Senator Lankin: Do you make any distinction between this being that we are establishing that we are going to build the house but the consultation will follow? Does that give you any comfort at all?

The Hon. the Speaker pro tempore: Your time has expired, and Senator Lankin has a question. Senator Cotter, are you asking for five minutes to answer the question?

Senator Housakos: My speech, as you know, Senator Lankin, is a critique of this bill. It’s not incumbent on me to find all the solutions. But I do believe vehemently — and that’s why I oppose this piece of legislation — that the objective is honourable. We are trying to help failing — and particularly print — news platforms across this country. We all grew up with them. They are learning tools. They are so fundamental to our democracy. You are absolutely right — some are more left, some are more right, and that’s normal. I don’t have any issue with that. I encourage that as part of the democratic process.

But even in today’s digital world, some of them are very successful. They might not like it, but I’ll use The Globe and Mail as an example. They have adapted quickly to the new realities of the digital world. The digital world has offered a unique opportunity. It’s a megaphone to promote our work, and it has offered it to journalists, artists and politicians. It is something I believe we should embrace and learn how to use it effectively. The Globe and Mail has a subscription-type system that they have been using now for a number of years. They are as successful today as they have ever been in the past.

Another outlet, the National Post — and again, they might not like this — has not adapted to the digital reality as quickly, and we have seen their newsrooms across the country suffering. I’m not picking one or the other, but they are two prime examples of important national newspapers. One is really thriving in the digital world, and the other one isn’t.

It’s the same with local weekly newspapers. In my neighbourhood, once upon a time, there were six. Now there are three that are suffering, two are doing really well and one, unfortunately, went bust.

We have seen now with this government’s noble attempt to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to prop them up — to suspend them — that it hasn’t worked. The ones that are doing well are still doing well because they’ve adapted. For the ones that are not, all the money in the world won’t help them.

From my 20 years of business experience, I have learned something. If your business model is not adaptable to the economic realities of the time, the government can give you all the money in the world and you won’t succeed.

I don’t have the solution at my fingertips. I hope we have that robust, intense discussion at our committees — thank God, in Senate committees we do have those types of robust discussions — and, hopefully, we can come up with some decent, thoughtful amendments that would help this industry that we all agree and recognize has to flourish.

Unfortunately, for me, this is a shakedown of certain digital platforms that are not content providers. They are just platforms for content to be exported. We are shaking them down in order to help an industry that hasn’t adapted to that particular reality. There have been winners and losers. I think the marketplace should let them work it out.

By the way, Google has been negotiating with news outlets now for years. They have made arrangements with newspapers and different organizations. The Globe and Mail is an example, right? They have made a deal.

All I am simply saying, again, is let the marketplace figure it out amongst themselves in a conducive fashion.

[Translation]

Hon. Frances Lankin: Thank you, Senator Housakos, for putting forward your views. I would like to, in my question, set aside the matter of the CBC because I think there are many other points of debate that come into it, and that polarized view held among some of us in this chamber won’t be resolved through this particular bill.

I spent a number of years as chair of the Ontario Press Council and then the inaugural chair of the National NewsMedia Council. It has been my experience that any newspaper that brings forward critical arguments, whether it is of one political party’s positions or another, is named “fake news.” I have heard it many times from across the floor as well.

Here is what I want to understand from you: The voices of those small community newspapers that many of us in rural Ontario and across Canada rely on have largely been cancelled out and have not been able to have the resources and the staffing to do local investigative journalism. They rely on The Canadian Press and other feeds.

Your proposal doesn’t address how this issue will get resolved. Surely some of the $81 million is better than nothing at all. Could you speak to what the solution is, please?

Hon. Frances Lankin: Why is it always me you warn? My reputation precedes me.

Thank you, Senator Anderson. I, along with a number of my colleagues in our group, had a chance this week to meet with a member of the Transitional Committee, Mike DeGagné, and also with representatives of the Métis National Council. We have further meetings coming up.

One of the things that Mike DeGagné, who is First Nations, talked about was the representation of the work going forward to the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, or ITK, the Métis National Council and First Nations, and the importance of them having a role in designing the consultation. He also talked about this as being a bill to enable the building of the house, but the view of the house, the structure of the house and the foundation of the house must be informed by meaningful, deep consultation with the community. That is the framework approach.

Sometimes, that’s really difficult for us — the framework approach — and we’re seeing it with other bills because the consultation is to come, and the commitment of the consultation is there —