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Results: 46 - 60 of 434
View Candice Bergen Profile
CPC (MB)
View Candice Bergen Profile
2021-06-14 18:57 [p.8374]
Madam Speaker, everyone who is here virtually or physically is here, and I am very happy to state that. I am also really happy to be here physically on the government side to take this place.
My colleague, the Conservative member, has done such a fantastic job talking about Bill C-10 and what we can do to ensure that two things happen: that Canadian content is protected and that we have freedom of speech, with the ability to express ourselves online.
Can my colleague from Saskatchewan tell Canadians how we can protect both Canadian content and freedom of speech?
View Kevin Waugh Profile
CPC (SK)
View Kevin Waugh Profile
2021-06-14 18:58 [p.8374]
Madam Speaker, I would say to the House leader that freedom of speech is big in this country. It is democratic and it is fundamental to why we exist. We have seen some awful incidents in Canada in the last month and a half that show there is a lot of hate speech we need to talk about. We know as Canadians that it is not acceptable. On both sides of the House we know that.
I want to thank the hon. member for bringing this up, because what the Broadcasting Act should have looked at was conventional broadcasting and the Internet. We did neither.
View Jasraj Singh Hallan Profile
CPC (AB)
Madam Speaker, I want to echo something that the member mentioned about having a lot of emails and phone calls. I have noticed them going up in my own office, being a neighbouring riding. I have been hearing the most from new Canadians and immigrants. Most of them have left countries where freedom of speech is not the liberty that we are supposed to enjoy in this amazing country we live in today, much like the member is an immigrant. I would like him to speak a little more about that.
View Tom Kmiec Profile
CPC (AB)
View Tom Kmiec Profile
2021-06-14 19:13 [p.8376]
Madam Speaker, there are a lot of people I call new Canadians who come here from other countries where freedom of speech is not taken for granted because it is a very precious right and privilege. In this House, we should be the guarantors of people's constitutional, natural-born rights.
View Corey Tochor Profile
CPC (SK)
View Corey Tochor Profile
2021-06-14 19:14 [p.8376]
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to enter into debate on this faulty bill. I really hope there is some soul-searching by opposition members before this bill is passed. This bill is ridiculous. The minister has done a terrible job explaining it. He cannot explain it because I do not think he fully understands what this bill would do to Canada.
I am first going to talk a bit about my fears about this bill. Central Canada or any governments that believe they can fix a problem with a solution often create more problems. This is what this bill would do. This bill is garbage. It has to be defeated. It has to go back to committee. I get that there is a gag order on it, and I get that the Liberals are trying to push it through, but opposition members have to start asking themselves why they are in Parliament if they do not stand up to a government that is threatening to take away our freedom to express our opinions online. This is dangerous material.
Governments will try to find a solution to a problem. We know that the CRTC needs updating, and we know that helping artists is a valuable inspirational goal. I get that, but it would question our existence as a country and whether we are truly free. If governments are there to tell us what to say, what we can post, what we can hear, what we can see, we are entering a dangerous stage in our country where I fear what this would lead to.
Failed regimes resort to censorship. This is what this bill is. It is telling the citizens of Canada what they can and cannot post, what will be shared and what, through the labyrinth of programs out there, will be heightened on search engines, on Facebook. This bill is something one would see from a failed regime. This is what we are seeing out of Ottawa lately. If we were to crack open a history book, we would see that failed regimes around the world follow a bit of a pattern, and we are seeing that with this bill. We are seeing it with other things that the Liberal government has done. In our history on this planet, a cornerstone of failed regimes is censorship. Another one would be printing money, and that is exactly what the government is doing. We have seen this story play out and it ends terribly for our society.
Maybe that is why the Bloc is supporting it. Maybe Bloc members are the smartest ones and are laughing to themselves as they support this centralizing of powers because they do not want Canada to exist anymore. That is probably why. If that is their political game in supporting this bill, and the Liberals are willing to take separatist support on this bill because it gets Canada closer to, unfortunately, breaking up, maybe that is why the Bloc is supporting it.
However, why are New Democrats supporting it? This is a troubling trend. I have had numerous calls at my office from people saying they are not supporters of mine but of the NDP, and asking what the heck is going on with Bill C-10. It is not too late for NDP members. Constituents should contact their MPs, if they are NDP members, and explain why they are passionate about this bill not proceeding. That is the only way we are going to slow this bill down.
