Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time today with the member for Peace River—Westlock.
I am rising today to speak on behalf of my constituents of Kelowna—Lake Country to this motion to close debate on Bill C-11. It is a bill that the government continues to insist should not be of concern to Canadians, yet barely allows it to be debated. The previous iteration, Bill C-10, had massive backlash last year, and damning testimony and expert analysis of the Liberal bill, so we can see why the Liberals want to shut down scrutiny as quickly as possible this time around.
Bill C-11 is a piece of legislation that the government continues to insist is entirely different from last year's Bill C-10. After reviewing the legislation, I can confirm there is definitely an 11 and not a 10 in the title of the legislation. Unfortunately, the rest of the deeply flawed Bill C-10, which would limit what Canadians could see, share and view online, has been sadly left in place.
The government can say that it listened and that regulating user-generated content is off the table; however, legal experts and digital content producers can read, and what they are reading in this legislation is still deeply concerning.
The government is moving to shut down debate, shut down committee study and prevent dozens of witnesses from sharing their thoughts and concerns on this bill. Probably the most recent conflict comes between the heritage minister and comments from the current CRTC chair, Ian Scott. Mr. Scott confirmed that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, CRTC, would be able to regulate user-generated content under the current iteration of Bill C-11.
The government has stated that this legislation intends to support Canadian artists, promote the spread of Canadian content over that of international competition and update the Broadcasting Act to cover the rise of digital streaming content. None of these goals is wrong. Our Canadian arts and culture sector is flourishing and deserves our support. More Canadians than ever are making films about Canada. More Canadians are making music than ever in Canada. More video games are being made here in Canada, not to mention e-books, podcasts and YouTube content.
Canadians are producing and watching great Canadian content. Sometimes they will see it through Disney+, and occasionally getting that content made will involve international investment. Under the current rules, this may make it un-Canadian. It is not what the government would prefer for Canadians to watch.
A constituent of mine recently wrote to me with his concerns on Bill C-11 and the threat of censorship that is always present when a government looks to prefer one source of information over another. He told me the story of tenants of his who had grown up in the Soviet Union. He wrote:
Some time ago, a couple from Russia rented our basement suite. We got to know them well and had many discussions over how Russia-controlled media impacted them.... We asked, in your opinion, what was the biggest lie ever told to the Russian citizens. Slava didn’t hesitate: “That Russia won the 72 Canada Russia hockey series!” We were astounded… how could they not know that Canada won? We had the videos. They said the government simply eliminated the last four minutes of the winning game and controlled the narrative.
They only saw what the government wanted them to see. Bill C-11 gives the Canadian government the powers to do this: it has broad powers that could be used to censor what Canadians can see and say online according to the government’s preferences.
If the government is genuinely interested in updating the Broadcasting Act, let us work together to do that. If the government wants to ensure that Netflix, Spotify and YouTube are not playing by different rules than Canadian producers are, Conservatives are happy to help them in that. Canadians want to see digital platforms pay their fair share, but do not trust Bill C-11 to do it with all the extra censorship power.
To quote very specifically from the bill itself, Bill C-11 seeks to bring platforms like YouTube under the following content regulations. It says the CRTC:
May, in furtherance of its objects, make regulations
(a) respecting the proportion of time that shall be devoted to the broadcasting of Canadian programs;
(b) prescribing what constitutes a Canadian program for the purposes of this Act...
The government says it is looking to bring the Broadcasting Act into the 21st century, but applying those regulations to user-driven content platforms is trying to bring digital content into the 20th century. As my colleague for Calgary Nose Hill put it, “It is like playing an MP4 on a VHS machine: It is just not going to work.”
Regulating digital platforms and social media is beyond the scope of the CRTC's mandate and abilities. Right now, Canadians are succeeding on digital platforms with the support of fellow Canadians. People of every background in this country are making their full-time living creating digital content while receiving billions of views. We know Canadians are succeeding in these spaces.
Social media platforms already have reach within Canada. Why would the Liberals fork over $600,000 in taxpayer dollars in 2021 to pay for social media Internet influencers to sing the Liberals' messages if online platforms were so ineffective? This does not include the money the Liberals spent on the various digital platforms themselves, only to pay influencers. This was only discovered through investigations by Conservatives.
Governments should not look to discourage Canadians from watching Canadian YouTubers just because they make content abroad. We should not look to saddle the success of homegrown content makers with checklists to prove the Canadianness of their videos. Over-regulation is the swiftest eliminator of innovation. It benefits the previously established who may be too out of touch to keep up with the pace of change. Canadian digital content creators are on the cutting edge of new media. They do not need Bill C-11 to succeed, and they have proven that. Canadians are already watching what they are making. They do not need the federal government to tell them to, or to have the CRTC analyzing every online post to see if it is something that meets whatever rules it comes up with and is worthy of its view.
This is truly unbelievable. The Liberals are also refusing to release the policy directive they are giving the CRTC. The only ones who are seeking the government's assistance really are the legacy media companies that once enjoyed monopolies on television and radio. They did not innovate to the new media landscape, and are now looking for backdoor bailouts in partnership with a government seeking greater control of the lives of everyday people.
Any government looking to impose new regulations on a service so vital to everyday life as our digital devices would need to first demonstrate that its actions are not self-interested and that it would not choose to discriminate based on the viewpoints of those it is seeking to regulate.
The current government has proven that it cannot be trusted to be fair and equitable. In the past two years, we have seen two public protest movements that blocked public infrastructure get two entirely different responses from the same Liberal government. Of course, I am talking about the 2020 rail-line blockades, which brought pretty much all passenger and commercial rail, including from ports, to a dead stop for almost three weeks across the entire country and laid off 1,000 people. That is compared to the 2022 trucker convoy border closures at a handful of border crossings for a few days of that critical infrastructure.
Even though there was damage to infrastructure during the rail blockades, the Liberals worked with law enforcement and met with protesters. When the Liberals disagreed with trucker protests over mandates, they turned to the Emergencies Act to give themselves new powers, which were proven not to be necessary as our border crossings had already been reopened under our existing laws. The Liberals froze Canadian bank accounts without verification, which is something just admitted by the Department of Finance. The Liberals were called out by the Privacy Commissioner for failing to notify or ensure the privacy of Canadians whose cell phones were tracked by the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Nothing can make the government's track record of secrecy, control and division clearer today than to repeat the same tactic of cutting short debate it used in the prior piece of legislation, Bill C-10, in the previous Parliament.
This motion to impose an arbitrary deadline to send the bill back to the House does not help the Liberals' case. The House is not a short-order kitchen. There is no need to push on law-making, especially on a piece of legislation such as Bill C-11, which has so many holes of uncertainty that its symbol should be a piece of Swiss cheese. However, as the Prime Minister has constantly proven, the work of Parliament is secondary if he can move up his vacation plans in Tofino. As currently written, and with the government having no interest in hearing from witnesses or entertaining amendments, I cannot support stopping debate on this poorly thought-out, full of holes, overreaching piece of legislation.
