. I hope that the minister is listening to us. At the very least, I hope that some policy advisors and senior officials are monitoring our work and are already busy writing the requested legal opinion and preparing speeches for the ministers who are going to appear, so that we can do our work properly.

I'd like to send a final message to everyone listening, and God knows that people in the cultural sector are listening. We all want to adopt a good bill. From the very beginning, that's what we all wanted. The problem is basically that this bill was not a good one. The MPs who sit on the committee, from all political parties, have been trying everything to come up with amendments and subamendments to fix things and make the bill better, before ruling on it and sending it back to the House of Commons.

However, in view of what's been going on for just over a week now, we can't continue our work without having a clear legal opinion on the matter. I hope that we'll adopt Ms. Harder's motion and retain its essence. Ms. Dabrusin suggested amending the motion to ensure that the legal opinion and the appearance of the ministers would occur as soon as possible, so that they could provide clarification not only to the members of the committee, but to all the experts as well. Only the government can get things moving as quickly as possible. Believe me, the more time goes by, the greater the number of experts who are listening. Everyone will be commenting on what the two ministers have to say and on the opinion that will be tabled.

It's almost 1 p.m. I usually suggest a short break, but debates today were too heated and expansive. I trust that we'll be able to finish with this topic today and that we will not return to it Friday. At the rate things are going, we will still not have ruled on Ms. Harder's motion by the end of the meeting and will have to debate it again on Friday.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Shields is next.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It was interesting listening to the amendments that MP Dabrusin made. I might have been like Scott Aitchison, my colleague, in the sense that he thought maybe there was something there that he might have supported, but when she lumped them all in, it became just untenable.

I thought I might have seen a motion that said we would guarantee that once this was done, it would not be sent to the House and that we would guarantee a review, but that motion wasn't there. She had mentioned it many times, and Mr. Housefather had mentioned it many times, but it wasn't there. I got a little concerned. What she was saying didn't happen, yet she did numerous amendments, a number of them.

As to the urgency aspect, you know, I'm an old guy. I remember when the Prime Minister implemented the War Measures Act in 1970. That was an emergency. A few years earlier than that, I was on Parliament Hill, and there was a Vietnam War protest. There wasn't urgency, but it was allowed as free speech. Yes, I go back a day or two, so when I see the movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, that brings back real concerns that I have about free speech.

In the amendments that have been put forward, what she has put forward is just not good enough to fix what she says, and there has been no explanation of the urgency. We have co-operated in the House on a number of things to do with the pandemic, when things had to be passed quickly—absolutely, you bet. Nobody from that party has talked about why it's so urgent and why this has to be done today or tomorrow with a flawed bill.

I don't see a house burning down. I don't see the War Measures Act needing to be implemented. This is not a pandemic piece of legislation to provide funding for people who need it. There has been no explanation of the urgency that they continue to mention. I am absolutely a huge supporter of culture, and we have great culture in this country, but when someone talks about urgency with no rationale as to why it's urgent, that really leaves it vacant.

Again, freedom of speech to me is a personal thing, and I learned how valuable it is a long time ago, when I stood in front of the Parliament Buildings in 1967 and when I saw what happened in our country in the sixties and seventies. This is really important to me.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Housefather, go ahead, please.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just wanted to set things straight on a number of facts.

My colleague and friend Mr. Rayes said several times that the government had made a mistake. It's not the government that rejected clause 3 of the bill, but rather the committee members. We are all independent members of the committee. All MPs on the committee, whether from the Liberal party, the Conservative party, the NDP or the Bloc Québécois, voted in favour of removing clause 3.

And then even the Conservatives wanted to amend clause 3 of the bill to limit the scope of the proposed clause to certain users, while ensuring that others were not subject to it. Now if the proposed clause was so terrible that the Conservatives wanted to introduce amendment CPC-5, why do they feel so strongly about the deletion of this clause?

It's too bad that the debate has taken this turn.

