44th Parl. 1st Sess.
December 13, 2022 10:00AM
Mr. Speaker, what is taking place in the legislation is a form of potential arbitration that will ensure a more level playing field, with the social media giants and the large search engines, which benefit from the local news outlets, sharing advertising dollars, as an example.
On the issue of fake news, Canadians want a high level of comfort regarding certain traditional news outlets that have a history of reporting and have built that confidence. If we look at the pandemic, there was fairly clear evidence that getting the vaccine was safe. However, there were some within the industry who were propagating or promoting that it was a terrible thing.
At the end of the day, I see the legislation as ensuring that those agencies, like CTV or radio stations, have fair compensation that they are not getting today, yet their material is being utilized.
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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, something that the legislation would actually do is require that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC, to publish a list of digital news intermediaries and news businesses that are eligible under the online news act.
Throughout the legislation, it talks about the CRTC's role with the overall principle and objective of ensuring that we have a higher sense of fairness in regard to revenue and how that revenue could be distributed. Hopefully, the industry is able to do it in a consensual manner. If not, there are ways we can ensure it does.
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Mr. Speaker, we know that 450 news outlets in Canada have closed since 2008. At least one-third of Canadian journalism jobs have disappeared. The member spoke a bit about this. We know it is vital that Bill C-18 includes small-sized media outlets. However, we are hearing from unions, like CUPE national, for example, raising concerns of layoffs. When the NDP proposed the amendment in clause 29 to require news organizations to publish a list of the number of journalists employed, the member's party voted against it.
Can the member explain to the chamber today why that is?
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Madam Speaker, I would recognize that we have seen a dramatic decrease. Some have estimated it as being as high as the mid-40% of journalists losing their jobs in a relatively short period of time. The government is very much aware of it and it is one of the reasons we brought forward the legislation. I do believe that, if not directly then indirectly, it would continue to support a critically important industry in Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, I would like to request unanimous consent to split my time with the member for Saskatoon West.
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Is that agreed?
Some hon. members: Agreed.
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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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Mr. Speaker, I salute my colleague and commend her on her speech.
Bill C-18, which was introduced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, sets out which major platforms will have to negotiate with local and regional news businesses so that they get their fair share. It is important to understand that the web giants are taking content from regional and local media outlets and sharing it on their platforms without paying royalties.
The Bloc Québécois fully supports this bill. Of course, we expected it to be introduced sooner, but it is never too late.
I would like to ask my colleague a question. We noticed that the digital companies targeted by this bill are the large, dominant platforms in Canada. This bill mainly targets Facebook and Google. However, we know that other platforms are using the content of local media outlets. Why then does this bill target only Facebook and Google?
I would like to know what my colleague thinks about the possibility of continuing these negotiations in order to broaden the scope of the bill to include platforms other than Facebook and Google.
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Mr. Speaker, this is exactly the premise of this. In fact, it will perpetuate even greater success for the large media companies.
For the small media independent organizations in communities across this country to even be at the table, they will need to form some type of a collective to negotiate some type of arrangement moving forward, so therein lies the issue. As I mentioned, for a lot of the bigger players, the way this is perpetuating would actually help them considerably more than it would the small independent media organizations.
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Mr. Speaker, I am certainly not going to suggest the CRTC is the best avenue to deal with the digital giants. I listen to my hon. colleague and, when she talks about these big media companies, she is missing the fundamental fact that the biggest media company in the world is Facebook, with $82.4 billion in ad revenue.
The other fact of this ad revenue is that Facebook falsified its metrics, which anywhere else would be fraud, but when one has monopolistic control, people had no choice. Facebook is actually deciding what people see through the algorithms. We can get an extreme right-wing marginal publication such as Breitbart be one of the highest read on Facebook because of the algorithms. It is the editor. It is deciding what is being seen. It has falsified its metrics. Its profits are unprecedented.
I do not see why the Conservative Party is bending itself backward to defend a company such as Facebook, which has shown such dismal commitments to human rights, democracy and working for innovation, other than making Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people on the planet.
