Madam Speaker, it is a great privilege, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South, especially because we have seen the benefits of film production in Canada in our part of the country.
It is great that we have Canadian productions. It is great that we have American productions that choose to set up shop in Canada. The one thing that I think is often missing in this conversation is that the Liberal government has never met a tax it does not like. When it tries to control Canadians and their viewing preferences and listening preferences, the only one who wins is government, not industry, not film production and not the people who work in television and media in this country.
The Liberal-appointed CRTC has come out with a declaration that to enforce the Liberal legislation that the Conservatives warned about vociferously, Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, it will triple the amount of money the streaming services that Canadians enjoy, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime and Apple TV, will have to spend to 15%, up from 5%, as the levy they will have to pay to fund Liberal government-approved productions and Liberal-approved content.
This is so important because when Bill C-11 first came through the House, Conservatives warned that it was not actually going to be about Canadian storytelling; it was going to be about the government picking and choosing winners, picking and choosing which types of stories get to be told, which ones get the support of government, who gets supplemented and supported and who gets suppressed. One of the biggest powers of Bill C-11 that we warned about was, basically, the requirement that streaming sites, including, for example, YouTube, would have to manipulate their algorithms so that they are serving up content that the Liberal government wants Canadians to see. While the Liberals say they are not manipulating algorithms, we know that the consequences of what they are forcing streaming platforms to do necessitate that.
We have already heard, quite recently, from streamers who have noticed changes. Content they used to produce and generate that would do very well all of a sudden is not. Podcaster Jasmin Laine, among others, has pointed to this. We have heard from officials that there are still very many conversations going on, and the Liberal government tries to play coy on these things. Even now, we have heard from one Liberal member of Parliament that this is all the CRTC's actions at arm's length and not something the Liberal government is controlling, ignoring the fact that the Liberal government has the power under the Broadcasting Act to step in and stop this streaming tax immediately. It has the power to do this. This is a consequence of the government's own legislation.
What is this going to mean? It is easy to get up and say that, in theory, we can put this levy in place and triple it from 5% to 15% and all these big American streaming platforms are going to have to pay it. That is the type of rhetoric we hear from people who do not understand how business works. They do not understand how markets work. To be fair, I have seen the budgets the Liberals put forward. I know they do not understand how business works.
This money will not be absorbed by the Netflixes and the Amazons. It will be passed along to consumers. All of a sudden, the amount of money people have to pay to Netflix to watch some shows they like will go up. The amount of money we have to pay to subscribe to these platforms will go up. This tripling of the tax will be passed on to consumers, who, because of everything the Liberal government has done to the country, deserve the chance to kick back and watch something for fun. They deserve the chance to watch some television shows and some movies. However, when the Liberal government is saying that we need to penalize companies that are offering a service to Canadians that Canadians pay for, and that the money will go toward content the Liberal government approves of, Canadians know this will result in more government control or in companies pulling out of the Canadian market altogether.
Members should remember that Bill C-11 did not come in isolation. It came alongside the Online News Act, which similarly tried to extort companies for being utilized by Canadian companies. In that case, it was journalism and news outlets. What did Meta do in response to this? It said, “Why are we going to be penalized because newspapers want to share their content on our platform?” Meta pulled news out of the Canadian market. To this day, Canadians cannot share a news article about Liberal corruption, among other things, or any news article on Facebook or Instagram. It is very conceivable that streaming companies could take similar retaliatory action if the Liberal government makes it so that their business model is no longer viable.
This is not about the American companies. This is not about streaming services. What this is actually about is Canadians' ability to access content they want and shows they want.
One of the great things about streaming services is that they bring together content from around the world. We often think about the need to safeguard this term we hear, “cultural sovereignty”, but in actuality, Canada, as we often hear from the Liberal government, is a very diverse country. Streaming services allow Canadians of all backgrounds to watch shows in different languages and from different countries. In fact, my favourite show of all time was not an American production imposed on me but a Spanish show that I learned about through a streaming service. I cannot understand it in the original Spanish; perhaps I will get to that at another point. I hate the idea that the only content we would get is Canadian productions when we should be able to have access to everything.
We can imagine if other countries imposed the same sort of cultural protectionism that the Liberals are trying to do. Then Canadian content could not be exported. People in other countries would not get to benefit from some of the great cultural exports of Canada, shows like Being Erica and Schitt's Creek, or speeches from the member for Winnipeg North, and all of these Canadian cultural exports that people from around the world may wish to tune in to. Not all Canadian content is good content, as the latter example shows, but we do not want the Liberal government to be the determining force in what types of content Canadians can see, and we do not want Canadian enterprise to suffer.
Again, the idea that the Liberals are presenting is that if we triple this levy, companies are just going to pay it, and it is going to go into creating jobs and opportunities in Canada. However, we know that is not what happens, and the Online News Act is, I think, a very good cautionary tale.
I would note that the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture has not really staked out a position on this. He said he will “carefully assess its impacts.” Now, that, I believe, translates from Liberal to “We do not know what we are doing, but we will carefully assess its impacts.” He says he wants Canadians “to see themselves reflected on [the] screen”. We do, but we also want Canadians to be able to afford to watch the content they want to watch and to afford things that have already gone up in price. It is more expensive to buy groceries now. It is more expensive to pay rent, to buy a house, to pay the gas bill and to fill up the gas tank. These are measures that, in a lot of ways, are within the Liberal government's control. Why is the Liberal government insisting on making everything more unaffordable?
In fact, there has already been some recognition from the Liberals of the effect that streaming services have on Canadian budgets. We may remember the former finance minister whose brilliant idea for how Canadians could cope with inflation was to cancel Disney+. Well, more Canadians will have to follow that advice because these services are going up in price because of something the Liberal government could rectify very easily. We have an opposition motion that calls on the Liberals to reject this streaming tax increase, to use their authority, which rests in the Broadcasting Act, to cancel this streaming tax once and for all.
I remember when Stephen Harper warned about the Netflix tax over a decade ago. The Liberals mercilessly mocked. They said, “No one is going to tax streaming services,” and here they are, not just taxing them but increasing the tax on these streaming services.
We will not protect anything in Canada if we take away more affordability from Canadians and take away choice, which needs to be front and centre in how Canadians choose to engage in whatever cultural product it is: a show, a movie, a song or anything else.