Hon. Mary Coyle: Welcome, Minister O’Regan. Great to see you again.

Minister O’Regan, in your mandate letter, which we heard a little bit about, you were asked to work with other ministers on legislation and action to achieve a just transition, ensuring support for the future and livelihood of workers and their communities in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The Office of the Auditor General released a report last April on that transition, which found that federal departments had not adequately designed programs and benefits to support coal workers and their communities while phasing out coal-fired electricity.

Minister, could you tell us how the government is responding to that report and the recommendations from the Auditor General? Also, what lessons might we learn for other sectors?

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: As you well know, Senator Yussuff was very much on top of that file in terms of coal transition.

There is a significant, and fundamental, difference in that coal is being phased out altogether. It is not only being phased out in Canada, but we want it phased out around the world — you cannot just do that, though, for jurisdictions that do not have an alternative. In Canada, in the meantime, we have alternatives — and we have for some time — whether those are fossil fuels, hydroelectricity or nuclear power. Therein lies a big difference.

This message gets so muddied and politicized. I learned during my tenure as Minister of Natural Resources that the most important thing you can do is singularly focus on one thing — and that is lowering emissions. Everything else is noise; everything else can become a distraction.

It is on two fronts: We have to lower emissions for its own sake, but we also have to lower emissions because, competitively, it will place our product and our fossil fuels in a far better place in the world, as the world shops around now — not only for cheap sources, but also for sources at lower emissions.

Hon. Wanda Thomas Bernard: Minister O’Regan, thank you for being here today. Two of my colleagues have asked about employment equity, which I was planning to ask, so I have a very straightforward follow-up to the questions asked by Senator Loffreda and Senator Cardozo.

Many equity-deserving groups are asking me what the delay has been in the reporting of the task force. Are you able to tell us what has caused those delays?

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: No, it is nothing other than they asked for more time in order to reach conclusions and write the report. I thought it prudent to do that once it was requested.

I realize there is a great impatience among a number of communities in this country to get this done. I also acknowledge that, as I said, I don’t think there has been any fundamental change to it since 1986.

Senator, I will acknowledge it is a fine line. I believe impatience is a virtue. I have not lost my virtue in my seven years as a member of Parliament, but one owes it to these groups to also find the time to get it right. I’m attempting to find that now. I am told that I will have the report by this spring.

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: That’s right. The Pay Equity Act came into force in 2021. We appointed the Pay Equity Commissioner to support that compliance.

The Pay Equity Act directs employers to take proactive steps to make sure that they are providing equal pay for work of equal value. It has brought about a dramatic shift in how the right to pay equity is protected in federally regulated workplaces. It is administered and enforced by Canada’s federal Pay Equity Commissioner and is supported by the pay equity division at the Canadian Human Rights Commission.

To more directly answer your question, it is a complex issue, as I’m sure the senator can acknowledge. We need time to get it right, so we have created a framework for federally regulated businesses to understand the requirements to develop those pay equity plans and to start making pay adjustments.

An overriding principle for me here is the closer that it can be done to the ground, the better. When you come from a provincial government or a small town in Labrador as I did, you do not like the long arm of big government coming at you. Growing up in Labrador, the long arm of big government was St. John’s, not Ottawa. The closer you find the solutions on the ground, the better.

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: I don’t know whether if you put “just transition” in air quotes it shows up in Hansard.

Look, it’s not a matter of workers finding themselves in a low‑carbon environment. Workers will create that environment. They will lead this. Let me finish an answer that I did not get a chance to finish earlier.

When I sit down and talk with the union leadership in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador, they are firmly in charge of this. We doubled Union Training and Innovation Program funding for union training centres, for instance, and I will be a big advocate for increasing the funding for them. In other words, I want them to point out where the opportunities lie as we lower emissions and build up renewables. That is what we’re doing. That will all happen with energy workers. It will all happen with people who are currently in the industry, and I would argue that we need more on top of it.

We have to build up carbon capture. To be honest with you, we have a great agreement with the Alberta and Saskatchewan governments, and certainly Newfoundland and Labrador.