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Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about here has to do with online media, and this has to do especially with small independent media in communities all across this country. That is what this legislation is a lot about. Also, it is about giving the CRTC sweeping powers.
I was happy to hear the member say that he was not a huge fan of maybe some of how the CRTC operates. A big part of my speech was that we would be giving an organization sweeping powers. Already, it is questionable whether it is meeting some of its mandate, and it would have these sweeping powers to make all kinds of new regulations and have a huge arbitration process without really knowing what it is going to mean. That is extremely concerning, especially for the small independent news media organizations.
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Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if my colleague would quickly answer a question about the arbitration process she just referenced. Is it possible for nine members appointed by the minister of the government to be truly free and fair in their decision-making? I ask her opinion on that.
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Mr. Speaker, that is extremely concerning. We have seen, even in other appointments and many different ways with the government, how it is questionable how non-partisan and how independent some of those appointments are. It is extremely concerning to have taken it out of a completely non-partisan separate organization and put it right into the minister's office to make appointments. That is extremely concerning, and it is what this legislation would do.
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Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to wish everyone in this chamber and all of the people of Saskatoon a merry Christmas and a very happy new year.
This is the time of the year that many of us get to spend with family, friends and other loved ones. For some of us, it is truly a joyous season full of wonderment. For others, the holiday season reminds us of people lost and of relations lost. It is a hard time for those individuals.
As we all reflect on the past year and look forward to the next year, I want to offer these words of hope to all of the good folks throughout Saskatoon. May 2023 bring new beginnings, peace, good health and prosperity to members and their families.
As the member of Parliament representing the west side of Saskatoon, I will continue to work hard to raise up our city, our neighbourhoods and each of us to the best that we can be in 2023.
As we get into these last days of 2022, Bill C-18 has landed back in the House of Commons for its final round of debate before being shipped off to the other place. This legislation is one of three Internet censorship laws that the NDP-Liberal government has brought in since the last election.
Its goal is to ensure that voices other than its own, and news stories it does not like, are silenced in our democracy. I had the chance to speak to Bill C-11, which would have given almost dictator-like powers to a branch of the federal government to decide what people post on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other Internet platforms.
If the content is not in line with the NDP-Liberal messaging of the day, algorithms would be manipulated to remove that content from one's feeds and searches. Members do not have to take my word for it. The head of that very government agency admitted as much to the Senate committee when it took up that legislation. What is worse, the NDP-Liberals just shrug their shoulders because that was the very point of the legislation.
This legislation, Bill C-18, is the second Internet censorship law that the NDP-Liberals are forcing down the throats of Canadians. Simply put, this law would force Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to prioritize CBC and other government-approved news outlets on our feed over the smaller alternative news media platforms that may be more critical of the NDP-Liberal view of the world.
The third piece of legislation currently before this Parliament is Bill C-27, which I hope to address in the new year. That legislation is the so-called digital privacy legislation, which is a laughable topic from an NDP-Liberal government that tracked millions of Canadian’s cell phones during the pandemic without their consent and has been responsible for the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Canadians ending up on the dark web.
The truth is that the Internet and social media are an integrated part of our lives today. Until now, they have been an unfettered part of our lives. Canadians use social media platforms to access and share a variety of different news articles and information among colleagues, family and friends. Canadians I talk to are very worried that these three laws will limit their ability to have open conversations online.
For legislation that is supposedly about promoting online news, the NDP-Liberals and their allies in the CBC and traditional media have been spreading a lot of misinformation about it. The current government wants to have Bill C-18 so it can use algorithms to keep information it does not like away from our feeds and Internet searches.
Bill C-18 essentially grants the government the ability to force online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, to sign deals under the duress of government penalty to promote government-approved content. These commercial agreements do not just have to be acceptable to the platform and the news organization but to the government as well.
