Blaine Calkins

[Online Streaming Act, March 27th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, the member has cherry-picked a year when Canadians were basically told to stop going to work, go home and get paid $2,000 a month. What were they going to do? What did I do until we had what was not even a hybrid Parliament but a virtual sort of Parliament where we did not do anything other than talk?

[Online Streaming Act, March 27th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I will reassure my friend from Fort McMurray—Cold Lake that one of my favourite places to visit in our beautiful province is Cold Lake. I have already booked camping and fishing at Cold Lake, so I am happy to go there and reacquaint myself with not only the good people in her constituency but also the great fishing opportunities there.

Aside from that, Albertans are sometimes a little culturally different from the rest of Canada, and I accept that, but we want responsible government. What I have heard from my constituents by and large is that they do not want to be told what they can and cannot watch, and they do not want the government regulating them.

Here is Canadian content. For digital content creators, “CanCon is defined using criteria applied by three bodies: the CRTC for regulation; Canadian Heritage to access tax credits; and the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to access its public financing.” That trifecta of bureaucracy is going to be governing what Canadian content providers can do. They know impossible odds when they see them. Dealing with one government department on an issue is bad enough. When they have to deal with three for the same issue to try to get something done, good luck.

[Online Streaming Act, March 27th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise today and speak on behalf of the constituents of Red Deer—Lacombe about an issue that I am hearing quite a bit about. Before I go any further, I will note that I am splitting my time with my friend from Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa.

Bill C-11, the online streaming act, and in the previous Parliament Bill C-10, is causing a lot of concern and a lot of debate here in Canada. We are not debating the bill per se anymore in the sense that it has been returned to this place. This does not happen very often. Those who are still able to freely watch this at home need to understand that it is very rare for the Senate of Canada to return a piece of legislation to the House of Commons, because normally MPs do their due diligence in the legislative process here. It goes through committees, where we hear from witnesses and hear from experts, and we can generally amend legislation in the House of Commons. I am not saying it ever goes to the Senate in perfect format, but if we are actually doing our job here, the Senate would have very few recommendations or changes to propose for a piece of legislation.

That is not the case with this particular piece of legislation. I believe there were 26 or 29 amendments made by the Senate. I can tell members how many Conservative senators there are in the Senate. I think there are 15, so that tells us that the vast majority of senators in the Senate are not in the Conservative caucus. However, that Senate, by a majority vote, decided to report the bill back to the House of Commons with well over 20 amendments, some of which the government has decided to accept. They are largely the innocuous ones. The important ones, dealing with what people can freely say online, what constitutes Canadian content and what the government and the CRTC can regulate, have not been accepted by the government, so we are in this debate now, in this standoff.

I want to be fair to the government in my analysis of the legislation, so I want to talk about the correspondence I have gotten in my office from Canadians and from my constituents in regard to the bill. We know how it is when we go to a convention. There is the “yes” microphone and the “no” microphone, with people speaking in favour of something and people speaking against something, so in fairness to the government, I will talk about the correspondence I have received that have a positive view on Bill C-11.

Now that that is out of the way, I am going to talk about all of the negative things we are hearing from constituents. Not since the proposals on firearms have I had this much uproar in my constituency. Actually, I have not had this much uproar since back in 2017, when the previous finance minister, Bill Morneau, tried in the summertime to change the tax laws in this country, which created so much furor.

Not one person in my constituency has written into my office to says they agree with everything the government is doing on Bill C-11, and there are people in my constituency who use social media, watch Netflix and watch Disney+. They are those who have not cancelled Disney+ and saved themselves from financial ruin, according to the current finance minister. All kidding aside, they have not, and here is why: It is because they trust the people who are being very critical about this piece of legislation. They are largely objective people.

Margaret Atwood has said, “bureaucrats should not be telling creators what to write” and that bureaucrats should not be in charge of deciding what is Canadian. She has referred to all of this with two words that I think should make every member of this House stand still and think for a second: “creeping totalitarianism”. That is from Margaret Atwood, a voice of reason. Everybody around the world has read, understands or has access to some of the fine works of Margaret Atwood.

Senator Richards, who was appointed by the current Prime Minister and is himself a novelist, in his January speech in the Senate said that Bill C-11 is “censorship passing as national inclusion”. I hear this all the time. I do not know what my colleagues hear, but basically when we hear the government talk about inclusion, what it really means is that everybody who agrees with it is included and everybody who disagrees with it finds themselves on the outside looking in and feels like they are foreigners in their own country. Our country has never been more divided, and there has never been less trust in institutions. We only have to go back to a little over a year ago to see what the reaction has been to the divide-and-conquer approach the current Prime Minister and the government have taken.

