Senator Miville-Dechêne: I do not think, as others do, that it is the most important event in an election campaign. All the evidence shows that debates have very little impact on voters’ opinions. That being said, it is still an event. If broadcasters are able to get along and organize one, that is just fine. I think they realized, after the disaster of 2021, that having five or six journalists moderate the debate is not a good idea. Maybe they’ll go back to simpler formats, especially with private broadcasters having less money and facing a broader crisis in journalism.

On the French side, the largest private broadcaster struck out on its own. It told Radio-Canada, “We don’t want to work with you. We’ll hold our own debate.” We are very well served in Quebec. The debate organized by Radio-Canada, with a few other smaller media outlets, is a bit more formal, and we also have a private sector debate with a moderator and some back-and-forth. Some say that it is a bit chaotic, but diversity is always welcome. Actually, Senator Dasko, since you ask me how I feel, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and I can say that, at a time when Canadians have a tremendous need for public services, I feel that investing in an electoral debates commission when the entire media landscape is changing is a bad investment.

(On motion of Senator Clement, debate adjourned.)

[English]

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the inquiry of the Honourable Senator Woo, calling the attention of the Senate to the one hundredth anniversary of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the contributions that Chinese Canadians have made to our country, and the need to combat contemporary forms of exclusion and discrimination faced by Canadians of Asian descent.

Senator Miville-Dechêne: First of all, Senator Housakos, journalists do have a choice of whether or not to post their articles online.

I know that you believe very strongly in the principle of individual choice. However, we are talking here about a complete paradigm shift. That means that if media outlets don’t allow their articles to be shared, then they lose a lot of readers. It’s a bit of a paradox because the survival of journalism depends in part on really solid content, the kind of journalism that is different from what circulates on social media.

We know that stand-alone, isolated media outlets will not be able to reach enough people. They are therefore obligated, in this new universe, to make their content available by agreeing to share it. The real problem is that we don’t know how much that journalistic content is worth to a platform like Google. Of course, Google won’t give us its figures. As a result, it is extremely difficult to implement a bill like this one, which seeks to put a value on journalistic content, because we have no idea how much that content is worth to the platforms or what it brings to individual media outlets.

We know they no longer get any advertising revenues because the entire advertising market has been picked up by the platforms, but we don’t know whether that could make a difference in terms of traffic. For example, people from the daily newspaper La Presse told me that they were bringing in decent advertising revenues. It wasn’t a windfall, but they had what they needed to survive. That’s why everyone wants to be on social media. Did you have another question?

[English]

Senator Miville-Dechêne: Australia certainly isn’t a perfect model, but we noticed that journalists were hired there after the secret agreements that Google and Facebook unfortunately reached with media outlets. We also noticed that, according to some sources, larger media organizations have more money than small ones but that small community media organizations received some money.

As for the Uber that gets you to the restaurant, I tend to agree with Senator Harder because I’m not convinced that’s a good analogy for what’s really happening. There is an exchange, but we don’t really know if the value of journalism to these platforms is equal or unequal to the value journalists derive from being broadcast on these platforms.

[English]