There are elements of it that can be improved at committee. It can get to the stated goal. That is the thing; the stated goal that the Liberals put forward on this bill is nowhere near what it would actually do for the CRTC, such as where it is reporting: from reporting to Parliament, which means 338 representatives from all over Canada, to reporting to the minister's office.
Who would trust the minister? Who would trust the minister after the way he has bungled this rollout and explanation of a censorship bill? I feel sorry for him, but this has got to get scrapped for the sake of our country. I am very hopeful that maybe the parties of other members here are whipping their support on this. I urge them to take a pause, because it is not too late to have those discussions in caucus.
Members can flesh out what would need to be changed for this to work. There is no need for this to be rushed forward in the dying days of this session before summer. There is nothing in here that requires urgency during the middle of a pandemic to force Canadians to change their ability and right to post what they want.
That is what creates fear for our country. There is this march toward centralized power in the Prime Minister's Office, because that is ultimately where the CRTC will report. It will report first to the minister, but we know that he serves at the pleasure of the Prime Minister. I do not believe the minister will stand up to, and not bend over backward for, the Prime Minister.
What does that mean for Canadians? It means that our rights to share our views and our beliefs will be censored in Canada. I cannot think of a more damaging thing for unity in this country than if Canadian citizens are not able to share their views. It is a fundamental freedom that we have cherished in this country. During a pandemic, the government decided that it would like to rush through a bill that would harm our ability to interact with other Canadians.
A lot of things on the Internet are silly and trivial, but there are some truths. We saw this at the G7 convention just recently. People on different social media platforms might have been embarrassed a bit by the Prime Minister talking about newspapers being used to wrap fish and some of the ridiculous comments he made.
Maybe in the future Canadians will not see that anymore. Maybe that is the point. Maybe that is what the government would like to do. It would like to stop the Internet's ability to share what is going on, be it a finance minister who wears no shoes at an international gathering and is mocked around the world, or someone who has embarrassed themselves by wearing blackface.
This bill gives power to the Prime Minister to stop those stories and stop people from being able to broadcast to anywhere in the world what they are seeing in their part of the country. That is the power of technology that has advanced in the last 20 or 30 years, which is our ability to tell our stories directly without going through the middleman of other broadcasters. The CRTC needs to be updated so that we can make sure that we have a modern act that would cover national broadcasts and make sure that we are modernizing our act to reflect the changes in the landscape. However, this bill does not do that.
I would ask all members to please do a soul-searching exercise and reach out to their supporters and the constituents they represent. They should ask them if they want the government to have more control. That is what this bill would do. It would give the government more control. Those who would lose are Canadians and Canadian stories.
View Heather McPherson Profile
NDP (AB)
View Heather McPherson Profile
2021-06-14 19:27 [p.8378]
Madam Speaker, I would like to be able to say that the member's speech was enlightening, but it was absurd, to be perfectly honest. I would like him to tell me exactly where in this legislation freedom of expression is put at risk, because it is not in the four places in the act where it is explicitly protected. It is not in the place within the legislation where it is explicitly protected, and it is not within the amendments that the heritage committee approved, including Conservative amendments, to protect freedom of expression.
Would he be so kind as to read exactly where that happens, instead of just saying “some places”?
View Corey Tochor Profile
CPC (SK)
View Corey Tochor Profile
2021-06-14 19:28 [p.8378]
Madam Speaker, it is a bill that would change the way Canadians share their stories, and this is the problem. I would hope that other parliamentarians would take this time for soul searching and to ask what we are doing as parliamentarians to protect freedom of speech, because this is not it. The academic people in our country who have come out against this bill are not typical Conservatives. They are minds that are concerned with the concentration of powers in our country in a select few individuals and what that would mean to our country. I would ask members to please take this time to reconsider their position on this bill, because it would have a lasting effect on our country for many years.
View Rosemarie Falk Profile
CPC (SK)
Madam Speaker, I will be splitting my time this evening with the member for Northumberland—Peterborough South.
Canadians expect that legislation passed through the House has been subject to rigorous and fulsome debate, and that the members they elect to this chamber have had the opportunity to represent their voices and to be heard. It really is unfortunate that we find ourselves here once again with the Liberal government moving to shut down debate. The scary and concerning irony here is that the primary concern that has been raised on Bill C-10 is its implications for freedom of speech. The Liberal government's persistent steps to silence members of Parliament from defending free speech in this chamber certainly do not alleviate the concerns that Canadians have raised with the legislation before us, including many of my own constituents in Battlefords—Lloydminster.