Senator Richards goes on to say, “Cultural committees are based as much in bias and fear as in anything else. I’ve seen enough artistic committees to know that. That what George Orwell says we must resist is a prison of self-censorship.” This is Orwellian language being invoked by a Senate appointee of the current Prime Minister. He also said, “This law will be one of scapegoating all those who do not fit into what our bureaucrats think Canada should be.” That is what an intelligent, articulate senator, a novelist appointed to the Senate of Canada, is on the record as saying in a speech in the Senate.

It is shocking that we find ourselves here in this place reviewing this legislation again after everything we said when it was Bill C-10 and before Bill C-11 went to the Senate. It has now come back to us with the senators confirming all of our suspicions, all of our concerns and all of the problems we identified for the Canadian public.

Professor Michael Geist, who has been a perennial witness here, is one of the most learned people when it comes to free speech and all of the laws pertaining to it. He is the University of Ottawa's Canada research chair in Internet and e-commerce law. On digital content, he says, “Canada punches above its weight when it comes to the creation of this content, which is worth billions of revenue globally. We are talking about an enormous potential revenue loss for Canadian content producers.”

This is at a time when Canadians are having an increasingly difficult time making ends meet with inflation, the carbon tax, the cost of living and the cost of housing. Everything is going up in this country. If we go back to January, Jack Mintz wrote an article about this. In 2015, the cost of the federal government service was about $38 billion a year. Today, eight years later, the cost of public service salaries is $58 billion, an increase of $20 billion. It is an increase in the size of the federal public service in Canada of over 30%, so there are 30% more people working for the Government of Canada now than there were in 2015. Have things gotten better? Have people gotten their passports quicker? Are people getting across the border quicker? Are people getting anything done? Are any of the services needed by my fellow Canadians getting done in a quicker and more timely fashion? The answer is clearly no.

Why on earth, why in the name of everything that is good about the free country we live in, would we increase the size of the bureaucracy even more through the CRTC and give it the ability to do to the Internet what it has done to cable TV and radio? Canadians are no longer watching. They have tuned out. They have tuned out to the point where the government has had to spend $600 million just to prop up legacy media outlets because nobody is interested in their mandatory content.

Why do we not hear from them? We can hear from many people. I have been a member of Parliament here for 17 years, and I hear from people I disagree with all the time, but that does not make me a bitter or jaded person. It does not make the information I am hearing more or less valuable. We need to hear from everybody, and everybody should have the ability to say what they need to say. When they are not heard, when they feel like they are not being heard and when they feel like their government is working against them all the time, they start doing things they would normally not do. We saw that manifested on this Hill for three weeks last year. This is the kind of governance we are getting from the folks across the way.

The implementation of this bill is going to be a blunder. There is no reason for me to believe that increasing bureaucracy and the capacity of the CRTC is going to create a better outcome for the people of Canada than the current 30% massive increase in the size of the government we have already seen. On behalf of my constituents who have written me, I would urge the government to at least reconsider its position on the amendments and accept all of the amendments the Senate has proposed, because it would at least make a horrible bill somewhat more bearable.

[Online Streaming Act, March 27th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I am glad to get up and ask my colleague from Calgary Shepard a question, because “there's always something to do.”

The government of the day has subsidized media outlets across this country to the tune of over $600 million because these media outlets that are highly regulated by organizations like the CRTC and forced to follow these rules cannot generate the advertising revenue or the interest they need because the government is dictating to them what they can and cannot do. Does my colleague see Bill C-11 doing the same thing to digital content creators on the Internet?

[Telecommunications Act, March 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the fact that we have the ability to have this debate in the House of Commons today. It has been lively, and I have enjoyed it, but I am going to remind Canadians, who might be watching at home, and my colleagues who are here, just how rapidly technology has advanced in the course of our lifetimes.

One of the last jobs that I did prior to becoming a member of Parliament here in the chamber was as a tenured faculty member at Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, where I was a member of the computer systems technology department. I taught computing systems to students there for a number of years. It was a great job with brilliant minds of the young people who had come to that college.

I learned all about computing when I was an adult. I did not have the privilege of growing up inside a computer. Those of us in the room who are old enough to know, back in the mid-1990s, an old IBM 386DX used to cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars, for computing power that right now would not even match an outdated, obsolete iPhone.