The government agency in charge of implementing Bill C-18’s censorship provisions is called the CRTC, and it would oversee every step of this process to ensure they are satisfactory to the NDP-Liberals. Surprise, surprise, all nine members of the CRTC are appointed by the Liberal Minister of Heritage.
I am not the only one seeing past the government’s spin on this. Outside experts such as Michael Geist, who is the research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said this at the heritage committee in relation to Bill C-18, “Bill C-18’s dangerous approach…regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation.”
The former vice-chair of the CRTC, Peter Menzies, told the committee how the government can influence news companies:
You could end up with companies wishing to please the CRTC or the CRTC feeling pressure to make sure money in newsrooms is spent on certain topics, and they might be good topics, but it's frankly none of their business to have.... An independent press spends its money on whatever it wants.
Who are we to believe, the independent experts or the CBC, which is already in the pockets of the NDP-Liberal government?
A question that comes to mind is who benefits the most from this Internet censorship? It certainly is not the average everyday user of the Internet who is logging into their feed to keep up with the news. It is definitely not the independent journalists trying to make a living and provide accurate news. It could be no other than the legacy media, more specifically the folks at the CBC.
The CBC and other legacy news organizations have been complaining for years about their inability to keep up with the modern online news media. Then they proceeded to lobby the government for $600 million in bailouts. CBC, for example, rakes in $1.2 billion in federal funding and receives $250 million in combined TV and online advertising revenue, yet it still struggles to survive in the Canadian market, as it cannot keep up with the modern tech era.
This is where Bill C-18 comes to play. The government is looking to tip the scales further in CBC's favour. The government has decided that it is a bad look to continue giving more billion-dollar bailouts to the CBC, so now the government is forcing tech companies like Facebook and Google to make NDP-Liberal approved commercial deals to fund the legacy media.
Instead, the legacy media should be competing on the open market, as many independent journalists are doing as we speak. At the end of the day, online platforms and Canadian taxpayers should not be footing the bill if the legacy media is unable to keep up with the times.
Let us talk about how this legislation would affect the news Canadians access.
Bill C-18 would prohibit digital intermediary operators from giving what the CRTC determines as “preference” in news ranking. That sounds relatively fine, does it not? No, it is not. With this unclear language added into the bill, just about anyone could call up the CRTC to contest their ranking and be brought up to the top of any search engine or platform.
I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Trying to regulate content on the Internet will always introduce bias into the conversation. At best, it is an innocent hassle. At worst, it can be used by the government to suppress real information and control people. In my view, the risk of the worst case is not worth it. As they say, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
Let us talk about Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and the Internet in general.
First let me say that Elon Musk's recent purchase of Twitter has shaken up Silicon Valley and the status quo in big tech quite a bit and has perhaps breathed some fresh air into what was becoming a stale industry. His commitment to free speech and his willingness to stand up to the powers that be show how big tech can directly influence elections or stay neutral, as they should.
Of course, in Canada, this legislation has the potential to tip the scales toward the NDP-Liberals during elections. Big tech recognizes that and they do not want to be tools of censorship in Canada or anywhere else.
Last spring, I met the executives of Google and it was an eye-opening experience. They are concerned. They worry that Bill C-18 does not have the tools to provide relief to smaller news outlets. After all, it was not the small independent news outlets that wanted this in the first place. It was the large media networks that lobbied for this to get done and that are now foaming at the mouth to get this legislation rammed through Parliament.
Members should not kid themselves. Google is not just afraid for its bottom line. It is a multi-billion dollar business and will absorb the costs associated with this legislation. Its real fear is about freedom of speech on the Internet. They may run worldwide organizations, but the Silicon Valley boys are still hackers at heart, living out of their mothers' basements playing Halo, sharing on Twitch and posting on Reddit. Google is concerned that the government is making it more difficult for Canadians to access quality information.
I also met with Amazon World Services in the summer, and we talked about a variety of issues related to this legislation. I can tell members that Google and Amazon do not just meet random opposition members from Saskatoon unless they have real concerns about where this country is going. It is Canadians who are the best judge of what content they want to consume, not some government bureaucrats.
