Madam Speaker, tonight I will talk a little about Bill C-10. We have talked about free speech and net neutrality. There have been a lot of words mentioned by the minister about foreign big tech and the Conservatives supporting them. When I look at lobbying, and I look at all of those people from big tech, the Amazons, the Netflixes, the YouTubes, they are not coming to lobby me. There is a registry that shows who gets lobbied, and they seem to spend a lot of time in the minister's office, not mine, so I am not sure where he is getting that from.
There has been some discussion about tax. Yes, if businesses are doing business in Canada, we agree there should be a tax, but we are going to be honest about that because the users are going to be paying up to 50% more because of that tax. The Biden administration is saying that, if we tax those companies like that in Canada, there are going to be tariffs, so where is that cost going to go to?
We are talking about funding this for culture, but who gets it and where does it go? The parliamentary secretary was the chair of the heritage committee when we looked at where our funding was going for cultural groups in Canada. Is it a surprise that Alberta got 50% less per capita than the rest of the country?
Who decides where it goes? The CRTC is involved in this, but who is the Canadian Radio and Television Commission? It is made up of nine appointed commissioners, and if we look at the Yale report, which a lot of this supposed legislation in Bill C-10 is based on, it recommended that one has to live in Ottawa, the national capital area, if one is on the commission. That is interesting.
There are no minutes for the CRTC. It has no record of debates and no record of votes. Is this transparent and accountable? We know that in the private sector, algorithms have been developed for Amazon or Netflix. They have developed the algorithms, so, if people like a movie, it will suggest some more like it, or if we are buying one thing, it will suggest more we might like.
They are driven by profit and data. We know that, but now we are taking the content, which is what we object to at the CRTC. It did protect individuals, but it pulled off the protective content, so now the CRTC, these non-transparent commissioners, are going to develop algorithms that are driven not by data but by content.
Would someone have a concern about the content of an organization that is going to develop algorithms based on Canadian content? That means they are going to look at whatever they think is Canadian content and develop algorithms that say this one is more Canadian than that one. It will say we should be watching these Canadians more than those Canadians.
That creates winners and losers in our creators of Canadian content. We have 200,000 people who have created and uploaded their content. We have 25,000 people in Canada who have been very successful at making a living. Our concern is to protect individual rights, and the content should be left alone. That is freedom of speech and it should be net neutrality. That is why we are concerned about Bill C-10.