44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 13, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I also want to thank the Bloc Québécois for all the rigorous work they did on Bill C-18 and for their support of the bill.
As I have said many times, this bill is not a panacea or a goal in itself, but it is an extremely important tool that essentially calls on the dominant platforms, the ones that control a substantial portion of the market and advertising revenues, to contribute to the production of local content. Many news media outlets, including radio stations, newspapers and television networks, have shut down. The bill needs to ensure that platforms also contribute to the growth of local journalism, especially smaller media outlets in the various provinces and regions, including of course in my colleague's riding. That is why Bill C-18 is so important.
It is not the only one, since the government has brought forward several other measures to support a free and independent press, including the payroll tax credit and other programs.
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Mr. Speaker, we are dealing with a number of factors. The massive power of the tech giants is unprecedented. The use of algorithms is really distorting public conversation and there are algorithms that drive people to extremist content.
One of my concerns is that there was a pre-existing problem, where we saw a few of the media giants in Canada buy up many of the small newspapers and fire staff. If we look at any of what used to be great local papers, often the website pages are the same, page after page and newspaper after newspaper. We are not getting local content from those sources. I am concerned, if we are talking about supporting local, that we not just be paying into some of the large media platforms that have literally stripped our local voices out of our local media.
How do we ensure the money is going to create a balanced ecosystem of local and regional identities that are part of the fabric of Canadian conversation?
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Mr. Speaker, this past August we heard that Sing Tao Daily, which is a very well-known Chinese daily newspaper, permanently stopped its printing service. We heard recently that the last remaining one, Ming Pao, has been undergoing some challenges as well.
These Chinese-language Canadian newspapers are very important to the Chinese Canadian community here and for them to receive proper information. For a lot of them, that is the only source of credible information.
I want the minister to talk about how this bill is going to help these ethnic media newspapers, those that are treasured so much by the newcomers and ethnic communities in Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like my colleague to enlighten us a little.
It is our understanding that with Bill C‑18, major content providers, major news outlets, will have the power to negotiate with major platforms. That might work.
However, there are also the small media outlets to consider. In my riding, one newspaper has lost all of its journalists over the past few years, mainly during the pandemic, because advertisers shifted to the major platforms. One small radio station is also struggling to survive because advertisers have left. These people are worried because they belong to small groups, not major groups. I am talking about a small newspaper and a small radio station.
How does Bill C‑18 ensure that our small regional advertisers, our small regional newspapers, will be able to hold their own in the kind of high-stakes bargaining that will take place under Bill C‑18?
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Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to represent my community of Kelowna—Lake Country and speak to Bill C-18, which proposes a regime to regulate digital platforms and act as an intermediary in Canada's new media ecosystem.
In order to understand what this really means, it is like coming across a newspaper left in a coffee shop, waiting room or staff lunchroom. Dozens or hundreds of people might read that paper throughout the day, even though it was only purchased one time. Should the readers be required to send money to the newspaper each time it is read? Of course they should not. That would be ridiculous. However, the outline of what I just said forms the basis of this Liberal bill, Bill C-18.
The Liberals claim that Bill C-18 would uphold the survival of small community publications and newspapers. The government and the largest organizations say they are looking out for the little guys, but in most scenarios it always seems to be the little guy who ends up losing.
Bill C-18 would allow the news industry to collectively bargain for revenue from social media platforms that the government says are “stealing” journalistic content through users sharing links with friends, family and followers. However, like much of the current government's supposed small business policies, it would be the most prominent companies that would benefit the greatest. The more content they put online, the more money they would make with no effort.
The notion that linking articles is the equivalent of theft has already been ruled out by the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Abella wrote in Crookes v. Newton, a decision ruling that says links do not carry commercial value. She said:
Hyperlinks are, in essence, references, which are fundamentally different from other [aspects] of “publication”....
A hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as “publication” of the content to which it refers.
