Karim Bardeesy

In response to a question from Tamara Kronis

“We need this bill to make social media companies more open about what they do. Right now, these companies hide what they are doing. This law will make them share safety plans so we can set proper rules.”

“Mr. Speaker, there are going to be lots of places that do that, like through the commission and through the regulations that may come out of the act. I think it is important to have transparency. We do not have transparency at the moment. In fact, we have had the opposite of transparency. We have had the intentional obfuscation or intentional suppression of what some of these platforms are doing. I believe that this legislation and the commission’s actions, in particular the filing of digital safety plans, will force a levelling up that will bring more transparency to these things.”

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In response to a question from Guillaume Deschênes-Thériault

“Parents and teenagers do not have the tools they need to deal with social media. This bill will help families by giving parents guidance and support.”

“Mr. Speaker, as it stands, parents and teenagers themselves lack the necessary tools. Two or three years ago, my family met with other parents in our neighbourhood to share advice on how our four families could work together to help our children deal with these issues, while also helping us as parents navigate them. Teenagers and children are not the only ones affected by social media and its ability to connect us with others and share information. In my view, the commission will be responsible for providing guidance to parents and families, and the bill itself does a great deal to help parents.”

In response to a question from William Stevenson

“Our laws already clearly define what hate speech is. The new commission will follow those existing laws, just like the police do.”

“Mr. Speaker, I appreciate and identify with many of the desires of the freedom of speech and the fundamental protections that exist in the charter. We have provisions in our hate crimes legislation that are very clear about the difference between, for instance, speech that seeks to vilify or dehumanize and other forms of speech. I believe the existing pieces of legislation we have will be looked at closely by the digital safety commission, just as they are looked at by any police service that has to enforce them.”

“I want the House to pass this bill. Big tech companies design social media to hook kids and make money off their attention, even when it harms them. This bill makes platforms publish safety plans, face review, and give users a real person to handle complaints.”

