Mr. Speaker, before I begin speaking on the substance of Bill C-11, I would like to denounce the methods being systematically used by this government to limit debate. Once again, we are up against a motion that limits the time for debate on this bill. There have been too many to count. I do not know how many the government has moved, but it is becoming a habit. It has become a habit; this government's modus operandi is always to try to limit debate, as though there were some emergency, as though there were a fire, any time a bill is introduced on any subject.
In response to this, the government always says that it has a majority. To my knowledge, 40% of voters does not a majority make.
The government says that it has been given a strong mandate but this is not a strong mandate at all.
The government is using this strong-arm method, but it does not have a strong mandate. Since less than 40% of voters placed their trust in the Conservatives, they cannot use the argument that they have a strong mandate.
Once again, I am disappointed because we are again being forced to cut debate short and we will not be able to explore this properly. As many of my colleagues have pointed out, many of us are new here and would really like the opportunity to express our thoughts on these important issues. Indeed, the bills we are voting on today will have consequences. Many of my colleagues would like to have the opportunity to express their thoughts, without being systematically bullied by this government.
A number of things in Bill C-11 can be criticized. I would first like to talk about the thing that is probably most shocking to Canadians: making it an offence to remove a digital lock. The impression we get is that this government wants to put the entire population in prison; I do not know where we are going to put all the people being locked up. In the NDP, we say this government is disconnected from reality, disconnected from what Canadians see and what Canadians think in everyday life. Canadians do not understand why they want to put someone in prison for five years, when other crimes are much worse but are punished much less harshly. Putting sentences for digital manipulation on the same footing as assaults and crimes against the person makes no sense to the Canadians who watch us do our work as legislators every day.
I am going to offer a more personal anecdote. Before I became a member of Parliament, I worked for Statistics Canada. Statistics Canada's legislation on the subject of the census said that a person could go to prison for not answering the census. This was quite an old provision. Canadians did not understand why failing to fill out a form could mean someone would go to prison just like a person who committed a crime against a person, who committed an assault on someone, or who caused damage to property. People could not understand it.
The fact that we are told someone can be imprisoned for a term of up to five years shows that the government is completely disconnected from reality. No one in Canada would understand how someone could be put in prison for five years for digital manipulation, when other people do not go to prison for crimes against a person. For myself, this is what I find most shocking when I read this bill. It tells me there is a complete failure to understand, a complete disconnect between the government, on its pedestal, which is all powerful and demonstrates every day that it uses and abuses those powers, and the people who are trying to live their lives, and sometimes just trying to survive, and cannot understand this double standard.
Another aspect is also a cause for concern, in my opinion. We have the impression that this government is targeting students. There is a provision in this bill that would require them to destroy course notes they have used after 30 days, when those notes should be part of the knowledge they have acquired. They should be able to retain them for later use in their profession or in higher education. This makes no sense.
We want a country that develops and flourishes due to the quality of its teaching—providing better education for its children—and yet, paradoxically, a clause has been included in this bill that will force students to destroy their class notes. As a result, they will not be able to take advantage of everything they have learned, which is valuable to them, and to all of us here. Indeed, we need the next generations to be better educated and more comfortable, in a professional sense, with new technologies. This is yet another example of the government not sharing the same approach. It is as if they were living in another world.
Something else shocked me. I have listened to a number of debates and discussions on this issue and get the sense that the government is being deliberately ambiguous, and engaging in verbal games with words like “creator” and “copyright owner”. Some of my colleagues made a very relevant observation earlier, and that is that creators are not necessarily—and not at all in many cases—the rights holders. In the debate on this bill, every member across aisle constantly talks about standing up for the rights of authors, but copyright is not always the property of the authors, rather it belongs to big companies or publishing houses which, in practice, are not the authors.
So there is this constant, insidious ambiguity, deliberate in my opinion, regarding creators—whom we wish to encourage, of course—and copyright owners. The latter are often, too often, big companies with sometimes outrageous profit margins, whose situation does not resemble that of a creator, that is, the person who had the brainpower to generate the cultural product in the first place.
The NDP has consistently favoured a balanced approach to find the right balance between, on one hand, the rights of creators—not the copyright owners—to receive fair compensation for their work and their contribution to society in general, and, on the other hand, the right of the consumer to have access to culture at a reasonable price.
When considering the flaws in certain provisions in this bill, what automatically springs to mind is the issue of digital locks, which has in no way been resolved. In fact, as things currently stand in the bill, there could be situations where legal and legitimate copies are banned, despite the fact that it is perfectly legitimate to make the transfer from one format to another once the rights to a product have been purchased. Clearly the bill has not resolved this problem.
I will stop there and answer my colleagues’ questions.