Conservatives believe in a robust local media ecosystem in this country. Should a Canadian newsmaker or collective group of small publications seek to negotiate with Facebook or Google for revenue, they could do so. Smaller organizations are always more nimble. We see this whether it is a municipality versus the federal government or a local credit union versus a bank.
The news industry is in transition with publishing methods and business models. Like its sister regulation in Bill C-11, this bill seeks to reject that kind of innovation in favour of a one-size-fits-all approach and enrich old, outdated and predominantly large organizations currently being outrun by technological change. Also, just like in Bill C-11, the Liberal government has called upon what it appears to view as its most agile, efficient and modern government agency, in their minds, to do this: the CRTC.
The government's prescription of new and continuing roles to the CRTC has stretched its mandate beyond all recognition and ability, and there are many questions on definitions in this legislation and how it would be implemented.
The CRTC is an agency that took over a year to produce a three-digit mental health number. The CRTC had no proactive oversight or risk assessing of telecoms that potentially could have mitigated the massive Rogers outage.
Its 500-plus employees are already charged with the management of large portfolios, including cellular networks, data plans, advertising standards, television services, radio broadcasting, closed captioning, described video, satellite content and now, with Bill C-18, the entire Canadian online news and digital industries. If Bill C-11 is passed, the CRTC will also be asked to measure the Canadianness of 500 hours of uploaded videos posted to YouTube alone every minute.
The government originally tried to shy away from the CRTC's role in this legislation. Now, we hear that the heritage minister is openly promising to “'modernize' CRTC so it can regulate Big Tech” with an unexplained $8.5-million price tag. Bill C-18 would massively stretch the already massive mandate of the CRTC, which one could argue it is already not fulfilling. Peter Menzies, the former CRTC vice-chair, states, “It seems like they [Canadian Heritage] want to have the most expansive, most intrusive, most state-involved legislation in the world in everything they do.”
The CRTC would have a central role in the government's prescribed arbitration process, starting with selecting the pool of arbitrators and ending with the ability to impose settlements outright. The large digital platform negotiations with every Canadian media outlet needs to be completed within six months or then forced into arbitration.
Can the government credibly claim that such an arbitration process would favour small regional publications over giants such as Torstar, Postmedia, Bell, Rogers or the CBC? No, it cannot, which is why, in a technical briefing with reporters, the Minister of Canadian Heritage’s staff acknowledged that the largest beneficiary of this legislation would be the CBC, a news organization the government publicly funds.
Here is how it would work: In this legislation, news outlets would be paid based on content shared or streamed. All the state-owned CBC would have to do would be to livestream 24 hours a day on the likes of Facebook or other platforms, and it would be raking in the cash. Small producers do not necessarily have the content or capacity to do this. This, in fact, would rank up these large organizations even higher due to the amount of content they would put on social media, and it would be funded by the structure of the legislation. The CBC’s advertising revenue is low compared to its massive budget, so this would be an easy way to bring in the cash with literally no effort.
We have heard the government cite Australia as the model to follow. However, our research shows complaints have been made by small media publications in Australia about its news media bargaining laws, the same laws the Canadian government is seeking to copy here.
In a submission to the Australian senate economics committee, the Country Press Australia association, a bargaining group of small regional publications, precisely the kind of group the large media organizations and government say would likely emerge to represent smaller publications in Canada, said of Australia's own Bill C-18, “The Bill is weighted to large media organisations and does not take into account the ongoing need for a diversified media across Australia.” It also said it “could in fact lead to an outcome that is opposite to the intention of the bill, i.e. a reduction in media diversity”.
I am very concerned with the unintended consequences that would be created by this bill, especially with the largest of organizations and the Canadian state-owned media being the biggest benefactors. Sports media companies such as The Athletic have found innovative ways to uphold local sports coverage under the umbrella of an international publication.
