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.

The House proceeded to the consideration of Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada, as reported (with amendments) from the committee.

Online News Act

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

There being no motions at report stage, the House will now proceed, without debate, to the putting of the question on the motion to concur in the bill at report stage.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

moved that Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada, as amended, be concurred in at report stage.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The question is on the motion.

If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion to be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[An hon. member]

On division.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

(Motion agreed to)

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

moved that the bill be read the third time and passed.

Mr. Speaker, before I begin, I would like to ask for unanimous consent to share my time with the member for Winnipeg North.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Mr. Speaker, I am truly pleased to be here today to talk about the online news act.

I want to take a moment to express my sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of my friend and colleague, Jim Carr. Jim served Canadians with pride and dedication. He will be profoundly missed.

As I have been saying from the beginning, with Bill C-11, the online streaming act, and with Bill C-18, the current bill, Canada is leading the way. The whole world is watching. On the surface, the bill we are debating now is simply about ensuring fair compensation for Canadian media, but the issue is actually much bigger than that.

It is about protecting the future of a free and independent press. It is about ensuring that Canadians have access to fact-based information. It is about protecting the strength of our democracy, one of the most important legacies that we can leave to future generations, who will see the Internet and new technology play an increasingly larger role in their lives.

When the Internet first came along, we thought it was amazing. It was, and it still is. We were suddenly able to access information from around the world in a few simple clicks. Suddenly, we had an infinite number of possibilities at our fingertips, and we still do. We all love that.

That being said, it also brought incredible challenges.

The Internet has fundamentally changed the way we create, search and consume content, especially when it comes to news. Right now, our news sector is in crisis: 468 media outlets, newspapers, television, radio stations and news websites, closed between 2008 and last August, 84 of them since the beginning of the pandemic.

Why is this happening? More and more Canadians are turning to digital platforms like search engines and social media networks as gateways to find news. At the same time, the number of Canadians who read their news in print or watch it on TV is rapidly declining.

Right now, the news is largely disseminated by these platforms, but the companies creating that news are not benefiting from it as they should. The impact on our press has been devastating.

The numbers speak for themselves. Since 2010, about one-third of journalism jobs in Canada have disappeared. In the last 12 years, Canadian television stations, radio stations, newspapers and magazines, which depend on advertising revenue, have lost $4.9 billion, even though online advertising revenue in Canada surpassed $10 billion in 2021. The lion's share of that $10 billion went to the tech giants, which pocketed 80% of the revenue. The digital platforms dominate the advertising markets, so they can set their own terms, which are often unfair. In the midst of all this, the media has lost its economic influence. Right now, the digital platforms have absolutely no incentive to fairly compensate the media for its content.

The status quo is not an option and it never will be. There is absolutely no doubt that a free press, an independent and thriving press, is absolutely essential to our democracy.

We all rely on timely and accurate news to make rational decisions, to counter disinformation and to fully participate in our democracy. In these challenging times, we need it more than ever.

The pandemic gave us a strong reminder that access to quality information could literally save lives.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global protests inspired by Mahsa Amini are also devastating reminders that we must never ever take our freedom, our democracy, for granted. We must fight for it every day.

Dominant platforms have a responsibility to support news and journalism in our democracies. Tech giants have a choice to make, and I want to work with them. We want to work with them, but we must act now.

What will the online news act do? It will help build a fairer news ecosystem, one that supports a free and independent press, one that will hold the tech giants accountable to Canadians.

How will it work? The act proposes a simple, practical and market-based approach. It is not complicated. Digital platforms will have two options. Either they enter into fair agreements with news media, or they will be forced to negotiate based on specific criteria.

The agreements will have to satisfy seven criteria. First, the digital platform must pay fair compensation to the news media. Second, an appropriate portion of the compensation must be used to support the production of local, regional and national news content. Third, the agreements must show that they defend freedom of expression and journalistic independence. Fourth, the agreements must contribute to the vitality of the news sector. Fifth, the agreements must reflect the diversity of the Canadian news sector, including with respect to language, racialized groups, communities and local characteristics. Sixth, the agreements must support independent local news businesses in Canada. Lastly, the agreements must contribute to the vitality of indigenous news outlets.