Bringing forward legislation to modernize the Broadcasting Act is not without merit, and we have heard that this evening. In fact, this act has not been updated since its adoption in 1991. I was only a couple of years old in 1991, but we all know that the broadcasting landscape has changed drastically in the last three decades. There is no doubt that the Internet, technological advancements and evolving platforms certainly require some form of modernization. That is why Conservatives support creating a level playing field between large, foreign streaming services such as Amazon and Netflix and Canadian broadcasters, but Conservatives do not and certainly cannot support deeply flawed legislation that would compromise Canadians' fundamental rights and freedoms.
Bill C-10, in its current form, leaves the door open for a massive abuse of power and abuse of the rights of Canadians. This proposed legislation would allow the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC, to regulate user-generated content uploaded to social media platforms. The CRTC's regulatory power would go beyond television, radio and digital platforms if this legislation passes. It would extend the CRTC's power to regulate the free speech of individual Canadians on social media.
This legislation at the outset started with clear exemptions for social media that, due to amendments brought forward by the Liberal members on the heritage committee, are no longer included. If the intention of this legislation was not to regulate individual Canadians or to leave the door open to the possibility of restricting Internet content, then what was the motivation to remove the exemptions?
The Minister of Heritage has failed to provide Canadians with a sufficient answer to that question. The minister has also failed to provide Canadians with clear guidelines on how this power would be used. Giving unelected bureaucrats the authority to censor the Internet and regulate what Canadians post on social media is a radical change.
In our modern digital world, social media plays many roles. Social media is a powerful tool. It is a tool to speak truth to power, to raise opposition, to bring attention to issues and so many more items. The freedom to do that should be unencumbered in a free and democratic society. Those actions should not be subject to abuses of power. Around the world, countries that do not share our values may see fit to enforce such restrictions or regulations, but to move in that direction and to enshrine this power grab is simply unacceptable.
As it is currently drafted, this legislation does not belong in a society that values freedoms. It really is shameful that Conservatives are the only ones in this chamber who are fighting this attack on free speech and opposing Bill C-10. However, to be clear, it is not just Conservatives who are deeply concerned by the implications of this legislation.
The former CRTC commissioner, Peter Menzies, has called the Liberals' Bill C-10 a, “full-blown assault upon...the foundations of democracy”.
Timothy Denton, the former national commissioner of the CRTC has also said, “Forget about 'broadcasting': C-10 is clearly intended to allow speech control at the government's discretion”.
Those powerful and informed criticisms are not to be taken lightly. Free speech is a fundamental Canadian right. Why even leave the door open for any sort of abuse? Many of my constituents in Battlefords—Lloydminster have expressed grave concerns to me about the bill. Many have questioned the Liberal government's intention with the bill.
It has been promoted by the Liberals as a levelling of the playing field between traditional and digital broadcasters, but a look at the details reveals that it goes far beyond that. Will the criticisms of my constituents ultimately be silenced if this legislation is passed?
If those with any sort of following express discontentment with the Prime Minister's repeated attack on our energy sector, the government's failure to support our farmers and our farm families, or any other government policy, will they be subject to these regulations?
Ultimately, the question that gets raised in this debate is the question of whether this legislation is simply a tool to allow the Prime Minister to silence opposition and those who reject his agenda. If that is not the intention, why are we not taking the time to amend and draft the legislation so there is no question?
The concerns that have been raised about this legislation are very serious and the potential impact of this legislation's passage is wide-sweeping. Not only is it completely reasonable for Conservatives on this side of the House to want fulsome consideration of this legislation, I would suggest legislation of this magnitude demands it. That is not where we find ourselves.
The motion is not at the end of fulsome debate, extensive consultation and careful clause-by-clause consideration. In fact, we have not even considered the legislation at this stage, yet we find ourselves considering a motion this evening to limit and to once again shut down debate.
We find ourselves once again at odds with the Liberal government members as they act to silence the voices of those who disagree with them in the House of Commons, actions that will in turn give them the ability to silence the voices of those who disagree with them online.