Copying Australia's homework would not help us very much if it has already gotten a failing grade. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd testified that Australia’s legislation would be “enhancing the power of the existing monopoly”. Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, called it “bad media policy”. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, said laws like Australia’s could make the internet as we know it “unworkable”. Vint Cerf, another founding father of the Internet, once attributed its astonishing economic success to two words: “permissionless innovation”.
Regulations such as Bill C-18 are a permission, and they are the swiftest killer of innovation and the greatest tool of existing media powers to kill competition. We can forget Internet searching as we know it. Calling upon the threadbare CRTC to enforce a dysfunctional Australian-like media policy would do nothing to help the small media markets in places such as my community of Kelowna-Lake Country. It would make permanent the actions of the government to bail out legacy media giants from their own business model mistakes and lack of nimbleness.
If the government was so interested in ensuring that small, regional and rural media have their share of ad revenue, it should stop pumping millions into mainstream media, which gives them the ability to reduce advertising rates and remove $1.3 billion a year from state-owned media. If it is so valued by the Canadian public, it should be able to attract advertisers and fundraise, just as other public broadcast organizations do around the world.
The biggest winners in this legislation would be the biggest media outlets, which is why we see them advocating so strongly for this. In my life experience, anytime I hear the largest of organizations say they are looking out for the little guys and they have their best interest, it is always the little guy who ends up losing.
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Madam Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North is asking me to imagine what it is like to be in the mind of a Conservative and I have great difficulty in doing that.
I found a bit of a muddle from the Conservative side, and we have seen this before in other legislation. On the one hand, Alberta community newspapers and Saskatchewan community newspapers stepped up. These are newspapers that basically represent nearly half of the Conservative caucus. Their representatives came to committee and said that Bill C-18 has to be adopted, but to improve the aspects from journalism so that more journalists and more Canadian newspapers can benefit from this.
Conservatives should have taken their marching orders from their constituents, including the local community newspapers across Alberta and Saskatchewan who said that Bill C-18 was needed but improvement needed to be brought. The NDP brought forward that improvement. The NDP brought forward an amendment that would allow for a two-person operation, even if they are owners and operators of that business, to access the money that would come from big tech and those negotiations. What did the Conservatives do? They voted against the NDP amendment.
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Madam Speaker, that is exactly my point. Conservatives voted against the NDP amendment that opened it up for owner-operators. That is what the community newspapers in Alberta and Saskatchewan and across the country asked for: owner-operators and part-time journalists who are working.
The NDP amendment opens it up so that if a couple owns and operates a community newspaper, they would now qualify. If two part-time journalists are employed by that newspaper or that community publication, they would now qualify, even at a part-time level. Even if we are talking about one and a half journalists in terms of full-time equivalents or even one journalist in a full-time equivalent, the publications would now qualify.
That is why I find it passing strange the NDP amendment that was so successful and has been praised by a wide variety of groups was opposed by only one party, the Conservative Party.
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Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary should know that the CRTC has never regulated newspapers in this country. It has only dealt with television and radio. Now we are going to ask an agency to look after newspapers. The CRTC will decide who is going to win and who is going to lose. Ian Scott, the chairman, is leaving next month, so there will be a new five-year appointment coming up.
Is the CRTC capable today of regulating? We all know the answer already. It has difficulty in broadcasting. Can it afford to make the same mistakes that it made with broadcasting that I think it will make in the newspaper sector in which it has no background at all?
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Madam Speaker, I am concerned. I said that right off the top. When Bill C-18 was introduced over a year ago, the bill was designed to help local newspapers in this country. Now we find out when we peel back the onion that public broadcaster CBC, Rogers and Bell, are going to get 75% of the funding from Meta and Google. Why are they at the trough?
We dealt with Bill C-10 and Bill C-11 before, which pertained to those industries. Bill C-18 was designed for newspapers, as we have found out with the department saying only $150 million will be raised. Is it $150 million, or what the PBO said is a bigger pot of $239 million?
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Madam Speaker, a number of us in the House support local newspapers in this country. I would say 250 out of the 337 of us now, since yesterday, sponsor local newspapers with ads.
