Pablo Rodriguez Liberal
This bill has received Royal Assent and is, or will soon become, law.
This is from the published bill. The Library of Parliament has also written a full legislative summary of the bill.
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.
All sorts of information on this bill is available at LEGISinfo, an excellent resource from the Library of Parliament. You can also read the full text of the bill.
Anthony Housefather Liberal Mount Royal, QC
Perfect.
This is what is on everybody's minds. You did this testing in Spain. You did it in Australia. It became public. Everybody's wondering whether or not you did this so that it would become public—because everybody knows it would eventually leak and become public—in an attempt to intimidate parliamentarians when they were considering Bill C-18, because it's now before the Senate.
Can you just confirm for me that that was not your intention?
Marilyn Gladu Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
I'll go to my final question then.
You've got a lot of experience, Mr. Gingras, with news and being in the news world for years and years.
What is your expectation if Bill C-18 is put in place in its current form? What do you think the impact will be on local media in Canada?
Marilyn Gladu Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Very good.
You made a comment earlier that Bill C-18 “eligible news” definition was too broad. Is there another country that has a definition that you think is a more accurate and narrow focus?
I want to be clear about a couple of things. First of all, we are completely in support of our providing further to the news industry in Canada. We also have no desire to limit the kind of linking we do to diverse sources in a news ecosystem in Canada.
As noted earlier, we think there are better solutions and more constructive solutions. We do think a fund approach would make more sense. In doing so, by the way, I'm not suggesting that we craft the criteria. We shouldn't. I'm not suggesting that we should govern the criteria. We shouldn't. I've never been comfortable with Google being in a position to directly fund news organizations. In fact, one of my concerns is that I'm not sure why a government would want a private entity to be responsible for striking relationships to fund a significant portion of the news ecosystem.
We think there are better approaches—better approaches not only for the health of the ecosystem and not only to drive the necessary innovation we need so desperately, given how much our world has changed, but also to do so in a fashion that is appropriate to the expression of journalism in an open society. We'd love to work further on that.
Again, we think there are simply more constructive approaches to the stated objective of Bill C-18.
Marilyn Gladu Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Yes. I see a nodding of heads.
I'm interested, then, in some of the deals you were talking about that have been made in other countries and other approaches that you think would be more in line with the goal of Bill C-18, which is to try to keep local news media sustainable.
In many cases, we have YouTube creators, for example, or small publishers who disagree with Bill C-18 because they don't think it would benefit them—
It's not for us to set a number, nor has there been a number set for Bill C-18. I would hope and expect it would be a number that would actually be appropriate to our business interests and to how we can continue to properly run our business.
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
I understand that full well and I appreciate it. However, no company is safe from someone coming in with a completely different vision. That's why it's important to have legislation. In the bill we are currently debating, there are criteria we consider essential for our journalism.
When you propose a fund and other methods, it removes the opportunity for us here in Canada and Quebec to keep our own fundamental criteria for journalism. I think that Bill C‑18 is good and important, even if you don't approve of the way it's written or the method we plan to use. It's still up to us to decide how we are going to manage this type of informational content.
My time is almost up, but we'll have time to come back to it later, Mr. Walker, because I think you wanted to respond.
As Richard was saying, we try very hard to do quite the opposite. We want Google to be known as a source of high-quality information whenever possible. That's why when we implement these kinds of tests—and again, we do thousands of tests a year—we are constantly looking for the value to users in response to a whole variety of queries.
Our concern about Bill C-18, and the reason for the test, is that it may well encourage more low-quality information websites that are trying to—
Lisa Hepfner Liberal Hamilton Mountain, ON
Thank you. It's very interesting to hear this from you.
We've also heard this afternoon that Bill C-18 can help to spread misinformation and propaganda in Canada. However, from my perspective as a former journalist, I would say that during the test that's exactly what Google did in response to our legislation.
When Google ran similar tests in Australia, it blocked access to fact-based news sources and instead promoted sources of questionable quality that were known for spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories. Please confirm for us whether Google has promoted those sorts of sources in its tests in Canada.
Lisa Hepfner Liberal Hamilton Mountain, ON
Okay. That's fair enough. Thank you, Mr. Walker.
