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Results: 106 - 120 of 604
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Madam Speaker, I thank the minister for his intervention today and for trying to set the record straight with respect to what is happening with this bill. The reality of the situation is that, unfortunately, the Conservatives have attempted to hijack this bill in an effort to convince Canadians that the government is trying to limit free speech, but nothing could be further from the truth. This bill is about ensuring that Canadian content continues into the future.
I think of artists such as the musicians in The Tragically Hip, who came from my riding of Kingston and the Islands. It is quite possible that, in those early days, they may not have had the exposure they had without the requirements for Canadian content. This is really about helping to ensure that Canadian content and Canadian artists continue to have that level of exposure right from the infancy stages, before they are popular, when they really need it.
I am wondering if the minister could comment on how he sees this helping future artists as those in The Tragically Hip were helped.
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, the member for Kingston and the Islands is absolutely right. That is exactly what Bill C-10 is about and exactly what it aims to do.
As we know, web giants are taking more and more of the share of how we listen to music, watch TV and watch movies. Unless they are brought into the Canadian regulatory framework, then the very reason why we created those modifications in the early nineties will disappear, and we will lose our cultural sovereignty. That is precisely why Bill C-10 was brought forward and why we want it to be adopted as quickly as possible.
View Kevin Waugh Profile
CPC (SK)
View Kevin Waugh Profile
2021-06-14 16:47 [p.8356]
Madam Speaker, the Minister of Canadian Heritage was right when he admitted this bill could be improved.
The last two days in committee, we rammed through everything. There were no amendments and no discussion. There was nothing. Forty per cent of this bill was never talked about in the heritage committee, yet now we have another gag order thanks to the Bloc's support of the government.
How can the minister of heritage stand here today and say that this bill is good for Canadians when over 40% of the bill was never even debated in committee?
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, it is ironic that the Conservative Party would ask my colleague, of all its MPs, to ask me a question because he was one of the MPs who initially criticized the bill for not going far enough, saying that this bill needed to include companies like YouTube. When we did this, all of a sudden the Conservative Party changed its stance.
The Conservatives did not really want one of the wealthiest companies in the world to pay its fair share. YouTube is part of Google. It is one of the largest, one of the wealthiest, one of the most powerful companies in the world. I just cannot figure out what happened to the Conservative Party, which, instead of standing for our artists and our Canadian creators, decided to stand with Google and YouTube. Frankly, I just cannot understand it.
View Mario Simard Profile
BQ (QC)
View Mario Simard Profile
2021-06-14 16:49 [p.8357]
Madam Speaker, earlier the minister used a generic statement when he said that if we really want to understand where we are, we have to look at where we started.
I like this kind of statement. It reminds me that it took six years for us to even get Bill C‑10. It also took 120 amendments. My Conservative colleague alluded to this, but it seems as though we have the Bloc Québécois to thank for this. The Liberals did not seem very enthusiastic about working on Bill C‑10 until we intervened.
My question for the minister is the following: What inspired the Liberals' enthusiasm for working on Bill C‑10?
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, I think that my colleague, unlike some of his colleagues in the Bloc Québécois, has not followed the evolution of Bill C-10. I would like to remind him that Bill C-10 is based on a consultation and the ensuing report, which was released in early 2020.
If we do the calculations, 2020 to 2021 is not six years. It is a year and a few months. We acted promptly, swiftly and decisively.
I defended Bill C-10 on every forum, as did our government. I would remind my esteemed colleague that the Quebec National Assembly adopted a unanimous resolution supporting Bill C-10. In addition, several thousand artists, including Yvon Deschamps, Lise Dion and Claude Legault, signed a petition in support of Bill C-10. I think that our work is recognized and appreciated by the artistic community.
I will conclude by saying that I appreciate the Bloc Québécois’s support, as well as the work done by the Bloc and other members on the committee. Unfortunately, I do not appreciate the work of the Conservative Party.
View Alexandre Boulerice Profile
NDP (QC)
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank the minister for his remarks.
Obviously, we have often discussed the fact that we need to support the cultural sector, that the Broadcasting Act is outdated and archaic and that digital platforms need to be included. We agree on the principle that web giants should be co-operating to help protect our artists.
However, this afternoon, we are talking about this type of supermotion. What makes me uncomfortable is the Liberal government’s management of its legislative agenda. The minister is telling us that the government acted swiftly, but now here we are in a mad rush at the end of the session. We get the feeling that this was not a priority, and now we are under a five-hour closure. We did not even get 10 hours.
Then we were asked to add committee meetings. We agreed to hold five meetings instead of two in one week to try to move things along a little. Now, even with the closure and the extra committee meetings, the minister is back with another fast-track procedure. Why did he not plan the work schedule better?