News businesses would also be able to negotiate collectively, giving smaller news outlets more bargaining power. This is extremely important. If platforms and news outlets are unable to reach voluntary agreements, then, and only then, would the act mandate negotiation, with final offer arbitration as a last resort.

Members may say that this model is very similar to the one introduced in Australia, and they are right. However, we have learned from its experience, considered the feedback from stakeholders and adjusted it to fit our Canadian context. As I have said before, Canada is paving the way.

Canadians expect us to act to protect their local journalism and to do so transparently.

This is a complex task. We are hearing concerns and criticisms, and that is normal. Unfortunately, we have also seen misinformation in connection with the bill.

Our job as a government is not to stand up for the web giants or repeat their talking points like the Conservatives are doing. Our job is to be there for Canadians. It is the right thing to do. We will face challenges, because we are breaking new ground and that is never easy.

The online news act is one piece of a large and complex puzzle that aims to build a safer, more inclusive and more competitive Internet for all Canadians.

I have spoken with my G7 colleagues about all of this and I can say one thing: The whole world is watching Canada right now.

I hope that together we will rise to the occasion. We must never take our democracy for granted. We must do whatever it takes to preserve it. This is why I am asking all colleagues in the House to support this legislation.

[Xavier Barsalou-Duval, Bloc, Pierre-Boucher—Les Patriotes—Verchères, QC]

Mr. Speaker, Bill C‑18 has been introduced at last. I would be remiss if I did not mention from the outset that we have been waiting a long time for a bill to help local journalism and our media. This is a good thing.

One could say it is a shame it took so long. Here it is 2022, and it is not as though web giants showed up just last week. They have been around for years. It took the government a very long time to take action. Now, I can only hope that we will manage to get Bill C‑18 passed so it can come into force.

That said, Bill C‑18 has some issues, such as the requirement to have two journalists to be eligible for these agreements. Many news media organizations have just one journalist. More and more of our cities and towns, including some in my riding, are becoming media deserts.

Does my colleague really think that Bill C‑18 will be enough to resurrect them and bring media back to places that do not currently have any, or are there any further measures his government should take? I think more measures should be taken, but at least the Bloc Québécois will vote for this one.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. I also want to thank the Bloc Québécois for all the rigorous work they did on Bill C-18 and for their support of the bill.

As I have said many times, this bill is not a panacea or a goal in itself, but it is an extremely important tool that essentially calls on the dominant platforms, the ones that control a substantial portion of the market and advertising revenues, to contribute to the production of local content. Many news media outlets, including radio stations, newspapers and television networks, have shut down. The bill needs to ensure that platforms also contribute to the growth of local journalism, especially smaller media outlets in the various provinces and regions, including of course in my colleague's riding. That is why Bill C-18 is so important.

It is not the only one, since the government has brought forward several other measures to support a free and independent press, including the payroll tax credit and other programs.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, we are dealing with a number of factors. The massive power of the tech giants is unprecedented. The use of algorithms is really distorting public conversation and there are algorithms that drive people to extremist content.

One of my concerns is that there was a pre-existing problem, where we saw a few of the media giants in Canada buy up many of the small newspapers and fire staff. If we look at any of what used to be great local papers, often the website pages are the same, page after page and newspaper after newspaper. We are not getting local content from those sources. I am concerned, if we are talking about supporting local, that we not just be paying into some of the large media platforms that have literally stripped our local voices out of our local media.

How do we ensure the money is going to create a balanced ecosystem of local and regional identities that are part of the fabric of Canadian conversation?

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for the seriousness of the work of the NDP on this very important bill. I also want to thank him for the support. What he just said is extremely important. It is why we put that in the conditions. I will repeat what I read in my speech.

The agreements must support local independent news businesses in Canada.

To get an exemption, a platform, like Google or Facebook for example, needs to also have agreements with local media outlets that are independent. Yes, they will have deals with the big players, smaller players and regional players, but also with the independent players. We put this as a condition because it is fundamental to making sure those small news outlets thrive. We need them in our regions. They are disappearing. We need to put a stop to that. It is why this bill is so important.

