Mr. Speaker, the bill is an attempt to defy the geography of our nation. This cannot be done. The geography of a nation is set.
One of the advantages of being a little older than some of the members in the House is that I remember when people drove model A cars, although some were a little newer than others, and turning the thing on to determine who had a 50¢ licence to operate a radio. If a person were caught without a licence I believe the fine was $2. That was the first attempt and it failed dismally.
Where I live, even today, if I want to get an up to date weather forecast I go a few miles south. It is quite legal. It is an FM station. Eighty per cent of Canadians live closer to the United States than they do to the capital of their neighbouring province.This is a fact of life. It is just like Saturday night when I was getting ready to return to Ottawa on the flight on Sunday. I saw on CTV, I believe, an excellent program about how seniors were being treated in nursing homes. If that program had not caught my eye I would have shut it off.
Are we talking about robbery, piracy and so on, or are we talking about protection of our productions? There are many Canadians who do not like what they get on our television stations so they turn to the American stations. Many people in the United States will turn to Canadian programming. The government simply cannot make the bill work.
The reason we cannot make it work is that we live on a continent that shares everything. Even in the cattle dispute we recognize that it is a North American problem. For Canada to attempt to license those areas in Canada where the best signal and the only signal some can get is from the U.S., the bill would make those pockets illegal. The bill would make it illegal to receive those signals. There are pockets in B.C., in my province and in northern Ontario.
What the government is trying to do is to legislate against geography. We tried this before. There is a huge difference between the grey market and the black market.
In other continental industries we compete. In other continentals with a cattle industry we can compete. We have shown that we can compete in the automobile industry. We can compete in this industry as well. By putting the bill into effect the government is not allowing competition to take place and it may be hindering the betterment of Canadian progress.
Let us just think about this for a moment. The government says that a certain percentage of the programs must be Canadian. It will aim to get that certain per cent of the market and maybe not go beyond. In aiming for a low level, we may end up producing an inferior content and inferior programs.
I do not know the origin of the bill. Is it the CRTC? Let Canadians have the right, as Americans have the right. If they want to turn to a Canadian station they can turn to it, and many do. When Canadians wish to turn to an American station they do. It is a competitive market.
However what the bill attempts to do is kill that competition in a very important industry. I believe we have Canadians who have conquered this and who have gone into the United States and have done very well. However we should not limit the right of Canadians to a wider source of programming and, in turn, limit the U.S. because we then would not put out signals to their stations.
The bill is counterproductive and it could hurt our industry. It should be considered in committee where I would hope the committee would find a way not to pass the bill. It is not in the best interests of the receivers nor the Canadian telecommunication industry.