We have seen Canadian content creators thrive in an open and competitive market, one being Hitesh Sharma, a Punjabi hip-hop artist from Saskatchewan who built up a large following on TikTok and later made it to the Junos. He did not need the CRTC to give him a path to fame.
It is very important that we allow our creators, whether they are influencers or media, to flourish against the top creators in the world. That is not to say we should not support our local media when we can, but we should recognize the talent we already have, all of whom have succeeded without the involvement of big government interference.
With Bill C-18, local Canadian content creators could be squeezed out of our newsfeeds and replaced with the CBC. I guess that is fine for the few people who tune into CBC on a regular basis, but for most people, especially younger people, the desire is for a free and open Internet where we can search for whatever we want, free of interference by government or anyone else. That is what Canadians want.
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Mr. Speaker, I suspect there is widespread support in recognizing that tech giants, whether it is Google, YouTube or Facebook, which really dominates the social media industry, get billions of dollars in revenue every year, and a lot of their sourcing comes from news agencies that are finding things difficult. There is a sense of unfairness there. This legislation would ensure there is a higher sense of fairness. The creators and news agencies are reporting on the news, and their content is being utilized by these giants, which are not paying anything for it.
Do the member and the Conservative Party believe that Google, Facebook and other giant conglomerates have a responsibility to pay for some of the creative journalism we are seeing in our communities?
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Mr. Speaker, providing funding to all organizations big or small is a laudable goal, and it is something we need to work on, but that is not what I see here. What I see in this legislation is too much risk. The government would insert itself into this process at the risk of being able to essentially contaminate the well, as they say. There is too much ability here for the government, and frankly any future government, to manipulate things and coerce through very subtle means or very direct means. That is the concern I have. I do not think this is the right approach.
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Mr. Speaker, I can agree with my colleague on the fact that the CRTC is a stale, last-century institution that is not equipped to deal with today's reality. However, I do not share his obsession with CBC/Radio‑Canada.
That being said, there is currently an imbalance in the market between David and a few Goliaths. This imbalance contributes to cultural flattening by allowing one type of news to dominate. I would like to know whether my colleague recognizes the imbalance of power. Could he explain to me what he will do to mitigate the consequences of this imbalance, which is having an adverse effect on culture?
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Mr. Speaker, we have a wonderful thing in the free market, and we need to allow companies to flourish. I mentioned one example from Saskatoon, and there are many more.
We have a radio station in Saskatoon, 650 CKOM. John Gormley runs a show there, and he does a great job. He has managed to figure out how to use social media to his advantage. I am quite certain they make a great deal of money from their programs, and it is possible for this to be done.
Sure, there needs to be a way to share revenue, but as I said, the concerns here come back to control and the way the government has allowed its fingers to be in this process with an ability to promote or unpromote certain things based on the whims of the Government of Canada.
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Mr. Speaker, I certainly found what was said very entertaining. I do not like to go down the dark wells of conspiracy minds very often, but it was nice to see how the Conservatives look when they look internally.
The member talked about Elon Musk and what a great breath of fresh air he is. The guy has almost crashed one of the biggest platforms in the world in the space of two weeks.
What is so fresh about Elon Musk? Well, there is the rise of anti-Semitism. Jeez, that is a breath of fresh air. There is Vladimir Putin's troll armies against the people of Ukraine. What a breath of fresh air that is for backbench Conservatives. Then, of course, Elon Musk wants to jail the United States' most illustrious doctor for the work he did in preventing the pandemic. I bet the Conservatives just love that. What a breath of fresh air that is. If only we could go after medical science.
Then, on the other hand, we have the big, bad CBC running everything. I thought it was George Soros doing this. I thought it was Klaus Schwab. When the leader of the Conservative Party said he was going to go after cryptocurrency, replace the Bank of Canada and shut down the CBC, I did not know it was because of the conspiracy that the CBC controls everything.
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