You are shaking your head, Madam Speaker. Are you are not one who puts an ad in a newspaper? I am sure the member for Edmonton Strathcona is one of them, because she knows the importance of local media, especially around Edmonton.
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Madam Speaker, 50 years ago there were metal boxes on city street corners where, for 25¢, one could buy a newspaper. Each box had a window showing the top half of the front page if it was a broadsheet and the whole page if it was a tabloid. If one wanted to read anything more, one had to put a quarter in the box and remove a copy of the paper. In our cities, it was common to find three or four such boxes for competing newspapers on the same corners of the downtown of any city. Those newspaper boxes are, for the most part, long gone as the nature of the news business has changed.
Home delivery, one of the mainstays of the newspaper industry, has declined drastically. These days, most people get their news online. The news industry has changed in how news is gathered and changed in how it is delivered to consumers. Gone are the days where most people subscribe to home delivery for the morning and the afternoon.
For those in the news media, the challenge has always been to provide a public service while ensuring sufficient revenue to continue their function. Canadian journalists and publishers have always risen to that challenge.
This is not the first time technology has upended the news industry. As television became popular in the 1950s, many feared the end of print publication or journalism. Newspapers survived the challenge posed by this new medium by concentrating on in-depth reporting, which television, with its constraints, could not do. Quality journalism was still possible back then.
One could say that Google and other search engines function today as the newspapers did in the 1970s. They show the headlines but not the whole story. They provide a link for people to click on. Facebook, the other online giant the Liberals seem to be most concerned about, does the same thing. Providing a link that allows people to access and use websites could be considered by some to be a public service or an aid to the news industry. If people want to read the full article, they have to follow the rules set by the news organizations that publish it.
In the early days of the Internet, many news organizations placed their material online free for anyone who wanted to read it. Most of those now allow limited access to non-subscribers. In some ways, one could argue that the news industry should be paying the tech companies for attracting readers to their articles or their content.
Facebook and Google sell advertising on their websites and have lots of advertisements. Perhaps some of that might have gone to other media in the past. Given the way the Liberals think, it is possible and only natural that the government wants to intervene in what would be a private commercial industry.
Canada's Conservatives believe that the Canadian news media should be fairly compensated for the use of its content by platforms like Google and Facebook. The issue here is how that should happen and what should be the role of government, if any, in the process.
Media companies could inform Google and Facebook that linking to their news sites is no longer allowed and that breaking that rule without permission would be a copyright violation. Media companies deserve compensation for their work, and some have negotiated agreements with the tech companies for the online use of their content, which has me wondering why government feels the need to intervene.
The government, which has in the past shown its willingness to give taxpayer dollars to the news industry, does not seem to understand the difference between public and private. One would think that a billion dollars a year to the CBC would be enough to exempt it from receiving more money under the bill, but it is not.
This is flawed legislation. It seems as if this government has taken a worthy idea, which ensures that Canada has a healthy, free and vibrant press, and brought in a bill for which the ramifications have not been considered.
Why is the CRTC being given oversight? Despite what some Liberals may think, the Internet is not broadcasting. Print media are definitely not broadcasters. Where is the logic in asking the CRTC to oversee something when it neither has the expertise or the resources to do so? Is this all about building a new bureaucracy? Indeed it is.
The online news act is supposed to protect the struggling Canadian news industry. How could anyone disagree with such a noble purpose? Would this bill solve any problems, or would it create new ones? How would fair compensation be determined? Who would be compensated under this act and who would be excluded? Why should a government agency be making such determinations?
The tech giants have widened the reach of Canada's news organizations by bringing their materials to the attention of the people who might not otherwise know of them. I am sure this increased audience has been beneficial to all sides. Mechanisms already exist through which media can be compensated by those using their materials. We have a Copyright Act. Some companies have come to an agreement with the tech giants, so why is more government needed?
