Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased this morning to rise and speak to this motion because it is very indicative in some ways of where we are standing right now as a Parliament.
We had a scenario just a few minutes ago where the Parliamentary Secretary for Canadian Heritage came in the House, stood up and accused everybody of being soft on crime because of the fact that we were actually talking about the role of telecom and broadcast deregulations. He added that by not sticking to an extremely narrow focus of what a national government is, we are somehow allowing the punks to run wild in the streets, grabbing old ladies' handbags, that we are supporting kids tossing litter out on the sidewalks, and that we are not getting serious about mandatory minimums for furniture theft and bicycle theft.
This is the line that the government has pushed consistently since it was elected. It is fascinating that it happens just in the shadow of the debacle that we had in Africa this week, where the government shamed Canada on the international stage and said to the world that Canada was no longer there as a leader.
We had a national government there basically acting as a front for big oil, saying to the rest of the world, “You can suffer with climate change but the Athabasca tar sands are going to be allowed to be developed by a bunch of ecological freebooters”.
When our representatives return to Canada, we are supposed to maintain their narrow definition of government, a government that is not there for the national interests of Canadians, that is not there for the international interests. And if we dare speak out on the issues that are important to people in this country, the day to day business of Parliament, we are somehow soft on crime. That is a farcical position.
The only problem with it is that there is nothing funny about what the government has been doing. It is becoming more and more incumbent upon the opposition to stand up and oppose it at every opportunity until we can flush this government from this House and begin with a vision that will actually deal with the substantive issues that are facing Canadians today.
It is for this reason that I am pleased to speak to this motion because the issue of the role of the CRTC and its undermining by the government needs to be debated in this House.
We know, for example, that soon after forming government, the Conservatives sent the instructions to their delegation in the GATS talks in Geneva to begin an international plurilateral request at the GATS to strip telecom of any kind of regulations on telecom internationally. Telecom of course is the poster child for deregulation, but let us for a minute just talk about what telecom has done in this country.
In a nation that is so far flung, where we have large pockets of isolated urban areas and then massive rural areas, a national plan for telecom has always been considered primary in our national interests.
Has our telecom industry failed? No, we have some of the highest penetrations of rural regions in the world, much better than our neighbours in the United States, where everything is based on a profit line. We have some of the highest use of broadband in the world, so with a national framework policy on telecom, we have been able to serve our country. Have we served it as well as we should? No, but it really speaks to the need to have a national plan.
Canada is the lead nation pushing for the stripping of all foreign ownership on telecom, but at the same time, Canada is on the receiving end of a GATS request and audio-visual services that would strip all the abilities of a national government to maintain domestic content quotas, to maintain cultural quotas, and to maintain even language standards.
This is a major issue that needs to be talked about and the government has done everything it can not to talk about it.
Right now at the GATS, negotiations are underway that could strip our nation's ability to maintain domestic language, domestic cultural content, and in exchange it will allow again this group of freebooters its long term vision, which is to completely strip telecom.
When we ask the Conservatives a question on where this stands right now in the House, they jump up and scream that we are being soft on criminals and letting the punks run wild in the streets. That answer does not wash. The Canadian people need to know what is happening because the negotiations that are underway and that have been ongoing with the GATS process run counter to Canadian law. They run counter to the Telecommunications Act. They run counter to the rules of the CRTC.
We would end up with a scenario where, for deals that were made at the GATS, Canada would have to come back and say that this is now international trade law, we had no choice, we had to sign off and we will now have to amend our domestic law. We would have to change what is happening at the CRTC. That could happen without a proper debate in Parliament.
Therefore, certainly we have consistently pushed for these issues to be debated in Parliament before our trade negotiators are given any kind of mandate to sell out fundamental issues of national interest. One of the arguments we have heard from the government is that we should not worry, that we can put a firewall around our domestic content. We will allow the telecoms to be sold off willy-nilly to any large U.S. buyer, but we will somehow manage to protect ourselves and we will put in a firewall to protect our domestic content, says the government.
That is an absurd position and anybody who is in the industry knows it, because we have also at the same time been pushing for many years for convergence so that the people delivering our telephone service and cable service are now also the same people who are delivering our news.
The vertical integration in telecom and broadcast is so complete that it would be absurd to say that in any proposed takeover we would have a situation in which the buyers would agree to sever off the key aspects of some of their business portfolios, which are the news and the cultural elements. It is impossible to suggest that we could maintain Canadian content, a Canadian vision or a Canadian news service if we were bought up by a much larger U.S. partner. Even on the issue of telecom the question has to be asked: is there not a need to increase foreign capital? There has not been a single instance of any of our major telecoms even coming close to needing this.
We have a number of issues before us right now that need to be looked at in terms of the role of the CRTC. We have set up a situation that is good for industry. We have created a situation whereby industry has managed to survive and hold its own because we have had a proactive policy, a vision that comes out of the federal government and which we have maintained for a number of years.
For example, the broadcasters are in competition continuously, especially since most of our major urban centres are along the border. They are going head to head, night after night, with the major U.S. players, yet we have section 19.1 of the Income Tax Act, which allows our broadcasters protection in order for them to maintain a very profitable bottom line. Section 19.1 of the act gives our broadcasters about $300 million a year, moneys that they might otherwise lose to U.S. competition. For the specialty channels, it is upwards of $900 million a year.
The problem is that we have set up a system to encourage a domestic broadcast network, but we also rely on the CRTC to maintain a bit of a vision so that there is a quid pro quo. Right now, of course, we have a situation in which, after the 1999 changes to the CRTC Act, we have seen domestic Canadian content virtually disappear from the prime time airwaves.
More and more, what we are seeing now is simply simultaneous substitution, whereby U.S. programs are shown in Canada and our domestic broadcasters make money by showing Canadian chunky soup advertisements as opposed to American chunky soup advertisements.