Industry is embracing this as well. With great pride, I acknowledge that the industry association in Newfoundland and Labrador, which was called Noia, the Newfoundland & Labrador Oil & Gas Industries Association, is now called Energy NL. They completely not only embrace and champion oil and gas, as they always have, but now they’re embracing hydrogen, hydro and all of the in-between and how they all work together. That is how we go about it. That is how we do it.

I’m very proud of my crowd. I think out my way, we see the world very practically. This is the way the world is going, and we want to be on top of it.

Hon. Marty Klyne: Minister, we know that as all provinces and cities strive to reach emissions that are 40% to 45% below 2005 levels, many will do it by phasing out coal plants, as Saskatchewan has said it will do. In that regard, we need to be ready to mobilize and ready a workforce that’s prepared to work in a low-carbon-emissions economy.

What is your government doing to ensure a bright future for energy workers and to demonstrate the upside of this just transition in terms of transferable skills transitioning to well‑paying, steady jobs for Western Canadians who are working in a low-carbon economy, which they are not now?

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: Right off the top, senator, I will get you a more detailed response than perhaps I am able to provide at this time. As I said, we are committed to reducing the gender wage gap and increasing financial equality in the workplace.

In 2018, we provided $3 million over five years to introduce pay transparency for federally regulated private sector employers, and we will continue working to support women in the labour market, particularly through pay equity legislation and pay transparency, as well as Canada-wide early learning in child care and the good work that I think we’ve done with provinces on that score. I think that will have a huge effect.

I would be happy to get back to you with particular answers to those questions.

[Translation]

Hon. Donald Neil Plett (Leader of the Opposition): Minister, the federal government is bargaining with nearly all of the unions representing more than 300,000 public servants. Some of those unions have outrageous demands, clearly, which would add billions of dollars to the deficit as your own Treasury Board has said. The government and the unions are clearly on a collision course. Canadians should brace themselves for the largest strike in Canadian history.

As Minister of Labour, do you think the government should table legislation to pre-emptively prevent a strike? Or if you decide to allow Canadians to be held hostage by a civil service strike, how long do you think the government should wait before tabling back-to-work legislation?

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: I cannot speak directly to the quote, but I could just say that we’ve never produced more oil than we are right now. That is a fact. The prosperity that it brings to every corner of this country is a fact. Climate change is also a fact, and the future competitiveness in the industry is a fact.

Alex Pourbaix — I deal with Mr. Pourbaix, the Chief Executive Officer of Cenovus in Calgary. I would not call him a tree hugger, but he sees the competitive sense in this. He came out and said there is huge opportunity in lowering emissions, working with the government on lowering emissions and increasing renewables.

By the way, it is worth noting too that the province of Alberta by a country mile leads this country in wind and solar — by a country mile. The thing that we also have to make sure that we are going to do, and this came out in the federal Economic Statement, is make sure — just because they are producing winds and solar does not necessarily mean that they embrace workers. Some of them don’t. Some of them are looking for non-union workers.

We want to make sure that any tax credit we give to companies that are building up renewables are worker-friendly, much as the Biden Administration has done. I still cannot get over it. Dealing with the Trump Administration in my two years as natural resources minister, they were not worker-friendly either. Now we have an administration, a trading partner and a great friend and ally that is challenging us — and our biggest customer by far of oil and gas — to match them on lowering emissions, building up renewables and looking after workers. Good problem to have.

Hon. Seamus O’Regan, P.C., M.P., Minister of Labour: Yes, we are working on that, senator. We’re referring to what is sometimes referred to as gig workers. We see it sometimes. One, albeit, it is provincial jurisdiction, but an example, of course, is Uber.

We are seeing similar models in long-haul trucking. You have a lot of people who are private contractors, it is an industry that is growing inordinately and it is called Drivers Inc., but there are sometimes abuses within that model. People are not aware that they have, as de facto employees, benefits that are accrued to them, whether it be sick leave, paid leave, EI or CPP — all the things that we take for granted.

Our job is to make sure that where there are de facto employees in a situation within a federal jurisdiction, that we look after them, that they are aware of their rights and obligations and that they have access to them.

The good news is that we have a huge, growing industry, and it is probably the biggest part within my jurisdiction, which is long‑haul trucking. We just have to make sure that all of the employees there get the basic rights that every worker in federal jurisdictions in this country should be accrued.

