Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This will be my final comment on the amendment I'm putting forward. I'd like to place something in context for the people listening. Very respectfully, I believe that Minister Guilbeault is misleading them when he talks about the web giants. Basically, what people don't like about the web giants is that they monopolize all the advertising revenue without giving print media, whose content is shared on the various networks, their share of the pie.
So, two different things are involved, because the minister did not at the outset want to take this aspect into account in his bill. He even told us, as he mentioned in several interviews, that he had made a personal decision to split up the Broadcasting Act bill and remove some elements, including the sharing of the advertising revenue currently monopolized by the web giants like Facebook, Google and the rest.
He also decided to exclude authors from his bill. God knows that we are all being approached by organizations that defend Canadian authors, and they all think it regrettable that they were not included.
The minister also decided to exclude the CBC/Radio-Canada mandate from the bill, which prevented us from introducing amendments intended only to make sure that CBC/Radio-Canada complied with its mandate. That was so wacky that not so long ago, only a few months in fact, when some CBC/Radio-Canada representatives were testifying before the CRTC, they themselves were asking for legislation on the digital aspect of their work, right in the middle of our clause-by-clause study of a bill on repercussions for digital broadcasters. CBC/Radio-Canada didn't even have an opportunity to talk about it, because it wasn't even defined
So every time we wanted to discuss our public broadcaster in the course of this study, it was impossible because the minister had decided to address it at a later date, for strategic reasons, as we now know. It's a very sensitive issue that he didn't want to address, so he deferred it. It's the same thing for hate speech. He said in several interviews that the bill was coming soon. In the end, we'll never see it, because we all know that elections are coming very soon. He deferred it because he knew that by addressing these issues he would be walking on a tightrope with respect to freedom of expression.
We therefore tried to include social networks along the way without having the opportunity to discuss doing so. As Ms. Harder pointed out clearly, we didn't bring in any witnesses affected because at the outset it was not part of the bill. That's the reality of it. So I feel duped as a parliamentarian. It's true that we welcomed 120 witnesses—I don't want to get the numbers wrong but Mr. Champoux tallied them up and I thank him for doing so—and we all wanted to work very hard and had an opportunity to submit a list of witnesses. But at no time did we feel the need to look for players from the community, namely social network users who are not members of any associations, like influencers who earn their a living from social networks and never apply for grants. I admit that I never thought of inviting them, and I'm sorry that I didn't. It's only after the removal of section 4.1 that it became totally obvious. That's the reality.
We are now being asked to approve this bill and move forward without having really done our homework. I can't agree with that. I'm trapped. I think we could make progress on behalf of of the cultural sector by returning to the essence of the bill that the minister introduced at the outset. I think that he made a serious mistake by attacking us during question period and in his interviews, by implying that Conservatives were being obstructive and anti-culture.
It's not true! The Minister of Canadian Heritage is solely responsible for the mess we are in now.
We now have an opportunity to find a system that is equitable for our digital broadcasters, not for social networks and not for users like ordinary Canadians who share content at home. Even fellow members of my own party regularly have millions of viewers when they share videos. That means that one day, the CRTC could decide to regulate content shared by politicians. If that were to happen, it would have serious repercussions on our democracy.
And the experts who comment on the subject are not just anybody, and deserve to be heard. I'm proud that our party is giving them a voice. I'm proud that one of the political parties in Canada's Parliament is taking the time to listen to these experts and to defend them before this committee, where they no longer have a voice now that the bill has been amended.
I'm going to weigh my words. Sometimes—and I can't imagine that this could really be the case—I have wondered whether this whole process was planned deliberately. At the outset, the proposed bill did not include social networks. Was the intent to remove the initial exemptions excluding social media after having heard witnesses, and reached the clause-by-clause study of the bill, making sure thereby that they would be included?
I don't think so. I'd like to believe that the Minister of Canadian Heritage, whom I know and with whom I've had several conversations, had not planned it this way. It might have been the intent of some of his people, with he himself unaware of it. When we see him defending his own bill in various interviews he has given, he doesn't appear to be aware of all the details. Don't people often say that the devil is in the detail?
When we began analyzing the bill and listening to experienced experts in the field, we began to realize that the minister was simply unaware of all the details. He even said so at one point, and so…