[Han Dong, Liberal, Don Valley North, ON]

Mr. Speaker, this past August we heard that Sing Tao Daily, which is a very well-known Chinese daily newspaper, permanently stopped its printing service. We heard recently that the last remaining one, Ming Pao, has been undergoing some challenges as well.

These Chinese-language Canadian newspapers are very important to the Chinese Canadian community here and for them to receive proper information. For a lot of them, that is the only source of credible information.

I want the minister to talk about how this bill is going to help these ethnic media newspapers, those that are treasured so much by the newcomers and ethnic communities in Canada.

[Pablo Rodriguez, Liberal, Honoré-Mercier, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague for his support, from day one, on this bill. We have had many conversations about this. As I said, there are many criteria the platforms have to respect, and one of them is having deals with a variety of media. That includes ethnic media and media in different languages.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, first, if I may, I would like to speak about the passing of Jim Carr, a dear friend and someone I have known for a number of years. I would like to extend my condolences, prayers, love and best wishes to his family and friends.

I had the opportunity in 1988 to be elected at the same time as Jim Carr. He was appointed as the deputy leader of the Liberal Party of Manitoba. I was the deputy party whip. From virtually day one to what we witnessed just a few days ago in the House, he served as an inspiration to me personally. I genuinely believe that, no matter where Jim went or what he went through in his life, he left a large footprint. He has deep respect in all corners.

I do want to make quick reference to what he said in his last speech in the House, because I think it embodies many of the wonderful attributes Jim brought not only to the chamber but beyond. He stated:

Madam Speaker, I want to start by expressing some deeply held emotion. I love this country, every square metre of it, in English, in French, in indigenous languages and in the languages of the newly arrived.

He went on to say:

In wrapping up this debate, I want to thank the people of Winnipeg South Centre, without whose confidence this would never have been possible.

He concluded his remarks by saying:

It is with gratitude, thanks and a deep respect for this institution that I humbly present this bill to my colleagues in Parliament.

I am very grateful for the fact that the building a green prairie economy act passed. It was something I know Jim spoke at great length about both inside and outside the chamber. It was one of a number of visions he carried, one of a number of ideas that he shared with so many Canadians in many different ways.

I appreciate the opportunity to share those few thoughts.

With respect to Bill C-18, the online news act, this legislation is an absolute must. The minister made reference to Bill C-11 to amend the Broadcasting Act and now Bill C-18, the online news act. These would assist us in modernizing our systems. So much has changed in regard to Internet accessibility, from what it was to what it is today. The Internet is an absolutely essential service today. It continues to grow as an essential service, and we need to overcome some challenges that are there.

As we look to the weeks, months and years ahead, in terms of conquering some of those challenges, one of the biggest ones is getting that fast, reliable Internet service into our rural communities. We have made significant progress over the last number of years, ensuring that it is taking place. I believe we are on the right track and are aggressively pursuing better interconnectivity for all Canadians. It is absolutely essential.

The act itself is something absolutely essential. I am pleased to see it is at the third reading stage. I was listening to what the minister was talking about. One can sense the passion and urgency just by listening to the minister. When we think about Canada and our democracy, one of the fundamental pillars of democracy is to have a free, independent media.

I recall sitting in the Manitoba legislature and seeing at least 10 or 12 members of the media in the gallery. There were representatives from all the major networks and local community newspapers. There might even have been a few others. When I left the Manitoba legislature back in 2010, I might have seen one or two reporters in the media gallery.

When we look at what has happened to our media and our news sources over the last 10 years or so, we have seen a mass reduction in the number of professional journalists. We have seen literally hundreds of news outlets in one form or another close. I do not believe for a moment, and I do not think anyone would even attempt to suggest, that it is nothing more than what we have been witnessing taking place on the Internet. We have seen a tremendous rise in things such as fake news.

The minister made reference to the war in Ukraine, and we talk about what happened during the pandemic. Canadians and people around the world, but particularly here in Canada, are very dependent on that essential service and ensuring what we see and read is factual. One of the ways we can ensure that is by going to the mainstream media.

One of my colleagues made reference to that fact that we have a wonderful ethnic media. I often look at the Pilipino Express, CKJS and numerous Indo-Canadian newspapers. There is the Portuguese community, the francophone community, the indigenous community and all of those different independent news outlets. For our community newspapers, whether rural or urban, there are things we can do to ensure they continue to be independent and continue to be supported, rightfully so, because of the Internet.