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I do not know if he has had the opportunity to speak with representatives of the cultural and arts sector in Quebec or elsewhere in Canada in recent weeks. All those I spoke to said that they wanted Bill C-10 to pass as soon as possible. That is what I was told by the Coalition for the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, ADISQ, the Union des artistes and many others. Had it not been for the Conservatives’ filibustering, I do not think we would be where we are now.
However, I must admit that I am somewhat surprised that the NDP is not prepared to support artists, and that it let them down because they are afraid of the Conservative Party. I do not understand the NDP’s position. On the one hand, they say they are in favour of Bill C-10 and forcing web giants to contribute their fair share, but, on the other hand, when the time comes to support artists and take action, they run and hide. I am truly shocked.
View Warren Steinley Profile
CPC (SK)
View Warren Steinley Profile
2021-06-14 16:53 [p.8357]
Madam Speaker, I find it funny for the minister to be asking what happened to the Conservatives. We always have stood up and always will stand up for free speech. We believe that citizens across the country should not be censored on what they put on social media, like Facebook and YouTube. We believe people have a right to their own personal thoughts and opinions, unlike three-quarters of the front benches of the Liberal Party who want a basic dictatorship. Conservatives will always stand up for free speech and Bill C-10 curtails that. We will stand with all Canadians and their right to have their own opinions and own independent thought process.
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, I am not sure there was a question in there, but I will give it a shot. I would be curious to hear the hon. member on his party's stance regarding free speech when they were in power under the Harper government. At the time, I used to work for not-for-profit organizations. Organizations like mine, and so many others in this country working on environmental issues, women's rights issues and international development issues, were the target of the government because we did not agree with it. That is word for word. People can look it up.
I had a huge argument with the spokesperson for the Prime Minister's Office at the time when it was prime minister Stephen Harper, at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. He said the reason they were doing this was because they wanted to shut us up because we disagreed with the government.
Where was their priority and eagerness to defend freedom of speech when they were using all of the state's resources to go after non-governmental organizations and try to take away our funding because we disagreed with them? Where was their concern for freedom of speech two weeks ago when 81 members of this party voted—
View Alain Rayes Profile
CPC (QC)
View Alain Rayes Profile
2021-06-14 16:55 [p.8358]
Madam Speaker, I am very pleased to be speaking today. Earlier, I listened to the Minister of Heritage talk about Bill C‑10, which he tabled, and I almost choked several times.
He began by pointing out that it was important to look back at the past to understand where we are now. I will give another version of the facts for everyone out there watching, and I would invite everyone to fact-check me by consulting the unedited transcriptions, the “blues”, of the various discussions at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. People will be able to check if what I am saying is accurate and well informed and if it reflects everything we have gone through during the saga of Bill C‑10 leading up to the present day.
The minister was right to say that he had all the resources he needed to table Bill C‑10 for more than a year and a half and garner a unanimous response from the outset. The minister is confusing things, talking about web giants and insinuating how he will handle them and make them pay their fair share. The ultimate goal was to produce an act that ensures a level playing field between digital broadcasters such as Disney Plus, Spotify and Netflix, and conventional broadcasters such as TVA, CBC/Radio-Canada, Global and CTV.
The minister even chose to ignore the important elements that everyone wanted to see, including copyright issues and CBC/Radio-Canada's mandate, explaining that he divided these challenges into three parts and was only introducing one in the House of Commons so that the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage could work on it.
When he introduced the bill, the committee worked diligently and co-operatively to improve it. This bill was clearly imperfect even though the minister had had a lot of time to draft it with his experts. More than 120 amendments were proposed by all parties. Surprisingly, these amendments were moved not just by the Conservative Party, but also by the Green Party, which had been given authorization to move them, the Bloc Québécois, the NDP, Liberal members of the committee and even the government. In fact, the government and the Liberal Party moved almost 30 amendments, not to mention all the amendments to the amendments along the way, to try to address all the shortcomings of this bill.
As the minister pointed out, the committe's study of the bill was moving along relatively well, which I can vigorously and honestly confirm. We even worked with the minister and his staff, who were telling anyone who would listen that the Conservatives were slowing down the process. That was completely false. All the committee members even agreed to do a preliminary study and use that evidence in the committee's official study, to avoid holding up the work.
At no point in the legislative process was the bill delayed, despite what the minister and his aides implied. I am saying so in all honesty, and I challenge everyone to take the time to read all the speeches and everything leading up to that infamous Friday when the minister, surreptitiously and without warning, withdrew clause 4.1 that he was proposing to add to the Broadcasting Act. This made the bill altogether different by including social networks, which had originally been excluded.