Canadians can be confident that if this legislation is rammed through Parliament with the support of the NDP and the Bloc, Conservatives are committed to repealing it. However, I would sincerely hope that the Prime Minister and his government would recognize the need to withdraw this legislation and not to rush it.
Given this motion before us, it is clear that the Liberal government is doubling down on its efforts to ram this legislation through Parliament. The stifling of debate is becoming an all-too-common practice under the Liberal government.
First, the Liberals shut down debate on the legislation at committee, limiting the committee's ability to carefully consider every individual clause in this comprehensive bill and now without any debate, at report stage or third reading the Liberals are moving a motion to silence opposition to their flawed bill.
This motion pre-emptively shuts down debate on this legislation before this parliamentary stage, allowing only two hours of debate before sending it to the Senate. I urge my colleagues in the House to seriously consider the impact of this motion. I urge them to consider the serious concerns raised with the proposed legislation and I urge them to reject efforts to hurry it along without proper consideration.
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
Lib. (MB)
View Kevin Lamoureux Profile
2021-06-14 19:39 [p.8380]
Madam Speaker, the government cannot ram through this legislation. It is a minority government, which means that we need to get support from opposition parties in order to bring in time allocation.
The need for time allocation is there because the Conservatives, as the member just said, have absolutely no intention of passing the legislation, even though members of the Green Party, the NDP and the Bloc all support the legislation.
My question to the member is very specific. The Conservatives are trying to say this is an attack against freedom of speech. Could the member cite, specifically, where the attack on freedom of speech could be found in the legislation?
View Rosemarie Falk Profile
CPC (SK)
Madam Speaker, it is really unfortunate that the member was throwing the Bloc under the bus in his question as siding with the government.
It is the government's fault we are in this position. The Prime Minister, who is riddled with scandal and ethic breaches, prorogued Parliament to hide a cover-up. We did not need to have two Speeches from the Throne in a minority Parliament. What I would suggest is that member should take that back to his caucus, the effects that proroguing Parliament on legislation.
View Alistair MacGregor Profile
NDP (BC)
Madam Speaker, with respect to my Conservative colleague, I did not really hear an answer to the previous question.
I have reviewed this bill's progress through committee, and its report back to the House. There were amendments adopted to the legislation to ensure freedom of expression. There are sections in the parent act that specifically articulate freedom of expression. Even in the original Bill C-10 that was sent to committee, there were sections dealing with freedom of expression.
I will ask the member, again, if she could point to a specific section in this bill that has been reported back to the House that she has troubles with, that sort of backs up all of the points she made in her speech.
View Rosemarie Falk Profile
CPC (SK)
Madam Speaker, I do not trust the Liberal government and neither do my constituents.
When the Liberals pull funny business, whether it is trying to cancel committees or whether it is extending sitting hours because they failed to work the parliamentary agenda, I do not understand why this falls on us. We are doing our job. The opposition is supposed to strengthen legislation. Iron sharpens iron. It is too bad that the Liberals will not take that advice.
View Philip Lawrence Profile
CPC (ON)
Madam Speaker, it is an absolute privilege to rise in debate today. I must say, without commenting on who is or is not in the House, that the government benches have not looked this good in years.
I am happy to speak on Bill C-10, an act to amend the Broadcasting Act and to make related and consequential amendments to other acts. The idea or belief behind this act, and some of the goals that the minister espoused, are laudable. As the member for Saskatchewan said earlier, the Broadcasting Act absolutely does need to be updated, there is no doubt about that, but it infringes upon one of the most sacrosanct principles in our country, and that is our freedom of expression and freedom of speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are really the pillars of all the freedoms we enjoy today. I would like to talk a bit about how people have talked about the importance of freedom in the past.
One of my favourite books in the entire world is The Republic written by Plato, the musings of Socrates. Socrates said a couple of things that are critical to this debate. I own a couple of horses. I love horses and think they are beautiful. Socrates talked about a horse in particular and said that someone may have a beautiful, fantastic horse, but in the absence of any type of motivation or being pushed forward, it would lose its strength. Socrates likened himself to a fly that kept the horse swishing his tail, kept the horse moving and getting stronger. That is what the discussion is in many ways on the Internet. It is that fly that keeps people and discussions going, keeps pushing our discourse to be better.
Alexis de Tocqueville, one of my other favourite political philosophers, said, “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens.” This was de Tocqueville talking about the Internet 200 years before the Internet existed. He captured the very essence of our democracy. The foundation of our democracy is the citizens that underpin it. Never before has there been such a democratization of information and the ability to contribute.