We've heard a lot about links today. You or a Google representative said that these tests were designed specifically to assess the potential impacts of Bill C-18 on how news is linked to Google Search and Google Discovery. We've heard this several times today. We heard this in previous testimony from Ms. Geremia when she appeared before our committee last month.
Please tell us how these tests could possibly be conclusive given that Google is moving away from traditional links in this search engine and instead towards AI features. We heard this from your CEO in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on April 6.
Please go ahead, Mr. Walker.
Cheryl Gallant Conservative Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON
Madam Speaker, I am proud to rise on behalf of my privacy-loving constituents in Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke.
Bill C-27 is another piece of legislation that had to be resurrected after the Prime Minister called his superspreader pandemic election. Originally, this was supposed to be a long overdue update to the Privacy Act, and it has since morphed into Bill C-27, the data-grab act.
Everything about Bill C-27 should leave the Liberals feeling embarrassed. A Canadian's right to privacy is fundamental. Sadly, Canadians' privacy rights are not a priority for the government.
This bill has languished for years. It was first introduced immediately after the original online streaming censorship act was introduced. However, when the Prime Minister called his pandemic election and reset all legislation, what did the Liberals make a priority? Was it the privacy rights of Canadians? No. Was it securing Canadians' ownership over their data? No. Instead, what the Liberals prioritized was a bailout for big telecom and a bailout for the legacy media.
Not only does the government care more about padding the bottom line of Postmedia, but it also adopted Rupert Murdoch's false narrative about tech profiting off the content produced by the news media. Social media companies and search engines do not profit off the news media. They profit off us. These companies profit off our data, and the Liberals know the truth. Unfortunately, this legislation seeks to make it easier for companies to profit off our privacy.
If Bill C-27 is not significantly improved at committee, then together with Bill C-11 and Bill C-18, the government will have entrenched the surveillance economy in Canadians' lives. By combining the updates to the Privacy Act with the creation of a new artificial intelligence act, the Liberals have actually illustrated the brave new world we live in.
The Privacy Act and the way we talk about privacy even today are holdovers from the industrial era. We do not live in that world anymore. In the industrial economy, privacy rights were concerned with the ability to control what information could be shared. The goal was to prevent harm that could come from our personal information being used against us.
In effect, information was personal and an economic liability. We spent money on shredders to destroy personal information. The careless use of our personal information could only have a negative value, but then the world changed. Our personal information stopped being a liability and became an asset.
It started out slowly. Early examples were Amazon recommending a new book based on previous purchases and Netflix recommending what DVD rental we should next receive by mail. Google then began displaying ads next to search results. That was the eureka moment: Targeted ads were very profitable.
However, the targeting was pretty basic. If someone searched for shoe stores near them, Google returned search results alongside ads for shoes. Then it became ads for shoes on sale nearby. Then came Facebook and millions of people signed up. In exchange for an easy way to connect with friends and family, all someone had to do was share all their personal information, like who their friends were, how many friends they had and their geographical proximity to friends.
With the addition of the “like” button, the data harvesting exploded. If someone liked a news story about camping, they would start seeing ads for tents and sleeping bags. Every action Canadians took online, every single bit of their data, was commodified. Our privacy was turned into property and we lost both.
Not only does this bill not secure privacy rights, but it effectively enshrines the loss of our property rights with just two words: legitimate interest. Proposed subsection 18(3), entitled “Legitimate interest”, has this to say:
(3) An organization may collect or use an individual's personal information without their knowledge or consent if the collection or use is made for the purpose of an activity in which the organization has a legitimate interest that outweighs any potential adverse effect on the individual resulting from that collection or use
Is “legitimate interest” defined anywhere in the legislation? No. It is just another example of the vagueness found throughout the legislation.
Even if we accept the plain-language definition and that private business really somehow does have a genuine, legitimate reason to collect private information without consent, it is weighed against the adverse effect. However, this is industrial-era thinking. It views personal information only as a potential liability. Businesses have a legitimate interest in making money. With the Internet and mobile phones, much of our private information can be collected without any adverse effect. This legislation turns the private information of Canadians into the property of corporations and calls it legitimate.