“Mr. Speaker, we have the biggest companies on earth with the most sophisticated attention-holding technologies known to humanity, and we have a kid with a phone. There are the most dazzling, seductive, funny, curiosity-inducing images, texts and videos, and there is a family at the dinner table, hunched and shrouded in a blue glow, or there is a classroom of semibored learners. There is a predator, and there is a child on the other side of the world. It is time to act for these families, kids and learners, and to start to rebalance the playing field just a little. It is time to do what one parent said at the round table the member for University—Rosedale and I co-hosted with SickKids and other stakeholders. She said she wanted her kids to discover who they are, who they were, before their algorithms told them. This is the opportunity in front of us. This is why we are acting today. This is why we are acting now. This is why we are acting to get it right. Many of us have had different journeys to this piece of legislation. Many of us have had different journeys to the House. It was the prospect of bringing this bill, and this measure, over the finish line that helped inspire me to run for office. As a parent and a new educator at what was then Ryerson University, in the late 2010s we started to see the kinds of things that are causing such concern today, and that have resulted in the bill before us. I started a think tank that was then called the Ryerson leadership lab with colleagues Shoaib Ahmed and Sam Andrey. We decided to test what was happening in the world, what Canadians were thinking about the power of this technology and whether they wanted intervention on this. We did a survey. We put it out in 2019 in “Rebuilding Canada’s Public Square”. This is seven years ago now, and already the appetite was there. In that survey, it was found that 60% of Canadians believed that government should intervene with social media companies to require that they fix the problems they created in our political system. At that time, in 2019, social media companies were already amongst the least trusted companies in Canada when it came to doing what was in the best interest of the public. Seven years ago, 52% of Canadians already felt that they had little or no control over what they saw in their social media feeds. This was at a time when the social feed still had at least a bit of a chance compared to the algorithmic feed that has become so dominant in our feeds. I mentioned that 60% requested government intervention. Just two years later, the number of Canadians went up 11 percentage points, with 71% of Canadians supporting government intervention with social media companies. Canadians were already seeing the hateful content, the harmful content, seven years ago and five years ago. Racialized Canadians were 33% more likely to encounter hate speech and 52% more likely to encounter racist content online than non-racialized Canadians. Already, years and years ago, Canadians were telling us, Canadians were telling each other, young people were telling their parents and educators were telling parents that there was a problem, that these technologies were too powerful, that the machines guiding these technologies were too powerful and that we needed to act. Governments slowly attempted to do so. In the meantime, in that period of time, the information, the technologies and the research became even more convincing. From the social scroll to the infinite scroll, there is perhaps no more powerful tool in the world to monetize our attention, that most scarce resource, that most precious resource. New features were being added to social media platforms such as streaks, which was fun. I am going to click on this today, and I am going to click on it again tomorrow. I am going to click again, and someone will see that I saw them and I saw that they saw me. That is great. There were GPS connections within social media feeds. Great, now someone can find me wherever I happen to be, even if I do not know who they are. On the corporate side, what was happening? Trust and safety divisions were gutted. Content moderation was being rejected. The investment in the very AI tools that can be misused to make the existing tools even more dangerous was embraced by these companies. Companies were suppressing research, litigating or budgeting for the fines they would incur by failing in litigation. It was just a cost of business, as was attacking whistle-blowers. This adoption of the AI technologies that are being used to supercharge what was already a dangerous platform is kind of like owning the drugstore, buying the cigarette company, and then putting those cigarettes back at the front of the store, but then spiking those cigarettes with crack cocaine made in the pharmacy. The combination of social media and AI technologies was used in a potent way to monetize the worst forms of attention-seeking and of attention-grabbing content. This was the fundamental objective and the fundamental economics of the platform. The discovery pieces from the lawsuits coming in from the United States thankfully revealed that this was being used in a systematic way by platforms and continues to be used, in the case of X, or Twitter, to monetize our attention and to cause many of the harms we see in front of us. Meanwhile, what was the research telling us about about the kids, and what were kids and teenagers telling us? Very importantly, we were learning that the time of greatest vulnerability coincided with important life stages and that these differed by sex. For girls, the time of greatest correlation between social media use and lower life satisfaction was between the ages of 12 and 14, during those very key puberty adolescent years, and again at age 19, which is often the age when they take on higher education. For boys, the association between lower life satisfaction and increased social media use was highest between the ages of 15 and 17. Again, this correlates with their journeys through pubescence and adolescence, and into adulthood. The platforms knew this, and they took advantage of this to feed teens the very content that got them further hooked to these platforms, to their business models. Parents were at a loss. Parents were around dinner tables. Students, including the university students I was teaching at that time, were telling us that they were addicted and hooked to this content. They wanted alternatives they could not find. Policy-makers started to act. We started to act. Just in this Parliament in the last 12 months, as new MPs, we started to act. At the gathering the member for University—Rosedale and I co-hosted, we heard from Coleen Dudley from The Neighbourhood Group, a peer educator who was telling us about the solutions we needed to find. We heard from Jessica Besser-Rosenberg from Unplugged Canada. We heard from Dana Cramer from the Young Digital Leaders of Canada. We heard from the leaders who are on the front lines of these issues saying that it is time to act, that there are solutions available and that we must act. Recently, at the Attention conference at McGill, we heard Alex Munter of the Canadian Medical Association compellingly say that a parent’s no has no power because of the power of the biggest social media companies in the world and their biggest technologies. We heard from Ravi Iyer that AI-empowered chat bots are doing such a good job of easing the way into a false sense of socialization for kids, that kids are losing the ability to have the frictions that are required to develop social learning. Recently, we heard from Suki Huang, a youth champion at The Dais, who told us that the youth did not choose this system, but they feel that they need to be on social media. What alternatives are available to those kids? I think a complementary piece of work that we and the government have to be doing around news literacy is figuring out, if kids are not present on social media platforms, how they can get that news from other places. We need to put forward efforts to help them touch grass, enjoy the off-line world and be able to gather all those pieces. This bill, Bill C-34, is a culmination of the work that is a response to all those things I mentioned. I want to salute the former occupant of this seat, the hon. Arif Virani, former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, who brought a bill forward beforehand. There are so many aspects of this bill that are important, such as the requirement to file digital safety plans, the requirement to publish those plans and the requirement for the commission to review them. This would not just protect kids; this would protect all of us, because if the digital safety plans and the design features that need to be improved would be improved with a push from this bill and from the commission, which would need the crucial flexibility to adapt to changing technologies, then we would have a safer online space, not just for teens, but for everyone. There would be the requirement of a resource person to address user concerns. How nice that would be. Who has tried to reach out to a social media company and been deterred? We have learned so much over the last six to seven years. We have been able to experience and expose the harms that have been created. It is time to take our agency back. It is time to reclaim a greater share of digital sovereignty for Canada. It is time to claim a share of our humanity back. It is time to act now, and protect not just the kids, but everyone in Canada.”