When members of other parties chastise Conservatives and say our concerns are not legitimate, it goes to the very heart of who we are. In fact, the reason I am so passionate about this is because I want members of the Green Party, the NDP, the Bloc and the Liberal Party to always be able to express themselves. That starts to be limited and gets pulled away. Oftentimes when we lose our freedoms, it is not in one swift blow. It is often bit by bit. Conservatives stand as the guardians not just for our freedoms, but for everyone's freedoms, including members of all parties in this House.
There is no doubt that there have to be some reasonable restrictions on freedom of expression and freedom of speech, but it is my contention that this legislation has gone too far. I have noticed there have been questions recently as to what specifically this bill would do to limit freedom of expression. Let me go through this and explain it specifically to members. This is not just bluster; there are legitimate concerns.
Bill C-10 defines undertakings for the transmission or retransmission of programs over the Internet for reception by the public by means of broadcasting apparatus. This means that we are now including the Internet in the Broadcasting Act. Conservatives are okay with the idea for massive followings with $100 million in revenue or the Netflixes of the world. There is some discussion to be had there, there is no doubt, but for the individual provider, as it says in proposed subparagraphs 9.1(1)(i)(i) and 10(1)(i), among other things to adopt, “requiring social insight such as YouTube to take down content it considers offensive and discoverability regimes.”
What that means is that within this bill, as it is currently written, there is the ability to push content up or down. What does that mean? That means a government, a bureaucracy, the CRTC can say, “This content, we believe, is more agreeable or more Canadian than this other content”.
The reality is that the misnomer in this whole debate is that Canadian content producers are not doing well. The opposite could be true. Canadian content producers are some of the largest producers per capita of YouTube content in the entire world. Our content creators are doing a fabulous job, and we need to reward them for that, not penalize them.
We should not just be pushing people down randomly, and that takes the most positive view. I would certainly hope that, if this legislation ever came into place and the CRTC became responsible for the algorithms pushing content up or down, it would stay non-partisan.
However, sadly, colleagues and all Canadians have witnessed something I thought I would never see in my lifetime. We saw a case where there could have been interference with the independence of the judiciary. That was the SNC-Lavalin affair. What happened there was a potential direction of the Prime Minister's Office to an actual investigation of SNC-Lavalin for deferred prosecution.
This should never, ever happen. In fact, prior to this case, to me the independence of the judiciary was sacrosanct. I did not think that even the Liberal government would consider it, or that it would even be in the realm of possibilities, but we saw that it was.
Seeing that is conceivable, is it then also conceivable that a government of the future could potentially put pressure on the CRTC to favour one particular political viewpoint? I would render to the House that, if in fact a government could potentially interfere with an independent legal investigation, it is completely possible that this could happen. That would be a limitation of our freedom of speech, which would be incredibly dangerous to our democracy. As I said, freedom of expression and freedom of speech are the underpinnings of all our freedoms. They are the shields that protect our freedoms, going forward.
When we get to this, the health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by the citizens. Those were de Tocqueville's words on the importance of democracy.
View Philip Lawrence Profile
CPC (ON)
It is important that we hear from all the citizens, and that includes the House of Commons. Unfortunately, we have had a gag order put in place. The irony of all ironies is that we are here defending freedom of speech, and the government put a gag order on us defending freedom of speech, saying that there is not an issue of freedom of speech. The irony there is just too rich.
We need to go back. We need to peel back the boards here. We need to go right back to the studs and we need to look at this legislation and start over again. It is absolutely flawed. Anyone who heard the minister's interview on The Evan Solomon Show knows that there is a significant problem with this.
Long live freedom, and long live Canada, the greatest country in the world.
View Mark Gerretsen Profile
Lib. (ON)
Madam Speaker, I am starting to detect a pattern here, and I actually want to give credit to the NDP for starting this. There have been questions asked of several Conservative members back to back, which they completely avoided answering, so I would like to give this member the opportunity to answer that same question.
Can he point to the specific part in the legislation that would impact and restrict somebody's freedom of speech? If he could just tell us what clause of the legislation actually talks about that, I would love to hear it, or will he be the third Conservative in a row to dodge the question?
Results: 46 - 60 of 434 | Page: 4 of 29

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