Hon. Andrew Cardozo: My question goes back to the broad principles of the bill. I say this in light of the role you described with regard to the CRTC. Having been a commissioner there, it has the ability to have open and clear hearings when it develops a regulation, it has extensive experience in mitigating the power imbalance that exists between big and small players and it scrupulously stays out of content, especially when it comes to news.

If we can go back to first principles, could you say a little more about why we need this bill? What if we don’t have this law? Will it help the small players the most? I ask that simply because we often get into the weeds before we really understand the big picture of why we’re doing this.

Senator Harder: Thank you very much, senator, for your question.

Let me reiterate that, without this bill, we will continue to see an atrophying of news sources and layoffs in the news-generation sector. That will contribute to an atrophying of public discourse.

I don’t want to be alarmist, but we ought to be concerned with the quality of public dialogue in Canada. We do know that an independent press is an essential ingredient of our liberty and our democratic life together.

This bill is designed to ensure that there are market-based negotiating requirements between the creators of content — the publishers — and the platforms that use that content to achieve advertising revenue. It’s the collapse of advertising revenue that has created the layoffs and the negative effects in the newspaper business.

Your Honour, may I have five more minutes?