“I held a meeting with parents in my riding about online safety. Why is the member holding a similar meeting in his riding, and what does he expect to hear?”

“Mr. Speaker, I really appreciated my colleague’s speech. In our riding of Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park, we held a round table, as well as a round table with the member for University—Rosedale. The member mentioned a gathering he is hosting in Scarborough—Woburn on Friday. I wonder if he could share more details about why he has chosen to engage parents in this way and what he expects to hear.”

“I want the member to explain more about why tech companies will not fix the harm caused by their apps, and why the government needs to step in.”

“Madam Speaker, I listened with great interest to my colleague’s speech; she has so much commitment and expertise on this issue. I am wondering if she could expound on a point she made in her speech around the inability or the unwillingness of companies that have been faced with these issues, the research in front of them and the increasingly concerning effects being caused by their technologies. I wonder if she can describe in fuller detail what it is that is preventing them from acting and why government action is necessary.”

“Can the member explain why the new digital safety group needs the power to adapt to new technology?”

“Mr. Speaker, my colleague pointed to the flexibility around the digital safety commission. I wonder if she could expound on why it would be important for the digital safety commission to have the powers and the flexibility it needs to adapt to new and emerging technologies.”

In response to a question from Heather McPherson

“Unfair foreign tariffs are hurting our steel industry and threatening jobs. We are spending billions of dollars to support steelworkers and protect Canadian steel from unfair foreign trade. We are also looking at legal options and penalties to force the company to keep its promises to its workers, and I want the opposition to support us in this.”

“Mr. Speaker, I very much appreciate the intervention from my colleague from Edmonton Strathcona on this very important and very timely topic at this important and timely moment for Canada’s steel sector. As I think the member acknowledges, in part at least, that what we are seeing right now is a result of unjust, unjustifiable and illegal tariffs on the sector, affecting not just workers but Canadian communities across the country. These tariffs have undermined our workers by raising production costs and prices that have threatened their livelihood, and, yes, if unanswered, those impacts would result in fewer jobs and lower wages. We cannot allow that to happen, because these products are not just important for their communities; they also anchor crucial manufacturing clusters around the country that employ hundreds of thousands of Canadians. We just cannot stand by while our workers and families remain exposed to the impacts of these illegal tariffs. There are things we cannot control, but there are many things we can control. We cannot control the actions of foreign governments, but we can control our actions. The hon. member refers to some of the tools under the Investment Canada Act. Indeed, we are looking at all those options: the forced divestiture of assets, financial penalties, and requirements that the company honour its undertakings that it made sacredly through the Investment Canada Act provisions to every worker, to the government and, in fact, to the entire country. I want to encourage the hon. member to walk with us as we take a very strong and committed line with the company to say that it must honour its undertakings and that we are looking at all available steps under the Investment Canada Act. I would also add that the member referred to the visit by Premier Ford today. I just want to highlight the really significant measures that were in today’s announcement with the Prime Minister, ministers, and the Premier of Ontario. There is a joint steel action fund, with five-year funding commitments of $3.55 billion from Canada and an additional $1.67 billion from the Province of Ontario. The hon. member mentioned the buy Canadian policy. We intend to leverage the buy Canadian policy and the buy Ontario policy to prioritize Canadian steel and public procurement and strengthen domestic demand, a measure that was not mentioned in the hon. member’s remarks but I know is important to the United Steelworkers and is important to her. We are strengthening protections against foreign steel dumping and unfair subsidizing, through enhanced enforcement by the Canada Border Services Agency and tighter trade remedy practices and compliance measures. We have a new Canada-Ontario steel task force to coordinate the implementation of measures to support the steel sector and improve its competitiveness. The steel sector is fundamental to our economic competitiveness. Steel is a product we have been making in Canada for a long time. It is something we will continue to make and continue to turn into the kinds of products that are needed by manufacturers not just in Canada but around the world. The hon. member referred to innovation and progress in the sector and government partnership. I will just point her to the very innovative partnership we have made with Algoma Steel to help it improve and refine its production. When it comes to workers, I would point to the many tariff relief programs we have brought forward, the many tariff relief programs that are applied to business, and the specific protections for workers through Employment and Social Development Canada, with $70 million over three years allocated for steelworkers through labour market development agreements with the provinces to retrain and upskill up to 10,000 steelworkers. We have also committed $382 million over five years to create six workforce alliances, working in partnership, hand in hand, with workers, unions, Canadian businesses and those who are standing for a strong Canadian economy. What is being done to the workers at Stelco is a betrayal of those workers. We will not stand for it. The Hamilton caucus members on this side have been very active in working in partnership with us to defend them. We want the company to honour its commitments.”

