QUESTION PERIOD — Ministry of Canadian Heritage
Broadcasting Act
September 25, 2025
Minister, in the period between the first and second times that you were Minister of Heritage, we passed Bill C-11. In it, we included a privacy amendment, as suggested by the Privacy Commissioner, to protect the online data of Canadians. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, that privacy provision was removed from the legislation mere months after the Senate voted for it to be there. That excision was only discovered in late August, by the academic Michael Geist.
Can you please tell us how those important privacy provisions came to be removed from the legislation and what steps your government is taking to ensure that such a mistake never happens again?
Thank you for the question. I don’t have this information in front of me, despite this very thick binder that I brought, but I can certainly commit to you and all other senators to finding this information and providing it to the Senate.
You might have heard my colleague Minister Solomon, the minister responsible for artificial intelligence, talk recently about the necessity of working to protect Canadians’ data, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence. Our government is working on this, and Minister Solomon will probably have more to say on that in the coming weeks.
At the time that you originally proposed Bill C-10, the predecessor to Bill C-11, you told Canadians that it was likely to generate $830 million a year toward Canadian cultural programming. I believe Minister Rodriguez, your successor, increased that number to $1 billion. Could tell us how much money those changes to the Broadcasting Act have generated for Canadian production?
If memory serves, when I was Minister of Heritage and Bill C-10 was tabled, I think we were talking about approximately $300 million. That’s what I said at the time, and I’d be happy to provide you with a public declaration that I made to this effect.
As you probably know, this case is in front of the CRTC. The operationalization of what was Bill C-10 and that became Bill C-11 is done by an arm’s-length organization to the CRTC. We anticipate it will provide about $200 million per year for artists and creators in Canada, and the CRTC is moving forward with the implementation of Bill C-11.
