Madam Speaker, like the CBC. He just very honestly spit out that he wants the Internet to be controlled by the state broadcaster. It is nice when they accidentally tell the truth over there. It is so rare and so unintentional at the same time.
In real, free countries, they do not believe that a state broadcaster should have the monopoly on what people see on the Internet. That is only the case in dictatorships, like Communist China, like North Korea and like Cuba, places the Prime Minister admires and wishes to emulate.
This bill has been called creeping totalitarianism, not by me—my criticisms have not even gone that far—but by Margaret Atwood, a famous and, I believe, Liberal-leaning author, who testified that when bureaucrats are allowed to control the creation of art and culture, we are then heading to a very dangerous place. This Prime Minister has mused, recently, about going even further.
Let me give an example of one of the justifications he has been giving lately. He was over at, I think, a fire hall. He started rambling about how much time he spends studying people who believe in a flat Earth. He claims that this is the next big risk, that there are all these people who believe in a flat Earth, kind of like people who believe budgets balance themselves. Those are the kinds of weirdos we really have to watch out for.
He said that we have to be careful, that there are all these people who believe in a flat Earth. They are going to invade the world, and we are all going to forget, according to him, that the Earth is actually a sphere. He also said that this is the first time in human history that anyone has believed that the world is flat, and that it is because the Internet has too much freedom of speech that this crazy idea has spread.
Never mind that there have been many civilizations that believed the folly, and yes, I point out that it is a folly, and the Prime Minister was not fooled into thinking that the world was anything but round.
There have been others who have believed this over the years. What the Prime Minister failed to realize is that there have been many falsehoods about the physics of Earth and its relationship with the sun. For example, people used to believe that the Earth was stationary and that the sun went around it. Why did that falsehood persist for so long? It was because censorship prevented anyone from thinking otherwise.
In reality, the real purveyors of falsehood, of fake news, of information that is untrue, of conspiracy theories actually come into play when the state has too much control over our thinking, not too little. It is by challenging false ideas that we overcome those ideas. It is by smashing bad information with good information that the better information comes out on top. It is precisely in the pursuit of truth that we must allow freedom of expression online and everywhere to prevail.
Speaking of misinformation, the Prime Minister says one of the reasons he needs to have censorship is to stop all this misinformation. Well, I believe it is still on the Liberal Party's website that the budget would be balanced in 2019. I believe it was the Prime Minister who spread the misinformation that the Globe and Mail story about his interference in SNC-Lavalin story was false. It was the Prime Minister who spread that misinformation. It was the Prime Minister's own fall economic update that said we would have a balanced budget in 2027, once again reiterating misinformation.
Here is the problem: If the government's mission is to stop misinformation, what happens when it is the government itself that is spreading that misinformation?