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In response to a question from Steeve Lavoie

“Companies can be part of this in two ways. They can work on the projects, and they can help study how these projects affect the environment and the economy.”

“Mr. Speaker, I think there are two aspects. There is the type of project that companies can participate in, but there is also the aspect of participating in the environmental economy and the economy as a whole by assessing the impacts. There are companies that can participate that way.”

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In response to a question from Maxime Blanchette-Joncas

“The bill clearly says the minister cannot change the final decision on a project. The claims being made about this bill are not supported by the facts.”

“Mr. Speaker, if I understand correctly and we are talking about clause 53, it includes the following language: “the Minister is not permitted to amend the decision statement to change the decision included in it.” Again, I believe that some of the allegations being made about what this legislation could do is not supported by the facts in front of us.”

In response to a question from Dan Albas

“This bill includes protections at the start and end of the approval process. I believe these rules will protect Canadians.”

“Mr. Speaker, I would refer back to the provisions included on either end of the approvals process, which would provide a lot of protections, I believe, for Canadians.”

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“This bill is not like the old Conservative laws. It still protects the environment while coordinating approvals. I want the member to look at these protections again and support the bill.”

“Mr. Speaker, I have a lot of respect for my colleague opposite and her history of engagement on these files, including her engagement on the proposed Harper-era changes that she was involved in and that, indeed, I was involved in when I was a journalist covering that government. I would submit that this is very different, that we have a coordination of approvals. We have eminent protections on either end of the process. We have an important cabinet directive that was published at the same time as the introduction of the legislation and that would prioritize the mitigation hierarchy with respect to projects. I think there is a lot in this legislation regarding the protections we have in place, combined with those other elements of our climate policy that I described, that I would commend to the member for further consideration.”

“I support this bill and want it to pass. It helps us build clean energy and trade projects faster by setting one-year review timelines. It protects the environment, respects Indigenous rights, and makes our economy stronger.”

“Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this very important bill today. I want to start with the context of the legislation and the context that became quite apparent during the election campaign. I want to start with that because it is important to establish the “why” of this piece of legislation and what is guiding the government’s agenda. I am going to start with a quote from our campaign manifesto because it identifies very well the calls that Canadians had around the items in this bill and that indeed motivated many people in their support of our campaign. It is on the very first page of the manifesto: Canada is the best country in the world. Our sovereignty is under threat. America’s unjustified trade war is an attempt to weaken us. We will not let that happen. It’s time to build a future that makes Canada strong. We can give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the United States, can ever take away. Building one Canadian economy, for example, can expand our economy by up to $200 billion—proof that we are strongest when we are united. To unite this country, [we] will build one economy where Canadians can work wherever they want. Where goods can move freely from coast to coast to coast. Where the government’s significant purchasing power buys Canadian goods and supports Canadian industries and workers. Where we use domestic strength to grow a strong economy that can never be taken away. As Canadians, we have our own unique identity, history, and geography. To keep Canada strong, we will protect our culture, protect our environment, and protect our core values. And continue to build in true partnership with Indigenous Peoples. That was the context of this campaign, and that was the context that resulted in the questions and encouragement I was hearing from constituents in Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park. It really came down to three or four things that were underlying the arguments we were making and the support we got. First, Canadians and people in Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park were looking for a new generation of economic growth in the context of the attack on our sovereignty and in the context of the realization that we needed to do some things differently. They were also looking for climate policy that works, that gets results, that continues to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions we need and that gets us to net zero by 2050. They also observed, especially in contrast to the economic growth that they were seeking and the sovereignty that they expected us to express, some frustrations with the ways that we build. Indeed, in this bill, we have been talking about projects that cover vast distances. In cities, we also build. The residents of the city of Toronto and the residents in my riding have been getting frustrated on occasion by the slow pace of building, whether it is building transportation infrastructure in particular or building the other kinds of economic goods that maybe are not as visible. On transportation infrastructure, there is the Eglinton Crosstown LRT and other transportation projects that are taking a long time to build. However, we have other economic and transportation projects that are delivering results to people in our ridings and to people in cities. It is an important question when we look at the kinds of projects that this bill is contemplating, like the natural resource projects and the energy and electricity projects. They might appear to be far away from urban residents, but people in our ridings and people in urban Canada see the benefit of these projects that are being built sometimes far away from them because we have nuclear engineers in our ridings. We have tradespeople. We have people who work in the oil and gas sector. We have people who work on electricity, on renewable energy and definitely in ports and transportation. I have people in my riding, in a beautiful corner of west Toronto, Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park, who work in the services sectors that are covered by the kinds of projects we are talking about in this bill. We can talk about how we build in cities, especially in a city like Toronto, the capital of the largest province in Canada, the financial capital of this country, a centre for research, a centre for innovation and a centre of not only the services economy but the goods economy. There is manufacturing that happens within our borders, including in my riding, and people are looking at those things and the broader picture of how economic growth happens. They were asking us the question during the campaign, “Can we catalyze a new generation of economic growth while asserting sovereignty and achieving climate policy results?” This bill is a very natural response to the kinds of things that people in west Toronto, in my riding of Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park and indeed across the country were responding to and expecting when the campaign was unleashed and when the words that I read in our party’s manifesto were written. I think it is really important to share some of the things the bill would do and some of the things the bill would not do, because I think there has been a lot of misinformation and a lot of misconceptions about what the bill would and would not do. I will give some examples. For instance, the bill would allow an opportunity to formally designate strategic national trade corridors. I think a lot of Canadians would be surprised that the federal government does not have this power already. This is a very important thing to be able to do if we are going to be building transportation infrastructure. This bill would also give the power to declare regions of national interest. I see this as part of good planning. Cities already have the power to do land use planning. Provinces often have industrial regions. We have Alberta’s industrial heartland, and there are many parts of cities that provide a set way of doing regional planning for economic purposes, while also including the full set of environmental considerations for certain species and other considerations. The bill would simply brings that lens to the opportunities that the federal government might identify with partners. I think a lot of people would be surprised that these powers do not exist already. Where the bill says to do those kinds of things, it would not mean we end consultations. In fact, before and after permits are issued, there would still be consultation involved. This bill would not mean we would disregard cumulative effects. In fact, when we do regional planning, the kind of planning that is contemplated by the processes in this bill, land use planning cumulative effects would still be very much at the fore. Enabling digital trade is another key part of this bill. I think Canadians would be very surprised that digital documents in the transportation sector are not already recognized as being equivalent. This is a very positive measure to help the federal government help people who are involved in trade and transportation-related trade to catch up to the ways of doing business that we would expect. The bill would provide for one year for reviews for pipelines, designated power lines and offshore renewable energy projects. That is what it would do. It would not presume the outcome of any review. It would not say that a project will or will not go ahead. It would provide a one-year timeline, and it would provide that opportunity for, in particular, designated power lines and offshore renewable energy projects. I am going to get to those in a second. Bill C-39 would provide, as my colleague from Calgary Confederation and the Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations mentioned, the coordination of indigenous consultations. It would not end UNDRIP. It would not change our obligations under the charter in section 35. Those are entirely preserved. The bill would provide the coordination that makes it easier for indigenous peoples, and especially smaller communities, to take part meaningfully in consultations. The bill would codify existing practices, including some economic and other considerations in the species at risk determinations. It would not end or gut the Species at Risk Act in any way. In fact, one of the major things we did from the consultation we did at the outset of this bill, which resulted in reports over the summer that were published in the early fall and that helped inform this legislation, was remove the limited exemptions to the jeopardy test that were of rightful concern to many Canadians. The legislation would do a lot of things that would provide economic certainty and provide certainty to investors, but it would maintain high standards. This piece of legislation would not do a lot of the things that some of the fearmongering that I have heard in this House alleges. This is also in the context of an incredibly rich set of climate policy achievements that this government has brought forward. They are achievements like the national electricity strategy, which is going to double our electricity generation with major projects like Churchill Falls. It is a very exciting project that has been mentioned repeatedly in my riding of Taiaiako’n—Parkdale—High Park. The bill would tackle the methane emissions that we have been looking to tackle for a long time. We have an industrial carbon price that has been preserved despite the complaints from the members opposite. It has clean energy tax credits. We have a nature strategy, an oceans protection strategy, EV rebates and a whole set of climate policy objectives that are an important piece of context for the bill. They are not in the bill, but they all create the permission space for us to do the kind of work we need to do, especially in electrification. In fact, I would argue that if members want to accelerate the move to net zero and do more electrification, then they should get behind this bill 100%, because it would create the permissions, opportunities and timelines to get electrification done faster. That is the context of the bill. It would mean that we can build in the right way, build towards net zero and we can build sustainably. I appreciate the chance to participate in the debate.”