Hon. Pamela Wallin: Honourable senators, I give notice that, at the next sitting of the Senate, I will move:

That the Standing Senate Committee on Banking, Commerce and the Economy be permitted, notwithstanding usual practices, to deposit with the Clerk of the Senate a report relating to its study on the state of the Canadian economy and inflation, if the Senate is not then sitting, and that the report be deemed to have been tabled in the Senate.

On the Order:

Resuming debate on the motion of the Honourable Senator Harder, P.C., seconded by the Honourable Senator Bellemare, for the second reading of Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.

Senator Housakos: If I understand correctly, senator, you’re essentially saying that journalists need these platforms in order to magnify their work and have more reach. By the same token, they would like to quantify how much monetization is out there in order for them to get their share. That’s the problem.

This is where I’m not quite sure if this bill achieves that goal, and I’m not quite sure how you actually put a number on it.

To go back to copyright, my understanding — I’m not a copyright expert — is the moment the journalist puts out — into the public sphere — their article, for example, then they’ve made it public. It’s being disseminated on all these platforms with their consent because, to your point, they want to magnify their article.

In both those cases, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You either jump into that milieu or you don’t — where I come from.

[Translation]

Senator Miville-Dechêne: In a nutshell, we don’t know the value of this content shared on the internet.

As we speak, a lot of private deals are being struck between Google and certain Canadian media outlets. We don’t know the value of these contracts, but we do know that Google, faced with the “threat” of the coming law, is making deals with the media. The fact that Google is doing this means that it sees value in doing it. In our capitalist world, few private companies make deals if they don’t feel the need to do so.

In a way, the platforms are admitting that this journalistic content has value. Based on the rumours we’ve heard, we know that most of the agreements currently require the payment of 30% of the cost pertaining to journalists, based on the number of journalists on staff.

Still, you’re quite right in saying that there is too little transparency in this bill and a lot of unknowns. At some point, the hammer will fall. The government will want to know how many agreements there are and will wonder if that is enough for the law not to apply, as was the case in Australia. Then there will be a race because Google does not want legislation, does not want arbitration and does not want agreements to be imposed either. The government is betting on the platforms — and Facebook does not seem to be doing this — signing agreements before the law goes into force, because that way, the law will not apply. That is what the Government of Australia and the Government of Canada are betting on.

Hon. Paula Simons: Honourable senators, on January 12, Postmedia, the country’s largest newspaper chain, released its first-quarter fiscal update. The quarter begins in September and ends November 30, and it has traditionally been the most lucrative one for Canadian newspapers since it includes the back‑to-school period, Black Friday and the run-up to Christmas. But, this quarter, Postmedia’s numbers were bleak — a net loss of $15.9 million.

Twelve days later, the other shoe dropped. The company announced that it would be laying off 11% of its editorial staff across the chain. That means paring already gutted newsrooms right down to the bare bones.

Those cuts weren’t the only blow. Staff at the biggest Prairie newspapers — the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun; the Calgary Herald and the Calgary Sun; and the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and the Regina Leader-Post — were told that they would never come back to their once-vibrant newsrooms again. The newsrooms have closed. The few staff remaining will work from home, as they have been since the start of the pandemic.

The Calgary Herald building, a hilltop landmark, has been sold to U-Haul. It’s almost too on the nose to be real. The Saskatoon and Regina buildings are also for sale.

Now, Postmedia has a complicated lease agreement, which means it can’t divest itself of its Edmonton site so easily. For now, the elegant five-storey building, which sits on one of downtown Edmonton’s most historic corners, stands empty and abandoned — a ghostly reminder of the days when newspapers were powerful forces for community and democratic good.

Of course, it’s not only Prairie papers that are in trouble. Postmedia papers in St. Thomas, Sarnia and Owen Sound, Ontario, are now publishing only three days a week. And just this week came the parallel announcement that New Brunswick’s major papers — the Telegraph-Journal, Moncton’s Times & Transcript and Fredericton’s Daily Gleaner — would be daily no more, publishing only thrice weekly.

These papers — like so many across the world — have had their economic model derailed by digital disruption. Their advertisers, large and small, have moved to online sites, such as Craigslist, Kijiji, Autotrader, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Google and Facebook. Their subscribers have stopped paying — either because they were happy to get their news for free online, or because they could no longer see the value in paying more and more for papers that were shrinking and shrinking each passing year. More than that, local newspapers are facing fierce online competition for their readers’ attention. Once upon a time, papers had regional monopolies — not just on advertising, but on our time and our interest.

