Yesterday, Canadian news organizations met with the Senate’s Standing Committee for Transport and Communications to discuss the potential concerns over government interference in the news business if the much embattled Bill C-18 were to pass.
The bill would force tech giants like Google and Meta to negotiate deals that would compensate Canadian media companies for linking their content on their platforms.
Meta has threatened to end news content in Canada as a response to the legislation, while Google is reconsidering access to news and proposed alternatives.
Chief executive officer of The Globe and Mail, Phillip Crowley, urged the Senate to tighten the language of the bill to ensure that there is no overreach by the government, which, he warned, could worsen the public’s growing distrust in the media.
He proposed amendments to Sections 27, 53 and 86 of the Act that aim to limit the power of the CRTC, notably, to prevent the Commission from unilaterally designating a news organization as subject to the bill and compel news organizations to provide any editorial information it deems necessary for yearly audits.
“CRTC should not have the powers to compel that information from news organizations beyond what is strictly necessary to administer the act,” he said. “Unlike broadcasters, newspaper organizations are not structured for detailed ongoing regulatory reporting. We do not want newspapers spending precious resources responding to regulatory requests.”
The Senate also questioned whether the bill would harm competition and allow the government to further grant “tremendous privileges” to the traditional broadcasters, including CBC, Rogers, and Bell.
“We’re calling on Google and Meta to come up with a figure. We can debate if it’s $300 million or $400 million. But one thing there’s no debate on, is that if Meta pulls the plug and Google pulls the plug, that figure will go down even further,” said Senator Leo Housakos. “And in the meantime, the CBC will continue to receive its $1.2 billion subsidy, which to this day, as parliamentarians, we don’t know what percentage of that they’re investing in their digital platforms, which again, are competing directly with print media.”
Paul Deegan, CEO of News Media Canada, affirmed that the CBC, as a result, should be cut off from their outside ad revenue.
Independent journalist Jen Gerson added, “the status quo isn’t adequate. The type of funding that you’re hoping to provide to legacy media is overwhelmingly going to go to companies that have already demonstrated that they’re willing to cut costs, that have already demonstrated that they’re willing to engage in mass layoffs, and have already massively undercut the amount of quality reporting they do.”
If the government wants to interfere at all, Gerson said, there need to be more transparent mechanisms.
There is a widespread crisis of public distrust in news right now, explained Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown, that this bill would exacerbate.
“They [Google and Meta] started funding certain news organizations because this bill was coming. And when Canadians asked, well, how much money have they spent? Are they given to the news that I read every day and how do they determine which news organizations get the money and which ones don’t? Well, those Canadians are told that that’s a secret. And once this bill becomes a law, every qualifying news organization will be in a position to enter into their own secret deal with Facebook and Google. And that secrecy is poisonous to trust.”
Brown proposed the standardization of funding for all qualifying news organizations, which he said would prevent self-censorship and relieve his newspaper from caring what Facebook and Google think about their coverage, and not keep their readers in the dark.
