Madam Speaker, it is a great honour to rise tonight to speak to Bill C-11.
We have been around this issue a number of times. It is really important in this age of post truth, disinformation, falsehood and conspiracy that we actually say in Parliament what it is that we are debating and what the issues actually are. One would think this is a place where the precepts of truth are supposed to hold to some kind of standard but unfortunately they do not.
Bill C-11 is fundamentally about making sure that some of the most powerful corporations in the world, the web giants, actually pay a fair share of tax and level the playing field with Canadian broadcasters that are unable to compete, given the huge advantages that have been taken and appropriated by some of the media giants that have emerged out of Silicon Valley. For example, we can look at Netflix and how Disney moved online and took up a huge role of broadcasting, which is fine because industry changes. However, they are not paying nearly the level of tax in Canada for services they provide in Canada, which puts other Canadian operations at a disadvantage. They have also not been willing to pay into the system that has existed in Canada for years and has created an ecosystem of arts, culture and identity: the media fund. This is about levelling the playing field.
This bill is not about spying on one's grandmother's Internet. It is not, as I have heard Conservatives say, allowing the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau to block one's YouTube views on how to fix one's deck. This is not about censorship and shutting down so-called free expression. This is about making sure that extremely powerful corporations pay their share, and we are going to talk about that tonight.
Some of this disinformation was certainly allowed in the previous bill, Bill C-10, because, I am sorry to say, the environment minister, who was then the heritage minister, had an inability to even explain what the bill was about. He created an absolute total dumpster fire and got people rightly upset because he could not explain the difference between corporate content and user-generated content. What exactly was in the bill? He did not seem to know. It left the arts community and everyone else having to do damage control.
Bill C-11, I would say, is an okay bill. It is not a great bill. However, as a legislator, one of the great honours of my career has been to work with parliamentarians from around the world on the need to address the unprecedented power of Silicon Valley and to make it obligated to respect domestic jurisdiction. Its complete disregard for domestic jurisdiction is a serious issue.
In 2018, when I was on the ethics committee and the Canadian delegation of parliamentarians went to London for the first international grand committee, I believed that the Canadian delegation was out front because the Conservatives, the Liberals and the New Democrats were working together. We understood the need to take on the disinformation. The threat to democracy was such a serious element that it was beyond partisanship. What I have seen in my international meetings is that the need to hold companies like YouTube and Facebook to meet domestic obligations is something that should normally be beyond partisan consideration, but that is not what has happened under Bill C-11.
We met with parliamentarians from Brazil who told us about the shocking rise of Bolsonaro, who was a complete marginal extremist. They told us about how he used the YouTube algorithms to drive his ascendancy, which has created a political toxic nightmare in Brazil. We met with representatives from the global south who attempted time and time again to deal with Facebook and YouTube on toxic disinformation that led to genocidal levels of death in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. We met with delegations from Singapore on their attempts to get these Silicon Valley companies to take responsibility for the hate that was being perpetrated.
Today, the member for Lethbridge, in one of the most dismal, disgraceful speeches I have ever heard in my 19 years, presented a complete falsehood and talked about this magical thing called the Internet. This is not 2004. This is 2023, when this so-called magical thing called the Internet in Myanmar replaced all the domestic media and was used to promote violent, hateful genocide that left thousands and thousands and thousands of people dead. We had the representative from Facebook come to our committee, and I asked them a simple question about the corporate responsibility for genocide. The answer we got was the classic Silicon Valley jargon bunk: Nobody is perfect and we are all on a journey together. We are not on a journey together when corporate irresponsibility leads to genocide.
This is not about my opinion. This was the United Nations begging Facebook to take responsibility because it was the only broadcaster. It was the same thing in Sri Lanka. It was the same thing in Germany, where we can track the rise of anti-refugee violence to the algorithms of Facebook and YouTube. What we never heard from the Conservatives in their attack on Bill C-11 is anything about the algorithms.
Again, I want to refer to my colleague from Lethbridge and the toxic brew of paranoia, disinformation and hate that was promoted. I have read the legislation, and the member said that Bill C-11 was going to allow the cabinet, the Liberals and the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau to spy on people's search pages. That is a falsehood. To say that Bill C-11 would allow the Liberals, the cabinet and the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau to watch someone's Facebook scrolling is a deliberate falsehood. That has nothing to do with how Facebook or YouTube works and the algorithms that drive people to extremism. The member said that this bill would allow the cabinet, the Liberals, the elite gatekeepers, the son of Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the big arts union bosses, whom she also threw in, to block people's ability to watch cat videos. That was said in the House of Commons.
I raise that because there is a lot of synthetic outrage we hear. That is part of the job. People jump up and down and declare all kinds of calumny toward the government. I have certainly declared all kinds of malice toward government over the years. However, we are in an age of disinformation and paranoia, and we are talking about the need for parliamentarians to rise above that and not feed it for mendacious political purposes. This is an important issue because we see in 2023 the rise of conspiracy politics, and the new leader of the Conservative Party thinks it is working in his favour.
