Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the Bloc Quebecois, I wish to be very clear. We have a great deal of sympathy for the intent of the member for Sarnia—Lambton's bill, which is to ensure that consumers have control over what services businesses supply them with. The Bloc Quebecois will not, however, be in favour of Bill C-393 any more than it was of Bills C-216 and C-288, for the reasons I will now give.
The hon. member for Sarnia—Lambton has expanded his bill. Once again, incidentally, I would like to point out that we have considerable sympathy for him in particular, since he was great friends with a woman I considered my friend here in this House. But the Quebec consumer protection legislation, Loi sur la protection des consommateurs or consumer protection act, is clear, and already bans the practice he wishes to ban with his bill.
The relevant section of the act reads as follows “No merchant, manufacturer or advertiser can demand any money for goods or services provided to a consumer, when the consumer has not agreed to receive such goods or services”.
Our stand is that this legislation does not apply merely to businesses classified as coming under provincial jurisdiction. There was, for instance, the case of the supreme court decision on Irwin Toy's appeal of the ban in the consumer protection act on advertising aimed at children. The supreme court agreed that Irwin Toy was not entitled to run ads that went against the consumer protection act.
Commenting on this decision and talking about telecommunications businesses lawyer Pierre Trudel wrote:
—provincial measures that are not as such intended to apply to federal businesses so as to govern their operation may have a certain impact on them. It may therefore legitimately be concluded that provincial legislation will not be ultra vires simply because it may affect business decisions to be taken by those who develop or disseminate advertising—
—provided that these provisions do not result in these laws undermining what rightly constitutes their federal specificity.
I mention in passing that, having the industry critic as the Competition Act was amended, I was on several occasions told that the Competition Act was not consumer protection legislation and that it simply concerned relations between competing businesses. I have a transcription in which Mr. Flaherty himself said: “It is not consumer protection legislation”.
Our second argument, the stronger, which will bring us back to the heart of the argument, is that, for the Bloc Quebecois and I hope for many others in this House, this bill will conflict—if not more—with the CRTC's authority.
I would point out here that the CRTC has a job to do, a mission, including in section 3, that “French language and English language broadcasters, despite a certain communality, differ in terms of operating conditions and in the long run in terms of their needs”.
Need I point out that the operating conditions of broadcasters are not the same in North America and in Canada in English and French. That is why the chair of the CRTC argued before the Senate that it had the power to prevent the use of negative option marketing, which it had not used for consumer protection.
Representatives of the Association des consommateurs québécois told the committee that, although the intention was certainly good, although the grounds for introducing the bill might be noble, and although there would be advantages in English Canada, in French Canada and in Quebec, it was another matter. One of them said:
We are sure that the authors of the bill never examined or understood the disastrous impact of the bill on Canada's francophones. They would surely have wished to take them into account had they understood. In the final analysis, we are relying on their good faith, and we therefore hope that they will see the validity of our position.
The speaker goes on to say:
Need it be repeated that, for consumers in Quebec, choice of programming means not just in English, but obviously in their own language as well?
We believe that the CRTC has long understood this fact and that this is why it has refused to impose a single set of regulations across the country ... instead taking an approach that recognizes that the francophone market has different needs.
I could go on at length. This was Ms. Drolet's testimony.
Parliamentarians must take this extremely important dimension into account. I know that they did not do so when they voted on Bill C-288, but I repeat that, now more than ever, francophone viewers need the continued protection of the CRTC.
In fact, when to our dismay Bill C-216 and then Bill C-288 were passed, Quebec's then Minister of Communications, Mrs. Beaudoin, said how extremely sorry she was that this had happened.
She said “Although the specific purpose of the bill is to prohibit negative option marketing, it has a much greater impact because it prohibits every other marketing method except pay per view television and particularly because it involves such limited distribution that no new French language service will every get off the ground”.
Minister Beaudoin spoke of her concerns about the negative effects this may have on the supply of French-language television services. She said “The French language specialty channels, of vital importance in the current context of open availability, need a critical mass of viewers if they are to be created and to survive. The federal bill will, in fact, deprive any French channels, including the four new ones, of that critical mass”.
This is the first hour of debate. The bill will be debated further, and we would ask the hon. members of other parties, and of the other language in particular, to consider the market conditions in Quebec.
I would conclude by saying that the CRTC did not act on its own authority in deciding on this approach to competition; it was the government's approach, and the French-language media must be allowed to live, not just to merely survive, within that context.