Why do I say that? It is because, when we did our job in good faith as Parliamentarians, each party had the opportunity to call witnesses to testify about various aspects of Bill C‑10. That gave us the opportunity to obtain as much information as possible to do the best we could, based on the knowledge of every member and staffer, to formulate proper opinions during our study of the bill in order to improve it. That is our job as legislators, of which I am extremely proud.
The problem is that the Minister of Canadian Heritage left social media out of the original version of Bill C‑10. Furthermore, despite the minister's assertion from the get-go that it is a historic bill, to my knowledge, only one organization has said that. The other organizations highlighted the bill's good parts and said that it was indeed time to modernize the act and to align the way we deal with digital with the way we deal with what we call conventional broadcasters. However, I met with all the organizations the minister mentioned, and every one of them pointed out several frightening provisions in Bill C‑10.
The Minister of Canadian Heritage said that the Conservatives delayed and filibustered. I am sorry, but it was not the Conservatives who did that. The Conservatives have merely given a voice to a number of organizations, individuals and experts who wanted to point out the flaws in Bill C-10. The minister can go ahead and play his partisan games in the run-up to an election to try to scare everyone into believing that the Conservatives do not support the cultural community. However, it is all complete and utter nonsense, pure theatrics, a show worthy of our Prime Minister, who is a great stage actor.
The heritage minister should stop with the games, because nobody is against culture. On the contrary, we are against censorship, against this attack and the way the minister undermined freedom of expression one Friday by removing section 4.1, which was supposed to be added to the Broadcasting Act.
That is when we began what could indeed be described as filibustering or slowing down the committee's work. We are talking about a maximum of three weeks during the six-plus years the Liberal government has been in power. Those three weeks have allegedly been catastrophic, but the Liberals are filibustering in many other committees with regard to the corruption scandals they were involved in, whether we are talking about the former justice minister, SNC-Lavalin, the WE Charity or the Standing Committee on Health, where we have been requesting access to the vaccine procurement reports. The Liberals have definitely done their share of filibustering.
Why have we been filibustering for approximately three weeks? The heritage minister was right. Let us give some background on all of this. It is important to understand it, so that people know how we got to where we are today, muzzled by the Liberals with the support of the Bloc Québécois.
By amending the bill one Friday afternoon, the heritage minister set off alarm bells all over the place. During the weekend, law experts and university professors sounded the alarm, telling us to look out because the government was doing something that would undermine freedom of expression.
What did the Conservatives do? We just asked to hear from the heritage minister again and get a legal opinion from the Minister of Justice stating that the rights guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms were not violated by the removal of clause 4.1.
In response, the Liberals objected incessantly for more than two weeks until the member for Mount Royal moved a new version of the motion asking for exactly the same thing we had proposed, which was to have the justice and heritage ministers come explain the situation and answer our questions, as well as an opportunity to hear the other side of the story from experts who had concerns about Bill C‑10.
They ended up appearing, and we were finally able to put an end to the committee's three-week-long standstill. That is the truth about the delay that has the minister up in arms.
I have to wonder whether the minister really wants to pass Bill C-10, because the reality is that the work of the House will be over in just 10 days' time. When the bill is passed by the House at third reading, it will have to go to the Senate. The Senate will have to examine the bill, although 40% of the amendments will not even have been discussed by the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. It is pretty preposterous to hear the minister lecturing us, given his behaviour.
Earlier, the minister said that some 30-odd organizations from across the country had highlighted the importance of the bill for the cultural community. They are right, it is an important bill for the cultural community, but that does not release us from the obligation to make sure we protect freedom of expression. I can already picture the minister pointing out that the Minister of Justice tabled his report with his experts. I am sorry, but what he tabled was an explanatory document, which was not in the motion we had presented.
We did not get any answers to our questions, and people started to wake up. The committee heard from former CRTC officials including Timothy Denton, CRTC commissioner from 2009 to 2013, Konrad von Finckenstein, CRTC president from 2007 to 2012, Peter Menzies, the CRTC's vice-president of telecommunications from 2013 to 2018, Michel Morin, the CRTC's national commissioner from 2008 to 2012, and Philip Palmer, legal counsel at the Department of Justice and senior counsel at the Department of Communications from 1987 to 1994. The heritage minister never names them, but all those individuals said that what the minister was doing made no sense.
Peter Menzies went as far as to say that this was a full-blown assault on freedom of expression and the foundations of democracy. He said it is difficult to understand the level of hubris or incompetence, or both, that would lead someone to believe that such an encroachment on rights can be justified.