I would remind the people watching what the significance of this debate is and why the legislation we are discussing, and hopefully sending to committee, is so important.

If we go back to the 1960s, the development of ARPANET is where the foundations of the Internet started. The transmission rate of data at ARPANET, which was a military defence network, and as I said, the founder of the Internet, was 56 kilobytes per second. Now, in 2022, we are at 5U, which is 100 megabits per second. This is an absolutely astounding rate of growth in the ability to move information from point A to point B.

The growth since 1983 is based on Nielsen's Law on bandwidth. Basically, every year we increase the capacity to send information over a network by 50%, which is an exponential number that keeps going up. It is not 50% of where we started from. It is 50% from now. If we could do compound interest in the financial system that would give us a 50% compound interest return, we would be doing quite well. However, this is how fast the network processing, or the bandwidth, is growing in the world.

If we take a look at Moore's law, when it comes to the ability of microchip processing, transistors on a microchip double every two years, which is what they said back in the mid-1960s. In 1970, there were just over 1,000 transistors on a microchip. Now, there are 50 billion transistors on a single microchip. That is an insane amount of computational power, and coupled with the bandwidth that I just talked about, leaves us in a situation where parliamentarians and politicians need to be cognizant of the scale of the capacity of what we are talking about.

Let us go back to the early 1990s and a computer at that point in time. We measure computational power in things like FLOPS, or floating point operations per second, and MIPS, or million instructions per second. A computer back in the early 1990s could do under 1,000 calculations per second. Today, we are well over a billion computations per second, and that is floating point operations, which are more complicated than even just the millions of instructions per second. We can just take a look at that efficiency.

When we talk about going back to original computers, we talk about the Harvard Mark II, which I think weighed 23 tonnes. Now, with today's technology, the demand of energy per unit of processing or unit of computing power has actually been cut in half every 18 months, which means that every 18 months, the amount of energy and power that it took to do the same job is now half of what it was. This is allowing for massive growth. We see things springing up all the time. We have Bitcoin mining operations using massive amounts of electricity. Can members imagine if we tried to use that much electricity using older computers? It would have been absolutely astounding.

On storage, I am not talking about memory in the computer, and I already talked about the microchip storage. However, when I was teaching at Red Deer College, we got these hard drives that came in so that we could play around with a hard drive. Now, I am mostly a software guy. I was a programmer and database administrator, but I had to learn a little bit about the hardware.

We had a 420-gigabyte hard drive. It might have been a megabyte, but I think it was a gigabyte, but oh my goodness. I remember we had 20-gigabyte hard drives. Who can remember when they were excited about having a 20-gigabyte hard drive?

In the 1950s, if we go back to early computing, the cost to store one terabyte of data, using that technology and working backwards on the cost of a unit of storage and the evolution of computing, it would have cost over $100 trillion. Today, for less than $100, people can go to a computer store and buy a hard drive or a disk for their computer that contains well over a terabyte of data.

Why is this history lesson so important? It is because we are moving into an age of artificial intelligence. Some of my colleagues have expanded upon the importance of artificial intelligence in their speeches earlier. I listened with great anticipation to what they said.

What does the requirement for computational power and bandwidth require for artificial intelligence? Today's computers, looking at artificial intelligence, are actually using something called petaFLOPS, that is 10 to the 15th, a quadrillion floating point operations per second. That computational power exists in our networks that are out there that are now hooked up with 5G networks that can operate at 100 megabits per second.

The amount of technology and the availability of technology and the ability of that technology in today's standards are absolutely amazing. In fact, because of these advances in technology, we now have some pretty amazing facts. A television today, a software game, any of our intelligence toys, anything that requires computing is 35% lower in cost relative to income than it was just 20 years ago. Meanwhile, college tuition, education and so on have gone up over 150% in the same time frame. That tells us the vast amount of research and technology that has been put in place on the development of this technology.

That is why it is so important. Artificial intelligence is a conversation that we should be having in this House, and cybersecurity is certainly a part of that. Everybody knows, we are watching the news, and we see some great potential uses. That is the thing; everything that is designed to make our lives better, more efficient and more productive could also be used for evil.

I am not accusing anybody of using it for evil. That is not the point I am making. However, everything we want to use for good, somebody else could use with malicious intent.