The other thing I want to say is that regardless of the scope of the amendment that is proposed, I maintain the position that I stated. I'm not seeing that it is absolutely desperate to finish things in one or two days. I am saying that without seeing the scope of all the amendments on the section that has been amended, it would be impossible to make sense of a new charter statement.

We need to finish the amendments and continue the clause-by-clause study so that at the end of the results.... We know there are other amendments coming forward that have not yet been debated that deal with the exact issue of the removal of section 3. There are other amendments that deal with exemptions from the CRTC for users of social media and posts that are put up. How can any attorney then give a charter statement without having the full scope of those amendments? It doesn't make sense.

The reason to continue with clause-by-clause consideration is to finish all the amendments so that the person doing the charter review can then look at the overall context of the bill, including any and all amendments and including those amendments that are still to come forward that deal with this very same issue. It makes no sense to say that we're stopping now, that we can't consider further amendments that we know are coming forward, but we want a charter statement.

I support what Mr. Shields said, which is that we stop at the end of the amendments. We don't send the bill back to the House. We then get a charter statement taking into consideration everything that happened during clause-by-clause study. From my perspective, we do whatever we want with the ministers and their presence or non-presence. Then, if need be, because we haven't sent it back, we return to other clauses of the bill if the charter statement tells us something that I don't expect it to tell us.

However, it doesn't make sense to stop clause-by-clause consideration to get an interim charter statement when there are other relevant amendments that deal with the very same issues.

That is my perspective. I just don't understand why there's such a desperate need to have the charter statement before those amendments are brought forward and before the public and, most importantly, the lawyers drafting the revised charter statement can consider those amendments vis-à-vis the deletion of clause 3 of the bill.

If there were no other amendments coming forward on this issue it might make sense, but amendments are coming forward on the very same issue that would definitely change the position of any lawyer reviewing the bill.

I'm not going to speak to the wording of this particular amendment, but that is what I think should happen.

Mr. Chairman, I would like a brief word from you. Are we continuing past 1:00? If we are, perhaps we could have a suspension so we could all just take a brief break and come back.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Housefather.

Well, as you know, when we conclude a meeting and adjourn—or suspend, for that matter—it's usually done on implied consent from everyone. If someone doesn't want to end this particular session, then we will continue on, but that time is.... Okay, we're a minute away.

I'm going to have to go back to the committee here and ask for your input as to whether you want to continue this meeting or whether we're going to stop here and reconvene on Friday, as put out in the schedule for the business of the committee.

I'm not looking for a point of order or anything like that. I'm just looking for your input. Did I hear that someone wants to speak on what I just mentioned? Could you raise your hand?

Go ahead, Mr. Rayes.

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

Mr. Chair, in about an hour, the statements by members will begin, followed by question period in the House.

In the course of our meeting, we haven't had the opportunity to do our work, we haven't taken a health break, and we haven't eaten. Given the time remaining, I think we should put an end to this meeting and resume on Friday.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Okay.

I see we have a bunch of hands. That's because you want to engage in the current debate. If you want to weigh in on whether you want this meeting to continue or you want to keep to our original schedule and end now, can you please indicate?

Seeing no further comments after Mr. Rayes, I'm going to assume that implied consent is still with us and that we are going to conclude the meeting right now and reconvene on Friday as scheduled.

We'll reconvene on Friday at one o'clock Eastern Time. We'll be resuming debate once again on the amendment proposed by Ms. Dabrusin to the main motion put forward by Ms. Harder.

Go ahead, Mr. Champoux.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Chair, I may have missed a few moments from the debate and no longer know where we got to exactly, but I'd like to tell you what I think.

We discussed this topic today and went around in circles. We could take the five minutes needed to put the amendment to the vote, and then do the same for the motion, and move on to something else on Friday. That would give the government time to prepare the legal opinion requested, and for us to prepare for the appearance of the ministers and other witnesses if need be. We should therefore take five or 10 minutes to vote, and stop going around in circles, stop dithering and slowing down the work that needs to be done.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Okay, Mr. Champoux. I get it. Yes.