Today, Canadians can access the news of the world in real time, whether their tastes run to The Guardian, Le Monde and The Washington Post, or to Fox News and the Daily Mail. Whatever your taste, there’s a news site for you. You are no longer limited to getting your news from your daily paper, your hometown radio station or your local supper-hour TV newscast.

Meanwhile, new digital competitors are popping up across the country trying to serve readers who are interested in specific topics or specific points of view. Many of these publish award‑winning journalism about the climate — about Parliament, about social and technological issues — but they have a reach and an ecumenicism that they cannot match that of the broadsheet daily paper.

In some ways, Canadians have never had as many options to be informed. Information from around the world is literally at our fingertips. But, in other ways, we have never known less about what is going on in our own cities and towns without local reporters to cover city council and school board meetings, without local investigative journalists digging into local scandals, without local feature writers telling local stories.

And so now we have before us Bill C-18, which is designed to throw a lifeline to struggling news sites, large and small, all across the country. The premise is deceptively, intoxicatingly simple. Google and Facebook have lots of money. As Senator Miville-Dechêne has told us, they have pockets full of it. They dominate the Canadian advertising economy. The government estimates that those two companies alone command 80% of Canada’s advertising market, and they surely share links to Canadian news sites — links they don’t pay for. So why not ask them to pony up to support the newspapers, newscasts and news sites because advertising revenues have evaporated?

The bill requires Facebook and Google to enter into negotiations with news organizations: from the very largest, to tiny papers with owner operators, to Indigenous and campus radio stations. If they can reach private agreements, they will be exempted from the bill’s provisions. But if those exemptions are not granted, companies will be required to enter into binding, final offer arbitration.

It’s a tempting proposition, especially when promises are being thrown about that Bill C-18 will force Google and Facebook to pay for 20 to 30, even — as Senator Harder suggested this week; the first I have heard that number — a full 35% of the operating costs of Canadian newsrooms. The Parliamentary Budget Officer, perhaps more modestly, has estimated that the program should bring in about $329.2 million a year.

But the idea that we can or should force two American tech giants to underwrite the independent news upon which Canadians rely is a logical and ethical fallacy. The bill seems premised on a core proposition that the reason print media outlets have lost their revenues is that Google and Facebook are somehow stealing news stories and then monetizing them to sell ads, but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how digital advertising markets work.

Facebook’s algorithm privileges content that generates engagement, and a story about the Kamloops school board or a Senate debate isn’t sexy or juicy enough to do the job. Sadly, yes. A 2021 study for Nieman Lab found that less than 4% of posts viewed in the Facebook news feed actually linked to news stories, and since then Facebook — pivoting to video to fend off the challenge of TikTok — has retooled its algorithm to show people even less news.

Jean-Hugues Roy, Professor of Journalism and Media Economics at Université du Québec à Montréal, estimates that Facebook made $198.8 million in revenues stemming from Canadian journalistic content in 2022, but that was actually down from $210 million in 2021.

Professor Roy posits that, of that sum, about $99.4 million could be shared with the Canadian news industry. But even that rather rosy estimate will be far from enough to subsidize the costs of newsrooms across the country — and especially not if that sum keeps declining.

For its part, Google doesn’t post ads on its news site at all. Google News makes no money. It’s really there as a loss leader to keep people on the site longer.

It’s not that Google and Facebook benefit hugely from sharing news: They get little or no direct economic benefit from sharing news content.

Google and Facebook are advertising behemoths who dominate the internet and the advertising market with an unrivalled and unprecedented power. According to the Transnational Institute, in 2021 Google was the most visited website in the world, with monthly traffic of 92.5 billion visits. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is the second most visited site, with 34.6 billion monthly visits. Facebook comes third, with 25.5 billion visitors a month.

The only Canadian website that ranks in the top 20? Pornhub, with 3.3 billion visitors a month, gives them the peculiar distinction of attracting more views than Reddit or Bing.

Yes, Google and Facebook have a stranglehold on eyeballs and advertisers. I’m not asking for you to sympathize with them. I’m just asking whether it’s sensible to demand that they underwrite Canadian newspapers, magazines, broadcasters and news sites, including tiny websites whose work is almost never shared or indexed on those social media platforms at all.