These are some tangible examples. Google and its search engines have benefited from mainstream media and from our media outlets. All the work has been done at one level, which is the creativity and reporting, and Google has directly benefited from that. There is advertising on YouTube, and in social media there are things like Facebook. The amount of advertising done through Facebook has been estimated to be, in terms of the advertising dollars going into media, as high as 80% in those giant companies.

This legislation would ensure, by utilizing the CRTC, that we can level the playing field. We could ensure that, for the information being conveyed by these giants like Google, Facebook and YouTube, they are paying their fair share. There would be an obligation in the legislation. By doing that, there would be better, more appropriate and more fair compensation for those media outlets. It would ultimately ensure that we have a healthier and stronger independent media. That is good for Canada and good for our democracy. It is the type of legislation that is necessary to get us back on track with regard to what we have been witnessing over the last number of years with the reduction of news media.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I enjoyed listening to the member's speech. He often speaks in the House.

He mentioned free, independent media. That is a good thing. He then talked about fake news. It made me think about dad jokes we have all heard. One person laughs at a dad joke and the next person finds nothing funny about that dad joke. It just shows that we all hear things differently.

When we come to the political world, we have different views on things. This can result in our listening to certain news, then not liking it or thinking it is fake, but another person might have the opposite opinion.

This bill would impose a board, which is appointed by the government, to arbitrate things. How is it possible for that board, which is representing the government, to properly adjudicate different points of view?

We know that people have different points of view. Is this not going to promote one point of view? Is it not going to begin to discriminate against certain organizations and potentially force the government's view on people and on the news media?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, what is taking place in the legislation is a form of potential arbitration that will ensure a more level playing field, with the social media giants and the large search engines, which benefit from the local news outlets, sharing advertising dollars, as an example.

On the issue of fake news, Canadians want a high level of comfort regarding certain traditional news outlets that have a history of reporting and have built that confidence. If we look at the pandemic, there was fairly clear evidence that getting the vaccine was safe. However, there were some within the industry who were propagating or promoting that it was a terrible thing.

At the end of the day, I see the legislation as ensuring that those agencies, like CTV or radio stations, have fair compensation that they are not getting today, yet their material is being utilized.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like my colleague to enlighten us a little.

It is our understanding that with Bill C‑18, major content providers, major news outlets, will have the power to negotiate with major platforms. That might work.

However, there are also the small media outlets to consider. In my riding, one newspaper has lost all of its journalists over the past few years, mainly during the pandemic, because advertisers shifted to the major platforms. One small radio station is also struggling to survive because advertisers have left. These people are worried because they belong to small groups, not major groups. I am talking about a small newspaper and a small radio station.

How does Bill C‑18 ensure that our small regional advertisers, our small regional newspapers, will be able to hold their own in the kind of high-stakes bargaining that will take place under Bill C‑18?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Mr. Speaker, something that the legislation would actually do is require that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, or CRTC, to publish a list of digital news intermediaries and news businesses that are eligible under the online news act.

Throughout the legislation, it talks about the CRTC's role with the overall principle and objective of ensuring that we have a higher sense of fairness in regard to revenue and how that revenue could be distributed. Hopefully, the industry is able to do it in a consensual manner. If not, there are ways we can ensure it does.

[Lisa Marie Barron, NDP, Nanaimo—Ladysmith, BC]

Mr. Speaker, we know that 450 news outlets in Canada have closed since 2008. At least one-third of Canadian journalism jobs have disappeared. The member spoke a bit about this. We know it is vital that Bill C-18 includes small-sized media outlets. However, we are hearing from unions, like CUPE national, for example, raising concerns of layoffs. When the NDP proposed the amendment in clause 29 to require news organizations to publish a list of the number of journalists employed, the member's party voted against it.

Can the member explain to the chamber today why that is?

