Mr. Speaker, we have heard a lot in the debate about Bill C-55 serving to protect Canada's culture. I suggest the more correct term is to protect Canadian values.
When we think of culture we think in terms of the entertainment industry and we think in terms of the arts. What we are really dealing with is something far more prosaic. It is magazines that may deal with issues that are very much every day in Canadian life. It is the very fact that they are every day in Canadian life that makes it so important to preserve them as Canadian voices rather than American voices.
I will give a simple illustration. When we think of sports magazines and we consider the Canadian coverage of sports, be it sports occurring in Canada or sports occurring in the United States, we are liable to get a very different view from a Canadian on something like the use of drugs in sports than we might get in the United States. I am thinking of using certain performance enhancing drugs in baseball which has been the subject of a great many articles in both Canada and the United States. American society has a much more broad minded approach to this kind of cheating than does Canadian society. Americans would not consider it cheating at all but in Canadian society we might.
When we talk about the magazine publishing industry we are not necessarily talking about music magazines or arts magazines. We are talking about magazines dealing with home decorating, social issues, anything imaginable. Canadian values are reflected in this type of venue.
I will give another example. It is very important in Canadian society that we believe as Canadians that fundamental human rights pertain to the individual. In our charter of rights we do not even mention the issue of property. In the United States property rights are very much an issue. Americans are very conscious of the need to protect property. This has created a huge division in attitude between Americans and Canadians.
In magazine articles, even indirectly, this difference in values will be expressed. When a Canadian writer deals with issues at home, issues of safety, the safety of Canadian cities, that person will look in terms of the protection of human rights, of individual rights, not in terms of property rights.
I remember a vivid example of a National Geographic article that dealt with a tornado that struck the community of Homestead, Florida. It devastated that community. The article had illustrations of the various damage of the tornado. One illustration showed an individual property owner standing amid the wreckage of his property with his furniture and everything all smashed, including his home. He had a small silver plated gun to the head of a looter. The caption simply said something like Florida homeowner protects his property from looters.
That illustration is an example of the gulf in value that exists between American attitudes toward property, the protection of property and the use of force to protect property and Canadian values which would say that under no circumstances would anyone every have the right to hold a gun to the head of a person merely trying to steal something or looking at the rubble after a tornado. That would never happen in Canadian society. What is really at issue here is not just the protection of Canadian culture but the protection of Canadian values.
I note the Bloc Quebecois is very much in support of the principles of Bill C-55, and well it should be. It is well established that Americans feel very strongly that there should be only one official language. They cannot understand a society that actually has a whole bureaucracy, all our engines set up to accommodate two official languages operating in a society. That has made us into an exceptionally tolerant people.
That is not what we get when we read American publications. When we read the language and the stories of a society, underneath are that society's values. It is the same in television. Unfortunately we cannot do much about the airwaves but we can do something about the publishing industry. Bill C-55 tries to do this precise thing.
How is it doing it? As someone who comes from the publishing industry, I am impressed that the drafters of this law have recognized some realities of the publishing industry. One is that companies have fixed advertising budgets. The more advertising venues one has for a company that wishes to advertise, the more that money will be spread around and less will go to any individual organization. I will give the example that is occurring right now.
The National Post is trying to enter the newspaper marketplace and it is up against the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail . What we really see here is a conflict over trying to obtain what is essentially a limited amount of advertising revenue.
A story in the Sunday Star this past weekend claims that the National Post is making no progress. All we have to do is look at the National Post 's pages and we will see very few advertisements.
It is the same kind of thing we are talking about now. If the government does not act in this area there is no doubt that Canadian advertisers will be attracted to split-run publications coming out of the United States because there is no doubt they have more bucks behind them, they have more resources in producing the glossy finished product to get those topic interviews that are so expensive. There is no doubt that money would be streamed to some of these American split-run publications at the expense of Canadian publications which may be doing essentially the same story but that story will always have an undercurrent of Canadian values as opposed to American values.
At that level this legislation acknowledges that there is a problem here that must be addressed because if it is not addressed, there will be less of a voice for Canadian articles, indeed on the same subject, reflecting Canadian values.
One might say that if the government feels that way why does it not just give all these Canadian magazines a direct grant. Why does the government not give a direct grant to Canadian writers in these magazines? This would encourage Canadian content.
I suggest the problem with that is when government interferes with culture or a freedom of expression or function in Canadian society or any society, it becomes the government's values or the bureaucratic values that begin to operate what is actually happening with that publication or cultural expression, be it music or print or whatever.
The only measure of whether something is worth saying is whether people will pay their own money for it or go to the trouble to hear what is being said. That is why it is so important to have this cultural responsibility in the hands of free enterprise. We do that by doing exactly what this legislation does, encouraging Canadian advertisers to invest those dollars in Canadian publications so that we can have Canadian stories about Canadians and about Canadian values.