Bill C-18

Online News Act

An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada

This enactment regulates digital news intermediaries to enhance fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contribute to its sustainability. It establishes a framework through which digital news intermediary operators and news businesses may enter into agreements respecting news content that is made available by digital news intermediaries. The framework takes into account principles of freedom of expression and journalistic independence.
The enactment, among other things,
(a) applies in respect of a digital news intermediary if, having regard to specific factors, there is a significant bargaining power imbalance between its operator and news businesses;
(b) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting those factors;
(c) specifies that the enactment does not apply in respect of “broadcasting” by digital news intermediaries that are “broadcasting undertakings” as those terms are defined in the Broadcasting Act or in respect of telecommunications service providers as defined in the Telecommunications Act ;
(d) requires the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (the “Commission”) to maintain a list of digital news intermediaries in respect of which the enactment applies;
(e) requires the Commission to exempt a digital news intermediary from the application of the enactment if its operator has entered into agreements with news businesses and the Commission is of the opinion that the agreements satisfy certain criteria;
(f) authorizes the Governor in Council to make regulations respecting how the Commission is to interpret those criteria and setting out additional conditions with respect to the eligibility of a digital news intermediary for an exemption;
(g) establishes a bargaining process in respect of matters related to the making available of certain news content by digital news intermediaries;
(h) establishes eligibility criteria and a designation process for news businesses that wish to participate in the bargaining process;
(i) requires the Commission to establish a code of conduct respecting bargaining in relation to news content;
(j) prohibits digital news intermediary operators from acting, in the course of making available certain news content, in ways that discriminate unjustly, that give undue or unreasonable preference or that subject certain news businesses to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage;
(k) allows certain news businesses to make complaints to the Commission in relation to that prohibition;
(l) authorizes the Commission to require the provision of information for the purpose of exercising its powers and performing its duties and functions under the enactment;
(m) requires the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to provide the Commission with an annual report if the Corporation is a party to an agreement with an operator;
(n) establishes a framework respecting the provision of information to the responsible Minister, the Chief Statistician of Canada and the Commissioner of Competition, while permitting an individual or entity to designate certain information that they submit to the Commission as confidential;
(o) authorizes the Commission to impose, for contraventions of the enactment, administrative monetary penalties on certain individuals and entities and conditions on the participation of news businesses in the bargaining process;
(p) establishes a mechanism for the recovery, from digital news intermediary operators, of certain costs related to the administration of the enactment; and
(q) requires the Commission to have an independent auditor prepare a report annually in respect of the impact of the enactment on the Canadian digital news marketplace.
Finally, the enactment makes related amendments to other Acts.

[Kevin Chan]

I couldn't tell you what he was thinking, but to me, it wasn't at all clear that the motion of March 20 was related to the invitation we had received. It was an email inviting us to appear for the study of Bill C‑18. We were delighted to…

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

These discussions should have been held before we voted to send Bill C‑18 to the Senate. It's now being studied by the Senate. We're a bit late for that.

I understand from the way you're nodding that you have indeed met government representatives.

Did they listen to your concerns? Did you get the impression that you had been answered? Tell me a bit about what happened.

[Rachel Curran]

Look, Mr. Champoux, we would love to meet with you about Bill C-18, and we can certainly rectify that very quickly. We'd love to have a conversation with you about it and about the amendments we've proposed.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Ms. Curran, what you're saying is very interesting. I never received a request to attend a meeting to discuss Bill C‑18 with Meta representatives. And yet I believe we might have been able to have some very interesting conversations. We could have debated our respective ideas.

Did you have direct discussions with government representatives during the debate surrounding Bill C‑18?

[Rachel Curran]

Yes, we have met with some MPs and some senators to discuss our concerns with Bill C-18, and all of those interactions and engagements are recorded in the lobbyist registry, as required by Canadian law.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

When a bill is tabled in the House of Commons, it goes to committee for debate, where MPs from all parties meet the stakeholders and organizations affected by the bill so that they can explain their concerns or expectations.

Have you met MPs from various parties In connection with Bill C‑18?

[Rachel Curran]

Thank you, Mr. Housefather.

