Hon. Paula Simons: Honourable senators, I rise to speak to this issue in the bifurcated view of being both a member of the Transport and Communications Committee and a journalist who spent 30 years working in the trenches.

I want to start first by talking about Scott Benzie and the excellent work he has done in highlighting some of the challenges of Bill C-11.

I have been speaking with Scott about this bill on and off in the course of my own research for months now. I have found him to be a thoughtful person with a strong point of view about Bill C-11, not all of which I necessarily share, but I think he is a good-faith witness who speaks passionately and with knowledge about the nature of his industry.

He has been a credible voice because he is not just one single individual. He is the executive director of a lobby group that speaks on behalf of digital creators and he is the artistic director of the successful Buffer Festival.

The issue which arose with Mr. Benzie was a question of whether or not he had revealed soon enough — because he certainly did acknowledge the fact — that his festival and his organization received funding from YouTube and TikTok. They provided cash funding and also goods in kind, providing transportation for artists and filmmakers who were displaying their films at the Buffer Festival.

The question is whether that was a breach of anything. Mr. Benzie has provided us with letters that demonstrate that the lobbyist registry assured him that he was in breach of no protocols. I’ve seen copies of that correspondence.

So whether or not you think Mr. Benzie is correct about Bill C-11, I put it to you that he is a good-faith voice on the issue and that he has not hidden or denied the fact that he has received funding from YouTube and TikTok, nor have YouTube and TikTok denied that they had provided that funding, which was not given to him as a lobbyist but in support of the artistic festival for which they were the underwriters.

The question is not whether Mr. Benzie has done anything wrong, but how suspicious we ought to be about the timing of this leak.

I acknowledge that the timing stinks of what one might call dirty pool, that it is convenient timing that this article came out the day before Mr. Benzie was to testify. Is that, however, a violation of any Senate rules? In the first place, as Senator Lankin has so eloquently said, we have absolutely no idea where this information came from and how it came into the possession of The Globe and Mail reporter.

I want to tell you from — I don’t want to say my vast experience — but from my 30 years of experience as a journalist, you might be surprised how information gets to journalists sometimes, and sometimes it’s not from the most obvious source.

I had a number of scoops in my career in which people had provided me leaks, and people would call and say, “It must have been so-and-so who leaked to her.” “This person should be fired because they must have leaked to her.” I would sort of smirk to myself because that person had not, in fact, been the source of my information.

So although one might induce or intuit where this information came from, we have absolutely no idea what this reporter’s sources were, and it would be a grotesque violation of our whole understanding of freedom of the press to ask the reporter to reveal her sources. Did her sources come from someone in the Department of Canadian Heritage? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. Did they come from a politician? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.

So who exactly created this breach?

Then we come to the article itself.

I read it on the day it came out, and I have read it subsequently. It is a perfectly fair and balanced news story. It is not a vicious attack on Mr. Benzie. It quotes Mr. Benzie at length defending himself, and it quotes both TikTok and YouTube defending their funding of Mr. Benzie’s festival.

I grant you that the timing smells fishy. I would also suggest that sometimes our friends in the other place are blissfully ignorant of the timing of what we’re doing here, and we would need to presuppose that somebody plotted knowing precisely when Mr. Benzie was going to be testifying to get this information to The Globe and Mail reporter to have it come out at just the right time.

I worked in newspapers 23 years. They don’t work that way. For all we know, Ms. Woolf could have filed this story a week beforehand, and it was stuck in the queue waiting to be printed.

Journalists can scarcely conspire to hold a staff picnic, much less conspire with the government to attack an artist and creator.

I grant you, when I saw the timing of the article, my back was up because I did not think that Mr. Benzie deserved to be placed in this very awkward situation, but I would caution us: Against whom are we supposing that we would be sanctioning here? We have no idea what the source of the leak was. We have no idea what the timing of the article was meant to be, and we have no evidence that this journalist wrote this piece with any kind of malice. It is a straight-up piece of good journalism that describes this issue and then accurately describes the testimony that we had heard in the committee earlier.

I agree that Mr. Benzie seems to have been the target of perhaps some unfair dealing and I’m grateful to Senator Tannas for raising this issue, but I don’t think you have the prima facie case here.