When the minister attacks the Conservatives, he is also attacking all those individuals, not to mention the thousands of Canadians who support us and have said they want us to keep up the pressure on the minister about his bill and his encroachment on their rights.
These are facts, and I have not even mentioned Michael Geist, who is very often referred to as a professor emeritus of law at the University of Ottawa. His expertise is so sought after that even the Liberal government supports his research in this field. He was one of the strongest critics of the Liberal government's attitude, and the Bloc Québécois's as well since it supported the Liberals' gag order. Imagine: a gag order that has not been used in 20 years, that the Conservative Party never used during its 10 years in power, a House of Commons gag order that the government imposed on a committee when the House leaders keep telling us that committees are independent every time we question them.
Given what the Liberals just did to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, they can never again say that a committee is independent. This is something unique. Even when people used this measure in the past, they granted a minimum of 10 hours to work on the document in question. All we were given was five hours.
This law professor, Michael Geist, is not alone. There are others from other universities. I do not have the documents with me, but I have quoted them several times. People can go and check.
I therefore want to reiterate that, when the minister attacks the Conservatives, he is attacking all those who spoke out via social media, press releases, written correspondence, speeches and interviews with the media and who said that what the minister was doing did not make sense.
Does this mean we are against culture? No, absolutely not.
Does it mean that the minister made a mistake with his bill? The answer is yes.
If the work had been done properly to begin with, we would not be where we are today. It is because of all the delays that we are dealing with this mess, which will certainly not ensure a level playing field between digital broadcasters and conventional broadcasters.
My NDP colleague's question to the minister was entirely justified. That is what happened. Those are the facts.
Back when we started studying this bill, the government made a big show of saying that this was to be a partnership, so it is pretty funny that the opposition parties did not get so much as a phone call to let them know that clause 4.1 was being removed from the bill. That was the event that triggered this crisis.
No other conversations about collaboration raised problems when they were in the Liberal government's interest. I cannot talk about them because they happened in private, but I was involved in those conversations several times.
It is sad that things have come to this. It is sad that the minister is now stooping to partisan behaviour and attacking Conservatives over this file. As I said, we are just speaking on behalf of all these industry stakeholders, the ones who wanted to protect net neutrality and freedom of expression and avoid these flaws that will almost certainly be challenged in court.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission now has more powers, even though former CRTC commissioners and chairs say that giving the CRTC that kind of power is not a good idea. I am not kidding.
At the beginning of his speech the minister talked about $70 million a month, which was an approximate amount, with the calculations planned for later. People deserve to be told the truth. The CRTC now has nine months to tell us on what percentage it will base the calculations, because no one knows. The only response from the minister is that if the CRTC uses the same calculations as conventional broadcasters, the amounts will be somewhere between $800 million and $1.1 billion, which leaves a margin of $300 million. We do not know anything about it, however, and neither do we know whether the CRTC is going to use the same rules. Once the bill passes we will no longer have any control over this.
That is the current reality of this bill. Time allocation was imposed, and over the past week we have been forced to hold many votes on amendments without those watching us having access to the text of nearly 40% of them. Imagine that scenario, where the only thing the audience heard was the number of the amendment, preceded by the abbreviation of the party proposing it and followed by the question on whether members of the committee were for or against it. What transparency. The Liberals said that the people would have access to the text at the end, when it was all over. It will be too late by then and we will not be able to move forward.
The minister says that we delayed the process, but I would have him know that the committee agreed to hold as many meetings as the chair wanted. We even held meetings every day of the break week, when we were meant to be working in our ridings. Some meetings were extended to four or five hours, on barely an hour's notice. That is the truth, but the minister never mentions that when he talks about his bill.
That really stings, because these kinds of politics hurt us all. The session is ending in a few days. We know full well that the Liberals will call an election before the House comes back. All the minister is trying to do here is play politics. He wants his bill to make it into the election platform, since he knows perfectly well that he will not get it passed in time.
The Bloc Québécois helped the Liberals out of some hot water. I do not recall ever seeing an opposition party support a government gag order. The Bloc members are proud of it. They are boasting about supporting a gag order. It is crazy to think about it.
At times, I found myself wondering what was going on. The minister was weaving a story that did not make sense and that was looking like a horror story for a while there. We have tried our best to do our jobs as legislators, but it has unfortunately been extremely difficult.
The minister, through his work, has attacked net neutrality. He has created a breach. It may not be a big breach, but it is a breach nonetheless. It will be challenged, that much is clear. On top of that, the CRTC is also being given increased powers. That is the reality.
If people listening right now think that my story is not true and that I lied, if they think, as the Prime Minister has implied in the House, that I misled people, I invite them to go back and look at the record, because it is all there.