I can confirm that the way Australia unfolded was not ideal. There were some technical errors made in the way that we removed news from our platform. We fully intend that those errors will not be made in the Canadian context, and we're preparing very carefully to ensure that this is the case. We're going to make sure that we're fully transparent with Canadians, with parliamentarians, as we move towards news removal, if we're forced to do that.

Of course, Mr. Housefather, that's going to depend on the final scope of Bill C-18, and we don't want to pre-empt the work of the Senate in that regard.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

You don't know.

Was the decision to do content-blocking in Canada if Bill C-18 was adopted made exclusively by the Canadian team?

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Has Meta's board of directors discussed the proposed content-blocking in Canada if Bill C-18 is adopted?

I can't hear your answer, Mr. Chan.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Has Meta's board of directors discussed the content-blocking decision you've made in the event that Bill C-18 is adopted?

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

I'm curious. For Facebook to continue to carry news and to continue forward with these deals that have been sprung—I think it's 14, or something like that—I'm wondering what is required in terms of legislative change. Right now, Bill C-18 is in the Senate, so it's possible to have amendments made. What should those amendments be?

[Kevin Chan]

Well, Madam, I don't know that we have an answer for that. Of course, it depends on what the framework for Bill C-18 will ultimately be. We have to understand what is scoped in with Bill C-18 to understand what can and cannot be ultimately on the platform from a news content point of view.

[Rachel Curran, Head of Public Policy, Canada, Meta Platforms Inc.]

Thank you for the question, Mrs. Thomas.

Part of our concern with the online news act, with Bill C-18, is the fact that it ties the fate and the fortunes of the Canadian news sector to the fortunes of two American technology companies. We think that one of the major flaws with the legislation, as you've stated, is in fact that it makes the news sector almost entirely dependent on foreign technology companies. That is one of the points of concern we have with this piece of legislation.

[Kevin Chan, Global Policy Director, Meta Platforms Inc.]

Madam Chair, members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, it is a pleasure to once again be before you today. My name is Kevin Chan, and I'm a global policy director at Meta Platforms. I am here with my colleague Rachel Curran, our head of public policy in Canada.

Madam Chair, as you will know, your committee clerk wrote to us on Friday, April 28, to confirm an invitation to appear before this committee for its study on the “reaction of companies in the information technology industry to Bill C-18”.

We were delighted at the opportunity to once again make a representation to the committee of our serious concerns with the online news act and readily agreed to accept the invitation. To demonstrate how seriously we took this opportunity, our president of global affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, confirmed his participation as our principal witness.

Unfortunately, late last Thursday, May 4, we were notified by the committee clerk that the title of the hearing was changed to a much more confrontational one, one that seemingly had nothing at all to do with the online news act. Given this development, on Friday Meta notified the committee that our president would no longer be appearing.

I think we were all looking forward to a substantive discussion about Bill C-18 today, much like the thoughtful discussion that occurred at the Senate Standing Committee on Transport and Communications last week. That seemed like a high-water mark of legislative deliberation.

As you know, the clerk of your committee wrote us on Friday, April 28, to confirm that we had been invited to testify before you in connection with its study on, and I am quoting now, the reaction of companies in the information technology industry to Bill C‑18.

We were delighted to have another opportunity to speak to your committee about our major concerns with respect to the Online News Act, and willingly accepted the invitation. To demonstrate how seriously we were taking this opportunity, our president of global affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, confirmed that he would be attending as the principal witness.

On Thursday, May 4, we were informed by the committee clerk that the title of the study had been amended and replaced by another much more worrisome version that apparently had nothing to do with the Online News Act. In view of this change in direction, Meta advised the committee on Friday that our president would no longer be attending.

I believe that we were all keen to take part today in a serious discussion about Bill C‑18, like the thoughtful discussions held at the meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, which seems to have been the high point of the legislative proceedings.

With that in mind, I am pleased to now share with you the opening statement that our president of global affairs, Sir Nick Clegg, had written and was prepared to make for your original study on the reactions of companies in the information technology industry to Bill C‑18.

This is what he said:

"Madam Chair, my name is Nick Clegg and I'm President, Global Affairs at Meta. I'm grateful for the opportunity to address this committee.