When the member for Lethbridge says that if this bill is passed, it will make the leader of Canada powerful like the dictator of North Korea, not only is that a falsehood, but it is a disgrace to anyone who suffers under authoritarian regimes. It needs to be called out because we are at a point where 44% of the Canadian public believes conspiracy theories. That is being fed by the Conservatives, who believe that this will somehow get them an advantage in polling. It is a very dangerous path to go down.
We have only to look, for example, at the new shadow minister for infrastructure, who has used her time in the House to promote disinformation about Bill Gates, a classic trope of conspiracy theorists, and vaccines, which is another conspiracy misinformation drive. To her, Bill Gates and vaccines are undermining Canadian sovereignty, and she is accusing the Prime Minister. This is a person appointed as a shadow minister in the Conservative shadow cabinet. It is therefore not surprising that when Christine Anderson, a far-right German neo-Nazi extremist, came to Canada, she was feted and welcomed by key members of the Conservative caucus. They felt at home with that spread of disinformation.
This is not harmless stuff. A report that just came out on vaccine disinformation said that Canada had 198,000 extra cases of COVID, 13,000 more people sent to hospital and a $300-million hit to the medical system from people who were encouraged to believe in vaccine disinformation. An extra 2,800 people died as a result. That is double all the car accidents in Canada for a year.
These people were not isolated weirdos. They were our cousins, our neighbours and our aunts. When we see the Conservatives promoting vaccine disinformation because they think it is going to win them votes, we have to ask ourselves what is happening in our nation today that the political representatives of the people are not telling people that medical science is working with us. We did not have all the answers on the vaccines. We did not have all the answers on dealing with the biggest pandemic in a century. However, we all had an obligation to stand up and say that threatening and attacking doctors, nurses and paramedics is unacceptable. That is the danger of disinformation.
It not as though this pattern comes out of nowhere, because we know what happened in Brazil with the Zika virus. There was suddenly a proliferation of falsehood videos on YouTube that told mothers it was feminists making their children sick, that it was George Soros who was making their children sick. However, there were doctors and nurses on the front lines trying to stop that pandemic, and we saw the disinformation.
Why does that disinformation need to be talked about? We have never heard the Conservative caucus talk about holding the algorithms to account, but it is the algorithms that have created toxic disinformation. They are upending democratic engagement. The Conservatives talk about freedom, the freedom to believe in ivermectin and horse tranquillizers. We have heard Conservative leadership candidates brag about how great ivermectin is. They can believe whatever they want, but the issue is that this is about how the algorithms on Facebook and YouTube turn people toward disinformation.
I urge my colleagues to read the book The Chaos Machine. As they will see in it, when people started to study vaccine disinformation in 2013 and 2014, there were parent groups talking about raising their children, but the only ones that were promoted on the algorithm promoted disinformation. If someone clicked on one of those, soon after the algorithm would feed them more and more extremist content.
By the time the pandemic hit, I had joined an international group of parliamentarians led by Damian Collins from the U.K. We thought we could actually stay ahead of disinformation. We thought we could challenge it and take it on. However, within a month it was clear that the game was over. During the pandemic, if someone checked anything on Facebook while asking for the query “alternate health” in Facebook's search function, it sent them to QAnon. That is how the algorithm works.
The algorithms are set to send people to extremism, but we do not hear that when the Conservatives talk about Bill C-11. They are trying to make Canadians believe this is some kind of plot so that the big Liberal elites, their gatekeepers and their big arts bosses can attack our rights, spy on us and shut down our views.
In fairness, I know some of the Conservatives believe this. I firmly believe that some of them, in their hearts, do believe in the Klaus Schwab and George Soros tin hat conspiracy theory. However, I also know there is an element in the Conservative Party that thinks this is a great idea and that they should spread the hate and disinformation, because it will keep people angry and it will get them to vote against the other government. They do not come here with a vision of how to address the mass power of the web giants, which other jurisdictions are dealing with. They do not come here to ask how we ensure a balance of rights and freedoms and how we ensure local content.
I am not going to be the one to say let us give extra money to Postmedia or any of the other historic companies, but what is the obligation of companies to pay their share? That is a fair discussion and that is what we should be discussing, but it is not what this has been turned into. It is about the Conservative push to promote disinformation, falsehoods and ridiculous statements. The only thing I have not heard about from the Conservatives is “pizzagate”. That is about the only thing they have not mentioned. They have mentioned everything else but that.
When I go back to international forums with parliamentarians from France, Germany, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Brazil, who are asking what Canada is doing about disinformation, I will say there is a mixed bag. We recognize the damage disinformation is doing, that it costs lives, that it is creating paranoia and that there has been a rise in death threats against doctors, nurses, paramedics and people in political life for daring to speak up. It was the member for Oshawa who used his position in the House of Commons to promote the falsehood that the Prime Minister was somehow working for Klaus Schwab. When I took that on, within an hour I was attacked and received threats.