There is no need for this bill, except that the Liberals love to meddle in things that do not concern them at all. What other areas does the government wish to shove itself into rather than letting companies work out their own agreements?
If these technology companies feel there is value in linking to Canadian news organizations, why can they not negotiate contracts without government interference? If Canadians are turning to these tech companies for news, then the companies need to find a way to provide content. Short of starting their own news organizations, which strikes me as an unlikely possibility, they have to turn to existing news organizations. If they find value there, they will pay for it. It is very simple.
This bill defines a news outlet as “an undertaking or any distinct part of an undertaking, such as a section of a newspaper, the primary purpose of which is to produce news content”. It is a very nice definition. Those words, however, do not reflect reality. This is a dispute about money, pure and simple.
Producing news content may be the goal of those in the newsroom, those seeking to produce quality journalism for the public good. It may even be why a given publication was first founded, but is not the reason for its existence. The reality is that news outlets, like the big tech companies, exist to make money. This bill is about who gets the biggest slice of the advertising pie, pure and simple.
If news organizations perform a service by keeping the public informed about important issues, that is, in many ways, only a by-product of the business. Those running news organizations are rarely, if ever, journalists themselves. If news organizations thought they could make as much or more money by publishing only chocolate cake recipes, they would do so. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.
Bill C-18 is flawed and probably unnecessary legislation, which puts it in line with the rest of the current government's legislative agenda.
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Madam Speaker, Edmonton was the place I had my start in journalism in 1998 at the Edmonton Journal, and at the time there were several newspapers in town, along with several radio stations and several TV stations, which were all producing news for the city of Edmonton. Over the past 20 years, the media landscape has really shrunk. There is not the same number of journalists out on the street reporting the news.
This is because of what the Public Policy Forum calls “vampire economics”. Facebook and Google take 85% of the funding that used to go to news for advertising. That now goes to Facebook and Google, and at the same time, they take the content produced by journalists and distribute it for free. What we have learned is that, yes, Facebook and Google are making deals with these outlets ahead of legislation similar to Bill C-18. They did it in Australia. They are doing it now in the U.S., and in Europe they are also considering similar legislation.
These are deals that are completely without government influence. They are business deals between organizations and Facebook or Google, so there is no government interference, and what we have learned is that Facebook and Google probably would not make these deals, if the legislation were not already on the table.
I am wondering if the member opposite agrees that it is a huge threat to our democracy to see this demise of journalism in our—
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Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.
As this is very likely the last time I will rise to speak in 2022, I want to offer my condolences to the friends and family of the Hon. Jim Carr. I also want to wish everyone happy holidays, including you, Madam Speaker.
That being said, my colleague spoke a lot about the importance of local media. As I said before, representatives from the local newspapers La Voix de l'Est, La Pensée de Bagot and the Journal de Chambly, and even Radio M105, a great community radio station that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, all came to see me to say that legislation was required and action absolutely needed to be taken.
The Liberals have invested a lot in ads on GAFAM and other platforms, and the Conservatives are pushing for a form of libertarianism on social media and with GAFAM. This goes against the importance of news reporting that respects a code and aligns with what journalism should be. Journalism is about providing information on local current events and reporting real news, not disinformation.
What does my colleague think about the importance of local media for democracy and for a healthy news ecosystem?
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Madam Speaker, it is like following a bouncing ball. The Conservative Party said that it liked the Australian model, and put that in its campaign platform. The Liberal legislation is a reflection of the Australian model, and now the Conservative Party is saying that it does not support Bill C-18. The member says that, well, they want to be there for the smaller community newspapers, but a question was just raised that indicated that there has been a greater uptake than expected in the Australian example and community newspapers have benefited by it.
However, the Conservative Party, even though its members talk about the community newspapers, what they are really talking about is empowering Facebook and Google search engines to distribute the money how they feel is appropriate and that they will work with different media.
I wonder if the member does not realize that it is a pretty hard ball to follow because the Conservatives are bouncing all over the place on a very important issue.
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