"Madam Chair, the Online News Act is based on a fundamentally flawed premise. Meta does not benefit unfairly from publishers sharing links to news content on our platform. The reverse is true.

“Publishers choose to share their content because it benefits them to do so, whereas it isn't particularly valuable to us at all. As such, we've taken the difficult decision that if this flawed legislation is passed, we will have to end the availability of news content on Facebook and Instagram in Canada.

“The truth is, our users don't come to us for news. They come to share the ups and downs of life, the things that make them happy and sad, that interest them and entertain them. Links to news stories are a tiny proportion of that—less than three percent of the content they see in their Facebook Feed.

“But news publishers do find our services valuable. We estimate that Facebook Feed sent registered news publishers in Canada more than 1.9 billion clicks in the 13 months to April 2022. This amounts to free marketing we estimate is worth more than $230 million. Publishers choose to share their content because it drives traffic to their websites. It helps them sell more subscriptions, grow their audience and display their ads to more people than they might have otherwise.

“The traditional news industry faces profound challenges. New technology has emerged, consumer behavior has changed, and old business models don’t work anymore. Of course, everyone wants quality journalism to thrive. But it makes no more sense to claim social media companies are taking money from publishers than to say car companies stole from the horse and cart industry.

“It seems we’re having a debate as if the internet was frozen in time about 10 years ago. The way our users engage with content has changed dramatically. Just in the last year or two we’ve seen an enormous shift in people consuming creator content and short form video. Watching video is now more than half of time spent on Facebook and Instagram. People reshare Reels—our short form video format—more than two billion times every day on Facebook and Instagram, which has doubled in just the last six months.

“The world is constantly changing and publishers, like everyone else, have to adapt. Asking a social media company in 2023 to subsidize news publishers for content that isn’t that important to our users is like asking email providers to pay the postal service because people don't send letters any more.

“And not all internet companies are the same. We’re not Google. They are an amazingly successful company that does extraordinarily useful things for people, but they operate a search engine that functions by using links to news web pages. Meta, by contrast, doesn’t solicit, need or collect content from news websites to put on our services. Our users—and in this case, news publishers—choose to share it themselves. Globally, more than 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers are on links posted by the publishers themselves.

“I’ve heard a lot in this debate about how this legislation is replicating what Australia has done. In fact, the laws are different in important respects—and C18 will go further than the Australian legislation. First, the Australian code doesn’t apply to Meta because we haven’t been designated by the Treasurer there. If we do end up being designated and forced to pay publishers, we will be faced with the same difficult choice we are making in Canada. But perhaps more significantly, this legislation would make Canada the first democracy to put a price on free links to web pages, which flies in the face of global norms on copyright principles and puts at risk the free flow of information online. Canada—and Canadian liberals—have a long-standing reputation for believing in multilateralism, and for defending the free and open internet—C-18 would be a direct contradiction of that long held and honorable tradition.

“I spent 20 years of my life as a legislator, so I understand how difficult it is to craft good policy and sensible legislation. In this instance, I believe C-18 is flawed legislation which would deliver bad economic policy too. The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimates that most of the funds generated by the Act will go to broadcasters, not the local and regional publishers it was supposed to support. It’s Robin Hood in reverse. The Act would subsidize big broadcasters at the expense of independent publishers and digital news sites, skewing the playing field so it’s even harder for smaller players.

“Ultimately, this legislation puts Meta in an invidious position. In order to comply, we have to either operate in a flawed...regulatory environment, or we have to end the availability of news content in Canada. With a heavy heart we choose the latter. As the Minister of Canadian Heritage has said, this is a business decision. It’s not something we want to do, but it is what we will have to do.

“I welcome your questions.”

With that, Madam Chair, Rachel and I welcome your questions as well.

[Peter Julian, NDP, New Westminster—Burnaby, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'll state it again.

I move that in relation to the committee's study on Google, Facebook and Bill C-18, Nicholas Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta be summoned to appear before the committee for two hours on May 15, 2023.

I move the motion. Hopefully this won't engender a lot of discussion.

He was invited. He is not appearing. This would be a summons, so he would have an obligation to appear.