People know that that is how it happened. They know that everyone started out in good faith, until that Friday when the Minister of Canadian Heritage removed clause 4.1 without any warning. Everyone knows what happens when something is done on a Friday. It means they want to slip it through quietly. After all the theatrics to try to make people believe we do not support the arts community, which is not the case, because it is censorship that we oppose, here is what the Liberal government did instead: It censored us by imposing time allocation.
View Steven Guilbeault Profile
Lib. (QC)
Madam Speaker, let us start at the beginning. On November 18, 2020, Bill C-10 had just been introduced when the member for Richmond—Arthabaska said this during oral question period: “There is nothing in it that would regulate social media or platforms like YouTube.” That seems pretty clear to me. The member himself was criticizing the government, saying that Bill C‑10 did not go far enough.
I am somewhat surprised, not to mention amazed, to hear an experienced parliamentarian like the member opposite say that the minister did such and such a thing in committee. I would remind my colleague that the Minister of Canadian Heritage does not sit on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. I was invited to testify on several occasions, and I went every time.
The member says that there were 120 amendments and that that means the bill is a mess. That is a great way to try to mislead people, because it is perfectly normal to have many amendments. I could cite Bill C-69, another bill the Conservative Party opposed.
Finally, the member says that he is speaking on behalf of many people. I would like him to say on whose behalf the Conservative Party was speaking when the member for Lethbridge said that artists were a bunch of outdated people living off government handouts. Her comments were widely panned. On whose behalf—
View Alain Rayes Profile
CPC (QC)
View Alain Rayes Profile
2021-06-14 17:19 [p.8361]
Madam Speaker, I do not know what to say to the minister, who is being particularly partisan with respect to Bill C-10. It is always the same thing, and there are always attacks. The few times that he tried to defend his Bill C‑10, the media had a field day. This only exacerbated the lack of confidence and cynicism towards this bill.
I will repeat that he alone is to blame if we find ourselves in this situation with this bill. The minister missed the mark. He tried to change the bill. When quoting something I said in the House of Commons, he took it out of context. I was pointing out that he was suggesting to people that social networks would be subject to legislation, which was false. I never said that I agreed with what he was doing. I was quoting him because he was suggesting in his arguments that that was the case, when it was not. He is trying to say that is what I was saying, when instead I was correcting him.
I hear that, and it is always the same thing. He quoted the member, who later apologized, just like several members apologized for statements they made. This is all petty politics and we are tired of it.
Bill C-10 is a disaster, and he is going to move it forward by ramming closure down our throats—
View Martin Champoux Profile
BQ (QC)
View Martin Champoux Profile
2021-06-14 17:20 [p.8361]
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from Richmond—Arthabaska. I know that he has been very emotionally involved in the issue of freedom of expression on the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage in recent weeks.
After clause 4.1 was removed on that fateful Friday in late April, we were interrupted by the Conservatives, who saw a potential violation of freedom of expression, the important principle that all of us here respect and cherish. At the request of my Conservative colleagues, we invited experts to speak. The Conservatives called their own experts, and we heard from attorneys. The other parties called other experts with a completely different opinion. Some credible voices said that Bill C‑10 did not infringe on freedom of expression and that it contained provisions protecting it.
My question to the hon. member for Richmond—Arthabaska is this: If this is not an ideological matter, what would the experts have had to say to finally convince the Conservatives that Bill C‑10 does not infringe on the freedom of expression of Quebeckers and Canadians?
View Alain Rayes Profile
CPC (QC)
View Alain Rayes Profile
2021-06-14 17:21 [p.8361]
Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from my neighbouring riding of Drummond for his question. I appreciate him as a colleague, as he is well aware.
What he said is entirely true. Following the testimony of the Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Minister of Justice, we heard from experts with diametrically opposed opinions. I agree with him. It is true, and it is healthy in a democracy.
Among the experts who agreed with the Conservatives were law professors. I think that these people also deserve a voice in Canada's Parliament because of their vision, their advice and their warnings. It is appalling to see the minister attack these opinions. It is obvious that, if you do not think like a Liberal, you are not worth anything. That is not true, we are worth something. Our constituents are full-fledged citizens. These people deserve a voice, and it is thanks to these divergent voices that we can exchange ideas and improve bills.
The problem is when the minority government across the way operates in a dictatorial fashion and pays no mind to what is going on, which means that it can only get its bills passed under a gag order. Instead, it should try to understand these voices and see how it can improve its legislation.
I will say it again: If clause 4.1 had not been removed, we would not be in this situation today. We would not be engaged in these never-ending arguments that we have been having for some time—
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