More than that, I’m asking if it’s wise. How independent can the Canadian news media be if they are so deeply beholden to the goodwill and future economic success of two foreign corporations?

Back in June 2021 when we were debating Senator Carignan’s Bill S-225, a bill with parallels to Bill C-18, our Transportation and Communications Committee heard from the witness Edward Greenspon, the former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, who was by then the President and CEO of the Public Policy Forum.

Here’s what Mr. Greenspon told us in 2021:

. . . inviting the platforms to negotiate deals with individual publishers can badly distort the information marketplace. People have expressed concerns for decades that advertisers influence news agendas. In fact, it was rare to find an advertiser that had enough of a market share, more than 1% or 2% of a publisher’s total revenues, to do so. In contrast, I can well imagine a platform accounting for 10% or more of a news organization’s revenue under this system. They have massive public policy agendas of their own, including tax policy, regulatory oversight, data, et cetera.

He went on to warn us, “You are here to strengthen the independent press, not to create new dependencies.”

We should heed his advice now. With Bill C-18 we are creating an even greater economic dependence and giving Google and Facebook even more power than they already have over what we read and what we see — and, indeed, what we think.

The mechanisms proposed in Bill C-18 render us even more vulnerable to their corporate decisions, decisions over which Canadians will have absolutely no control.

As we watch the slow-motion meltdown of Twitter, accelerated this week, it seems to me naive — nay, foolhardy — to assume that Google and Facebook will be golden geese whose golden eggs can sustain our free press in perpetuity. If and when Google and Facebook are no longer cool or fashionable or trustworthy, where will that leave us?

I have many other questions about the bill as we move toward committee study. Realistically, how much will small, rural and ethnocultural or Indigenous papers and radio stations actually benefit from this program even if they negotiate collectively? How much should we want to subsidize large players such as Rogers or Bell Media or failing legacy firms like Postmedia, especially if that makes it harder for innovative start-ups to compete with them?

What guarantees do we have that companies will spend their subsidies to increase news coverage as a net increase as opposed to paying down debt or rewarding their executives? Is it reasonable, as the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated, for CBC and Radio-Canada — already funded by the government — to receive, by far, the largest share of this new money? What will be the impact on our respect for copyright law and the principles of fair use and to our obligation under the Berne Convention, given Bill C-18’s somewhat cavalier hand waving away of traditional copyright protocols?

And are we comfortable giving unprecedented new regulatory powers to the CRTC to intervene in the business of print journalism and to require mandatory media codes of ethics, given the free press has never before been subject in any way to the authority of the CRTC?

My friends, I was a professional journalist in this country for 30 years. I believe that responsible journalism is essential to the health of a civil society. It’s easy to look at the crisis in Canadian journalism and exclaim, “Something must be done!”

Well, this is something, but what will it actually do? Not, I fear, what we would like.

Thank you, hiy hiy.

Hon. Colin Deacon: Would my seatmate kindly take a question?

Senator Simons: I have contemplated it long and hard. Here is the challenge: Many of these small independent sites are struggling for market share both in terms of readers and advertisers because they are competing with the legacy dinosaurs, shall we say.

There is a strong argument to be made that if you prop up traditional broadsheet newspapers with a failing business model, you will inhibit the capacity of new competitors to come into the marketplace. On the other hand, as I said in my speech, some of those new competitors serve rather niche markets and do not give the broad community coverage that a local daily newspaper did. I’m very torn and I think those companies are too. Some of them initially came out quite critically of Bill C-18 and the premise that they will have to somehow band together — because there are no newspaper unions in this country. They will have to find other similarly situated companies and come together as a collective and then go together to negotiate with Facebook and Google.

How will they pull those collectives together? Do they have the legal bench strength to go toe to toe with two of the world’s largest corporations? It is a very interesting question.

Some of those small publications have already made successful deals with Google — more with Google than with Facebook — but they have made successful deals to showcase their work. Whether those deals are going to get ripped up now and whether Google and Facebook are actually going to be less likely to be supportive are very good questions. We just do not know yet.

Senator Simons: I would love another five minutes, with the indulgence of the chamber.