I will just give a couple of examples. We have had the conversation today about the amount of personal information that has been lost, hacked and held hostage through various cyber-attacks. We know that the People's Liberation Army in China has tens of thousands of people working, just in their cyber-attack divisions alone. Just to keep in mind, for the people who are watching at home, Canada's entire military hovers between 60,000 and 70,000 people. The People's Liberation Army, just in their cyber-intelligence division alone, would have more people than the entire Canadian Armed Forces across all three of our divisions.

These are the folks, coupled with our security establishment, who need to have the tools to defend us, our networks, our infrastructure and all the critical things that we do. We are talking about hospitals, electricity grids and all these things. Imagine something as simple as a driverless or autonomous vehicle. An autonomous vehicle can now drive itself, and the reason it can do it is because we have that 5G technology, and we have the cameras and the ability for that car to make intelligent, informed decisions at the calculation rate, because of the advances in computers that I just talked about. Imagine what somebody with malicious intent could do with an autonomous car, if they wanted to.

That is why we have to get the cybersecurity question right in this debate. If we leave our systems vulnerable, if we leave ourselves open to the possibility, and we are never going to be perfect, and for everything we do, somebody with malicious intent could find a workaround for it, so we have to keep it up to speed.

With all the facts I just talked about, the doubling of technology and computing power and the halving of electricity requirements, we need to be very clear. This is the one piece of advice that I will offer to my friends across the way in the government, because this is too important not to be working together on this. The technology is growing and developing at such a rapid pace that I really do hope that we and the government have the ability to put in some clauses to review this, because it is just so important that we get this right and constantly review our cyber defences and cybersecurity in this country.

[Telecommunications Act, March 6th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate the debate and the questions my colleague posed.

I think most Canadians back home watching this are wondering what the technical nuances are of everything we are discussing with respect to this legislation. We have even had some members of Parliament stand up here and say that they do not feel properly equipped to have this conversation.

I think one thing that everybody back home can relate to is seeing something on the news stating that the credit card information of a million people has been stolen or the data of some businesses that might have their personal information is now being held hostage in a ransomware attack. That is why this is a very important debate. I will be speaking about this a bit later.

I think the bill is missing the component of protecting the personal information of Canadians. Can my colleague tell us his thoughts on the bill in this regard? My speech will focus on the advances in technology and network infrastructure, as well as the rapid pace of technological development. With this bill, would we actually be able to keep up with the threats we are facing?

[Telecommunications Act, March 6th, 2023]

Madam Speaker, this is a very interesting debate and something we should be discussing thoroughly here in the House.

As my colleague has spent a lot of years as a defence critic and in the defence milieu, he is knowledgeable, so I want to ask him a bit about the People's Liberation Army's units 61486 and 61398. We know from public reports that these units have thousands and thousands of people working for them. The entire Canadian Armed Forces is somewhere around 60,000 to 70,000 people, so we would be outnumbered by their cyber-divisions alone.

Given the fact that AI is now in the public domain, does the bill go far enough in addressing the legitimate concerns that foreign actors create in everyday life here in Canada? What could be improved upon in the legislation?

[Business of Supply, February 7th, 2023]

Mr. Speaker, I received a call from a constituent this week, a woman in her mid-40s whose gas bill was over $300 for the first time ever. She lives alone in her house. She says that, if her power bill is equivalent, she will not be able to afford her bills for the first time ever. She has never had a better paying job in her life, and her final thought to me was that she would have been better off staying in a relationship with her abusive husband because at least he paid the bills. This is because she cannot afford to live on her own anymore.

I wonder if my colleague has any thoughts about how the carbon tax disproportionately affects women and the people who are vulnerable in our society.

[Public Safety, February 3rd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, in 2022, five Canadian police officers were killed in a deadly 37-day stretch. The president of the Police Association of Ontario has called this “unprecedented”. All the while, shootings continue in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Drugs, guns and contraband continue to flow across the border, and repeat offenders are out on bail, allowed to continue harming society unmitigated.

We know that the Prime Minister has been convicted of two ethics offences on separate occasions in the last eight years. Is that why the government is so afraid to deal with repeat offenders?

[Public Safety, February 3rd, 2023]

Madam Speaker, after eight long years of the current government, crime has surged to a level not seen in decades. Not only are communities subjected to daily shootings and stabbings, but now they worry about random attacks in their subways. Rapists are let out on bail the same day the police take them down to the courthouse.

Public safety is not some graduate project for a criminologist; its implementation has deadly consequences if we do not get it right. Instead of creating repeat victims, why does the current government not listen to the provinces and deal with repeat offenders?