I mentioned earlier that combining the privacy legislation with the AI legislation actually puts a spotlight on the issue of private data as property. However, as important as it is to highlight the connection, it is more important that these bills be separated. The artificial intelligence and data act has been slapped onto previously introduced privacy legislation.
With the privacy portion of the legislation, the devil is in the details. Overall, however, the bill reflects a general consensus developed over countless committee studies. That is not to mention the contributions to the privacy debate from the federal and provincial privacy commissioners. The issue has been well studied, and the minister has indicated that the government is open to responsible amendments. I am sure that the committee is well equipped to improve the privacy sections of this bill.
The same cannot be said about the artificial intelligence section of the bill. It seems rushed, because it is. It is intentionally vague. The Liberals claim the vagueness is required to provide them with regulatory flexibility and agility. The truth is, they do not know enough to be more precise. I have been trying to get a study on artificial intelligence in the defence committee for years, but there was always a more pressing issue. AI was treated like nuclear fusion technology, something that was always just over the horizon.
Since this bill was introduced 10 months ago, we have gone from ChatGPT to open-source GPT models, which any teenager can apparently run on their personal computer now. AI programs went from producing surrealist art to creating photorealistic images of the Pope in a puffy jacket. We have gone from short clips of deepfake videos impersonating real people to generating fictional people speaking in a real-time video. When we all started to learn Zoom in 2020, how many people thought the other person on the screen they were talking to could just be a fake? Now it is a real possibility.
The speed at which AI is developing is not an argument for delaying AI regulation; it shows that it is imperative to get the regulation right. Would this bill do that? The only honest answer is that we do not know. They do not know. Nobody truly knows. However, we can learn.
We should split this bill and let the stand-alone AI bill be the first legislation considered by one of the permanent standing committees, adding artificial intelligence to its official responsibilities. Artificial intelligence is not going away, and while much of the media attention has focused on chatbots, artistic bots and deepfakes, AI is unlocking the secrets to protein folding. This has the potential to unlock cures to countless different cancers and rare genetic diseases.
A paper was just published describing how an AI trained on data about the mass of the planets and their orbits was able to rediscover Kepler's laws of motion and Einstein's theory of time dilation. If we get this wrong, Canada could be left behind by the next revolution in science and discovery.
Given the government's track record on digital technology, Canadians should be worried about the Liberals rushing vague legislation through to regulate an emerging technology. Rather than modernizing the Broadcasting Act, they are trying to drag the Internet back to the 1980s. With Bill C-18, they claim that linking is a form of stealing.
The Liberals and their costly coalition allies do not even understand how broadcasting technology or the Internet works. They see people's personal data as the legitimate property of corporations, and now they are seeking the power to regulate a revolutionary technology. They did nothing while the world shifted below them, and now they are trying to rush regulations through without understanding the scope and scale of the challenge. Protecting Canadians' privacy and establishing property rights over their personal data should have been prioritized over bailing out Bell and Rogers.
We have not analyzed the results in that regard, so I really can't say one way or the other. Not surprisingly, I would say, obviously publishers who produce large volumes of content will likely see more traffic to that content.
When it comes to news at Google, be it on search or in Google News, we strive to present results sources that relate to news topics, whereas it is our analysis that under Bill C-18, the links and the size of the eligible news business class would mean that compensation would go to content that's far beyond what we would call news topics or current event coverage.
Marilyn Gladu Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Thank you.
Let's talk a little bit about the test that was done. The Parliamentary Budget Officer had looked at what he expected to happen under Bill C-18 and said that 75% of the revenue would likely go to CBC, Rogers and Bell Media based on their having the larger-volume news content. Did you see a similar result in your test?
Marilyn Gladu Conservative Sarnia—Lambton, ON
Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.
Originally, Bill C-18 was supposed to ensure local media would be sustainable. A lot of times, we've heard that it was modelled on the Australian legislation, but I think I heard you say in your testimony that we're the first country to put a price on links, so I assume that means Australia did not do that. I think you also said that you weren't subject to the Australian code. Is that correct? Could you confirm that?