I'm going to go to Ms. McPherson. Ms. McPherson, could you be very quick, please?

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

I was just waiting for Mr. Champoux to speak. He had put his hand up and expressed that he wanted to speak. That's why I waited.

I agree. I understand Mr. Rayes' concern. Let's take a few moments now to do the vote. Then we can actually continue on with the work and continue to do what we were sent here to do, please.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Well, I wouldn't mind going to a vote, but the problem is that I have a speakers list here. I can only go to a vote when the speakers list has collapsed. I still have hands up from people who want to speak on this point, including Ms. Dabrusin. I'm in a position where we can continue for another five minutes, but I can't guarantee you that there will be a vote.

That said, let's do another five minutes, if you wish. We'll do five to 10 minutes.

Go ahead, Ms. Dabrusin.

[Julie Dabrusin, Liberal, Toronto—Danforth, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The hope I had—actually, it's why I believe Mr. Housefather was suggesting a suspension—was to be able to see if we can talk among the parties to come to a resolution so that we can figure something out. I still feel very strongly, most strongly, that a charter review partway through is not a proper charter review. If we want to be able to get a useful and helpful charter review....

This is important. We're talking about freedom of expression. We want to make sure that the lawyers who are giving that advice have all of the best information so that they are able to do it right. I think that's the most important piece to all of this, so I would suggest that we take some time—we have until Friday—to talk among the parties and see if we can reach a resolution.

It seems as though we all fundamentally agree that we would like a charter review on this question of freedom of expression and that we would like that certainty going forward. The question is about what full information we need to get to the lawyers to be able to get that, and how we do it in a way that no longer delays what we're trying to do. How do we manage to get those points covered?

I would suggest that the best option for us now is to adjourn. I'm not bringing it as a dilatory motion; I'm just proposing that we do that so that we can have a conversation among the parties and work together, as I'm sure we all want to, and get to the best result on this one.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Okay. You're not moving a motion.

Ms. Harder is next.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

I believe it's important to point out something that Ms. Dabrusin neglected to say verbally. As to whether or not it was a sneaky attempt to get this through or just an oversight, I leave that to her.

Nevertheless Ms. Dabrusin, in her written form of the amendment, makes it clear that she is replacing the obligation for ministers to appear with an obligation to explain in writing. I find that problematic. We are asking the ministers to come. We are asking for the opportunity to ask them questions. We are asking for an opportunity to engage with them. It would have been really nice for that to have been made clear from the beginning, because it makes it look like the wool is trying to be pulled over our eyes, which certainly doesn't give me a lot of faith, even in terms of making sure that we review or ask for that charter statement at the end of the study as opposed to now.

Again, I absolutely cannot vote in favour of this motion. The fact that ministers would not be asked to come and testify in person and that we would not have the opportunity to ask questions seems unacceptable to me. Further to that, unfortunately, I think faith is waning in this process and in the understanding that a charter statement might be done at the end. I'd prefer to have it done at the beginning, please.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Mr. Rayes is next.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'll be quick about it, because I don't want to draw out the meeting any longer. We've already gone past the scheduled time.

In her proposal, Ms. Dabrusin removed the requirement for the minister to come and explain his position on this fundamental issue. It's an indirect way of keeping the minister from having to reply to questions from our committee, to be accountable and to clarify matters for all Canadians and experts in the country who are wondering about this aspect of the bill. What I'm talking about here is the Liberal government's attempt to intervene in the regulatory process and to decide on behalf of users what they are attempting to do when they stream content on the various social networks. That's what it is trying to do by giving the CRTC more power to control content streamed over the Internet.

I really have trouble believing that we still have to talk about this today and that we will have to return to it Friday. We should have already voted on Ms. Harder's motion by now, as requested by Mr. Champoux. Unfortunately, it would appear that we will have to continue to discuss the matter on Friday, because of this intransigence.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Go ahead, Mr. Shields.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

I move to adjourn.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

All right, let's go to a vote, Madam Clerk.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Just so I'm clear, adjourn what?

The meeting.