Canadians have asked again and again why it is that if the broadcasters are being given a protected market, there is no protected market or even a market to guarantee even a small slice for our Canadian content, because television is extremely expensive to make. In Canada we have a market that is split two-thirds English and one-third French. It is split across the country. There has to be a national will in order to maintain a domestic voice.
If people are asked why they read newspapers, why they listen to radio, or even why they watch local TV, I think it is very clear that it is because they want their voices heard. What we are seeing now is this push for the mega-mergers, whereby one or two newspaper chains will buy up an entire district or one or two radio chains will have the entire district. They say they need that because more people are tuning out, but people are tuning out when they do not hear their own voices.
They are tuning out when they have regional newspapers, which have always been a cash cow for the large giants, that again and again cut their staff and staff requirements. There are fewer and fewer local voices and more and more canned editorials, so people stop reading, of course, because they know what is going to be in the paper. They are not seeing their kids' photos in the newspapers. They are not seeing the events at the local Legion or Lions Club, because there is simply not enough staff.
We have to lay down some ground rules. We need competition in the marketplace. This has been an issue in regard to culture for the New Democratic Party forever: we believe we have to give access to smaller voices in the market so they can maintain themselves.
Over the last number of years, we have seen a number of challenges to the way the CRTC examines takeovers. Many takeovers have allowed one or two groups to consolidate further and further in regional markets without much fanfare. We have had a couple of big ones with the recent CTVglobemedia attempted takeover and, right now, the Goldman Sachs and CanWest Global takeover of Alliance Atlantis, which is very problematic.
We need to remind the CRTC that it has the obligation to maintain a national vision, because we are in a situation whereby a U.S. investment banker basically is being asked to come in as a partner to buy up not just a major partner in a Canadian network but also the entire library of the Alliance Atlantis chain, which has become the depository of the Canadian film library for the last 30 years.
The library was created through public input. The money was put forward through various federal initiatives to support a domestic film industry, yet we are seeing a situation whereby Alliance Atlantis could be in a position to pick this up.
I asked the former Minister of Heritage during a late debate where she stood on this and what steps the government would take proactively, because this falls beyond the mandate of the CRTC. She said to me that the Competition Bureau would look after it, but it was not the role of the Competition Bureau to look after the future of the biggest catalogue of Canadian film and in fact the entire history of Canadian film. That was not within the purview of the Competition Bureau and it also was not within the purview of the CRTC, but the government was going to sit back and allow its so-called market forces to rule.
However, we do not have market forces in broadcasting and telecom. We have protected markets. We have allowed certain voices and certain players to consolidate and get bigger and bigger. If they are going to get bigger, then there has to be the obligation that they have to give back, that there has to be space within that market. Otherwise, we simply cannot function as a modern democracy.
The role of the media in a democracy is crucial. We only have to look at the United States to see how a war that was perpetrated on a lie was allowed to go through with the meek consent of the elected representatives of the United States because the media went in lockstep with the lie and never challenged it. Any voices that spoke out against the lie were basically sidelined or silenced.
We cannot allow that same situation to happen here. We need to maintain, first of all, a strong public broadcaster whose role is to define the terms of how we actually engage in public discourse. We need to support our domestic broadcasters so that they can compete but we also must say to them that we will work with them, that we will ensure they will not be simply rolled over by their larger U.S. counterparts, but that they have an obligation to put back into the system so the voices of the various regions of the country can be heard.
These are important issues. These are issues that need to be discussed in Parliament. The Conservatives can jump up on their desks and beat their chests all they want, but the fact is that the reality of our obligation as members of Parliament is to speak about these issues. The government has been notably silent about it and, more and more, we find that the decisions it is allowing to happen are happening behind the scenes.
There was the situation last year with the heritage minister holding a broadcast fundraiser put on by the broadcast industry two weeks before a major broadcast review. Average Canadians do not have that kind of access to policy changes. Parliamentarians were not given that access to potential changes in policy.
This is a government that is working very closely with a few key lobbyists and has a vision for stripping some of the basic infrastructure of arts and culture in this country. When one talks about arts, this is where it needs to be focused toward the end. For years we have undervalued the arts in Canada. We have not seen arts and culture as the important entertainment industry it is, but what we can do and have an obligation to do is maintain the infrastructure so that the arts can actually be heard and flourish.
As I said earlier, in order to do that we need a strong public broadcaster whose mandate is to encourage and ensure that voices from the regions are heard. We also need to have the CRTC play the role of balancing competing interests among the bottom line, competition from the United States, and also the obligation to ensure there is a diversity of voices.
If we do not set some ground rules in Parliament and participate in these discussions, we will see them continually winnowed away, as in the 1999 CRTC decision, for example, which had profound effects on Canada's domestic television industry. In fact, the whole cultural industry, which was flourishing at that time, has never quite recovered.
We also have to deal with the fact that the government, not through Parliament but through its trade negotiations, is undermining the necessary infrastructure that is in place right now to ensure we have a diversity of voices and also undermining basic obligations to ensure language and cultural content. These are issues that Canadians have supported consistently and look to their government to support. They need a clear message from Parliament to say that at the end of the day the infrastructure for culture and the diversity of voices must be maintained.
At this time, given the numerous challenges to the CRTC, it is incumbent upon the members of Parliament in the House to speak to this motion. I am very pleased that this motion is coming before us today. In fact, I would look forward to a motion tomorrow and the next day if we need it, so that we could actually begin to debate some of the substantive business of this country rather than this wrong-headed, silly and pathetic Conservative Party attempt to focus the entire nation's business on the punks running up and down the streets. The government is not dealing with many of the other issues that we need to deal with in this House.
