Tories denounce Bill C-11 while Bloc defends it

Debate continued in the House of Commons Thursday on the Online Streaming Act, known as Bill C-11. Conservative and Bloc Québécois MPs were the speakers.They took opposite approaches to the bill. The Tories worry about censorship and government overreach while the Bloquistes stressed the need for cultural autonomy. The Conservatives oppose the legislation and have vowed to change it in committee. The Bloc has joined with the New Democrats to support the government legislation.The bill is a revised version of Bill C-10 from the last Parliament, which died on the order paper when the 2021 election was called. First up was Bloc MP Monique Pauzé, who pointed out that provisions had been made to strengthen the current bill from its predecessor. The new legislation is overdue because the existing laws have not been revised for decades, she said. “Broadcasting legislation has not been touched since 1991, so updating this legislation now is not repressive, nor will it jeopardize any freedoms,” she stated according to a translation. “Legislation is undoubtedly the most effective way to ensure that there is more equity when it comes to accessing and broadcasting Quebec and Canadian productions. Essentially, this is a way to spotlight Quebec, Canadian, indigenous, regional and other identities.” She took the Tories to task for opposing the bill. She accused them of running a “smear campaign” against it and “grasping at straws” when denigrating the bill. “Our American neighbours sometimes have a chuckle about Canadian culture. They joke about the RCMP’s uniforms, the way we say “eh?” and even poutine and Tim Hortons. They find it all a bit ridiculous. I will bet that the elected members that are fighting the bill tooth and nail do not really see a difference between Canadian and American artistic content. We do see a difference.” Pauzé said. Her Bloc colleague Sébastien Lemire praised the government for acting on the issue and said passing the bill should have occurred a long time ago. “I want to mention the Yale report, which was produced by the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel. Bill C-11 is a first response to this report” he told the Commons. “The Yale report was very well received by Quebec’s cultural community, which wanted measures to be adopted quickly,” he said in French. He later said, “This bill should have been passed last year. We will do everything in our power to get it passed quickly this year. Talking about the Broadcasting Act makes me think about how the act has not really changed in the time it has taken the Winnipeg Jets to go away and come back again.” He also expressed the Bloc’s support for Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which is also before the House. Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner led the charge against the legislation for her party. She stated that the true genesis of the bill is that large media players like BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. do not have the large libraries of programming that foreign outlets like Walt Disney Co. and Netflix Inc. do. “Rather than building competing online services on terms that attract people, those legacy media giants want a cut of the profit from streaming services that are increasingly popular in the 21st-century media market. That is really what we have here,” she remarked. “Let me be clear: The lobbyists for legacy media are all over this, as are the lobbyists for streaming services. They each want Parliament to do what is in their best interests. It is our job to come up with what is in the best interests of the Canadian public, and the bill does not get it done.” Rempel Garner used the analogy of Uber entering the marketplace a decade ago. Municipalities tried to regulate the service but failed. She stated that is a good thing. She worries that the broadcasting regulator will have too much power if C-11 succeeds. “I want to reiterate that I am concerned about the overreach of the CRTC, the main regulator here, in terms of the ability to regulate individual content. The regulator has sort of implied in committee testimony that it already has the ability to do this. It just maybe does not want to right now. That really frightens me.” Commission chair Ian Scott has stated that the regulator will not intervene on user-generated content. Conservative Gérard Deltell labeled the bill flawed and urged his colleagues to amend it in committee. Ontario Tory Philip Lawrence said the internet should not be compared to a legacy broadcaster but to the public square, where all may voice their opinions. He raised the spectre of censorship if the legislation goes through, long a theme for the Conservatives. “We can go back in time and look at the Soviet Union as it pushed out its propaganda and told lies to its people. This held people behind for years and years, sitting in bread lines. Meanwhile, they were being fed that they were actually ahead of the western world, which we all knew was false.” Lawrence stated. “We see the modern-day incarnation of that in Vladimir Putin restricting freedom of speech and restricting the Internet as Russians are unable to hear about or listen to the atrocities that are happening in Ukraine.” He urged the government to try again. “The problem is that this bill is so bad that we need to go back to the drawing board, unfortunately. It has all the hallmarks of bad legislation. It has a lack of clarity. It is overly burdensome to the industry. It also puts too much onus on the bureaucracy and not enough on parliamentarians,” Lawrence said. Alberta MP Matt Jeneroux worried about definitions of Canadian Content. He pointed to Disney’s film Turning Red, which is set in Toronto but does not qualify under CanCon rules. The same applies to the TV version of the Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Jeneroux, too, worried about the CRTC’s ability to take on additional duties. “It will be up to the CRTC to administer this act, and I think there is reason to be concerned. The CRTC is already spread thin and lacks the capacity to carry out the current mandate effectively. How exactly can Canadians have faith in the CRTC’s ability to regulate the Internet and redefine what is Canadian content when it is already struggling to cope with the 4,000 or 5,000 entities in the broadcasting sector? What tools will have to be provided to the CRTC and how much money will this cost taxpayers?,” the Edmonton Tory asked. Brad Redekopp picked up the arguments the Conservatives made in the last Parliament. “In this new age, where we get most of our information online, broadcasting companies such as the government's beloved taxpayer-funded CBC have been left in the dust. At the end of the day, they want their content promoted over everyone else's,” he claimed. “They are the ones scrambling for advertising revenues. This will throw the remaining content, Canadian or not, to the side. Many experts have raised concerns about this bill being very similar to the NDP-Liberal government's original Internet censorship bill, Bill C-10, in the sense that it would still have the power to block Canadian freedom of expression online.” Redekopp’s fellow Saskatchewanian Jeremy Patzer continued the verbal assault. “At the heart of the bill is the lurking threat of expanding censorship. It is only a matter of time, as this new opening moves through the process of bureaucracy,” he stated. “We must carefully consider more than the bill in front of us as it exists on paper, otherwise we will move too close to Big Brother for comfort, and it will turn out to be just as toxic as a reality show, but without any of the entertainment value. I hope bad jokes will remain safe from censorship as well.” Bloquiste Julie Vignola concluded the debate with an example of how hard it can be for francophones to find programming in their own language. “Over an hour ago, I shared an experience I had with a certain streaming service, which, despite my selecting French as my preference, offered me only American, British and Korean productions. In some cases, I could not even get the French translation, even if it was only through subtitles. I had to search for quite a while to get productions from Quebec, France or French-speaking Africa,” she told the House according to a translation. C-11 would not only offer francophones the ability to enjoy their own culture but it would also make that culture available to people the world round, she noted. Just as she has embraced some Korean programming, Canadian programming could be offered to citizens of other countries. –Reporting by Paul Park at ppark@thewirereport.ca and editing by Michael Lee-Murphy at mleemurphy@thewirereport.ca

Tories denounce Bill C-11 while Bloc defends it

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Tories denounce Bill C-11 while Bloc defends it

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