Madam Speaker, I am happy to join this debate, mostly to refute some of the claims that have been made by Liberals and the NDP about the Conservative position on this bill.
During debate on Bill C-11, the Liberals and the NDP have falsely claimed the Conservatives do not care about Canadian artists and that we do not care about Canadian culture. They have accused us of spreading misinformation and are insisting, falsely, that this bill is somehow necessary to protect Canadian culture.
I want to clear the air on the first part. I love Canadian culture. I am fascinated by all things Canadian, and I love travelling to new places in Canada. I love its land and people, and I am always fascinated by how Canada's history shapes its culture. I have always read Canadian authors. I have always listened to Canadian music. In my formative years, the eighties, most of my favourite bands were Canadian. In my university days in the early nineties, I went to countless live shows with emerging Canadian artists.
I have been buying Canadian books, Canadian albums and Canadian concert tickets for decades, but this bill is not about ensuring the health of Canadian culture. This bill is about giving extraordinary powers to a federal institution to influence what Canadians find, see, hear and post on the Internet.
This bill would give the CRTC powers that do not belong in a free and democratic society. This bill gives the CRTC the power to compel web platforms to favour some content over other content depending on the CRTC's preference, not the consumer's preference. This government interference with consumer preference naturally conjures up all kinds of thoughts of governmental control over the arts and access to information from both real history and literary dystopias.
When the Conservatives, or anybody, suggest that this bill is on a spectrum of governmental control that might include Goebbels' ministry of public enlightenment, the Soviet censorship system or Orwell's fictitious ministry of truth, Canadians and Conservatives who have engaged in this debate are merely raising the same concerns raised by experts, eminent Canadians and Liberal-appointed senators. These points have been made by academic experts like Michael Geist. They have been made by eminent Canadians like Margaret Atwood and David Richards. The latter happens to be a Liberal-appointed senator. They have been made by the former CRTC chair Peter Menzies.
We are raising the points made by contemporary professional digital content creators who have come to committee to say they are desperately worried that this bill is going to destroy their livelihoods. We are not making this up. This bill gives power to the CRTC to create winners and losers. It directs the CRTC to separate content the CRTC thinks Canadians should find, see, hear and post from content the CRTC thinks Canadians should not be able to find, see, hear or post. The Liberals and the NDP are welcome to make the argument that it is a good thing for the CRTC to differentiate between what Canadians should find and what they should not find on the Internet. They can make that argument, but they cannot argue that this bill does not do exactly that. That is the point of this bill.
What about Canada's 50-year history of mandatory Canadian content for broadcasters? We have heard lots about this in points when members are refuting Conservative speeches. The Liberals say that this bill is just evening the playing field by treating the Internet like old-fashioned TV and radio. Are we seriously talking about evening the playing field?
The infinity of the Internet is the ultimate level playing field. Nothing has been done to break down barriers between artists and their audience like the Internet. When the Liberals say this bill is levelling the playing field, what they really mean is they want to make the Internet every bit as uneven as the playing field the CRTC already regulates.
Once, the Soviet Union took a very dim view of western music. It banned not only American and British artists but even Canadian artists, like Rush, which was banned in the Soviet Union. It also banned the entire genres these artists popularized. There was no rock and roll, no jazz, no blues and nothing that could be associated with decadent capitalist western culture in the Soviet Union. If someone was living in the Soviet Union, all they could get was Russian classical music performed by trusty state-sanctioned and state-funded orchestras. Imagine being denied the Beatles because they did not fit in with the government's bureaucrats' ideas of what a model citizen should enjoy.
Although Bill C-11 is certainly not promising to ban foreign content from Canadians, it is proposing to gently suppress foreign or unregistered Canadian content in favour of content approved by bureaucrats at the CRTC. Let no one doubt who leads these bureaucrats. The Liberals always appoint their own when it comes to boards and commissions, including at least one defeated Liberal candidate sitting as the current CRTC commissioner.
That leads us right to the heart of why it is wrong to treat the Internet like 1970s radio and television: There is simply no way that a bunch of bureaucrats hand-picked by the Liberals can be arbiters of who and what is Canadian content. Despite what the Liberals and the NDP, and particularly its House leader, have been saying all night, there has never been a golden age of Canadian content regulation. Back in the eighties, people knew that when a song or TV show came on that nobody actually liked, it was on just because it ticked the boxes and was Canadian content. In the seventies, a checklist system was made whereby if something ticked enough boxes, it was in and was Canadian content. However, this system was always fraught with problems, like system gaming. We have heard about this tonight. Do members remember when Bryan Adams was not Canadian enough to be considered Canadian content? He was a Canadian who lived in Canada, in Vancouver, but other songs recorded by American bands in Vancouver could qualify as Canadian, maybe if the record producer slipped in a writing credit.
Bureaucrats with the power to censor, subsidize or otherwise make choices on behalf of consumers are the worst arbiters of good taste. That is why the Soviet Union could never make a decent pair of blue jeans. It is true. If we put bureaucrats in charge of something like this, they are not going to come up with what the people really want. That is why my favourite Canadian novelist, Mordecai Richler, once called the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council “mediocrity's holy trinity”. That is what he called them.
With all due respect for the Canadian artists who have testified at committee that the old rules helped their careers decades ago, I think some of them are being too modest. The Tragically Hip owe their success to their incredible talent as songwriters and performers and how hard they worked in their formative years. The Canadian content system may well have helped them, but their connection with Canadians and Canadian audiences seemed inevitable to me, just like a generation earlier when Rush produced their own album. They found an audience in Cleveland on the radio and then made their way back into Canada and throughout the world.
Bill C-11 would treat the entire Internet like it is 1971 again. The government wants to treat Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, paid streaming services and every other thing we can find, see, hear or post on the Internet like the system it is comfortable with, the one that has been around for 50 years before any of these things were invented.
The Liberals and the NDP say that opponents of the bill, from Conservative politicians to academic experts to eminent Canadian artists, are all wrong and that none of us understand. The Liberals and the NDP say that this is not about freedom of expression, censorship or regulating cat videos, but about making the web giants support Canadian artists. If that was true, why did they not say so in the bill and accept the amendment that would have truly created the exemption for user-uploaded content? They could have done that, but they chose not to because they want a bill that expands the powers of the CRTC.
The bill would not modernize the Broadcasting Act. It is Canada's first Internet regulation bill. It is wrong, and it should be defeated.