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Winnipeg North, MB]

Madam Speaker, I would recognize that we have seen a dramatic decrease. Some have estimated it as being as high as the mid-40% of journalists losing their jobs in a relatively short period of time. The government is very much aware of it and it is one of the reasons we brought forward the legislation. I do believe that, if not directly then indirectly, it would continue to support a critically important industry in Canada.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I would like to request unanimous consent to split my time with the member for Saskatoon West.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to represent my community of Kelowna—Lake Country and speak to Bill C-18, which proposes a regime to regulate digital platforms and act as an intermediary in Canada's new media ecosystem.

In order to understand what this really means, it is like coming across a newspaper left in a coffee shop, waiting room or staff lunchroom. Dozens or hundreds of people might read that paper throughout the day, even though it was only purchased one time. Should the readers be required to send money to the newspaper each time it is read? Of course they should not. That would be ridiculous. However, the outline of what I just said forms the basis of this Liberal bill, Bill C-18.

The Liberals claim that Bill C-18 would uphold the survival of small community publications and newspapers. The government and the largest organizations say they are looking out for the little guys, but in most scenarios it always seems to be the little guy who ends up losing.

Bill C-18 would allow the news industry to collectively bargain for revenue from social media platforms that the government says are “stealing” journalistic content through users sharing links with friends, family and followers. However, like much of the current government's supposed small business policies, it would be the most prominent companies that would benefit the greatest. The more content they put online, the more money they would make with no effort.

The notion that linking articles is the equivalent of theft has already been ruled out by the Supreme Court of Canada. Justice Abella wrote in Crookes v. Newton, a decision ruling that says links do not carry commercial value. She said:

Hyperlinks are, in essence, references, which are fundamentally different from other [aspects] of “publication”....

A hyperlink, by itself, should never be seen as “publication” of the content to which it refers.

Conservatives believe in a robust local media ecosystem in this country. Should a Canadian newsmaker or collective group of small publications seek to negotiate with Facebook or Google for revenue, they could do so. Smaller organizations are always more nimble. We see this whether it is a municipality versus the federal government or a local credit union versus a bank.

The news industry is in transition with publishing methods and business models. Like its sister regulation in Bill C-11, this bill seeks to reject that kind of innovation in favour of a one-size-fits-all approach and enrich old, outdated and predominantly large organizations currently being outrun by technological change. Also, just like in Bill C-11, the Liberal government has called upon what it appears to view as its most agile, efficient and modern government agency, in their minds, to do this: the CRTC.

The government's prescription of new and continuing roles to the CRTC has stretched its mandate beyond all recognition and ability, and there are many questions on definitions in this legislation and how it would be implemented.

The CRTC is an agency that took over a year to produce a three-digit mental health number. The CRTC had no proactive oversight or risk assessing of telecoms that potentially could have mitigated the massive Rogers outage.

Its 500-plus employees are already charged with the management of large portfolios, including cellular networks, data plans, advertising standards, television services, radio broadcasting, closed captioning, described video, satellite content and now, with Bill C-18, the entire Canadian online news and digital industries. If Bill C-11 is passed, the CRTC will also be asked to measure the Canadianness of 500 hours of uploaded videos posted to YouTube alone every minute.

The government originally tried to shy away from the CRTC's role in this legislation. Now, we hear that the heritage minister is openly promising to “'modernize' CRTC so it can regulate Big Tech” with an unexplained $8.5-million price tag. Bill C-18 would massively stretch the already massive mandate of the CRTC, which one could argue it is already not fulfilling. Peter Menzies, the former CRTC vice-chair, states, “It seems like they [Canadian Heritage] want to have the most expansive, most intrusive, most state-involved legislation in the world in everything they do.”

The CRTC would have a central role in the government's prescribed arbitration process, starting with selecting the pool of arbitrators and ending with the ability to impose settlements outright. The large digital platform negotiations with every Canadian media outlet needs to be completed within six months or then forced into arbitration.

Can the government credibly claim that such an arbitration process would favour small regional publications over giants such as Torstar, Postmedia, Bell, Rogers or the CBC? No, it cannot, which is why, in a technical briefing with reporters, the Minister of Canadian Heritage’s staff acknowledged that the largest beneficiary of this legislation would be the CBC, a news organization the government publicly funds.

Here is how it would work: In this legislation, news outlets would be paid based on content shared or streamed. All the state-owned CBC would have to do would be to livestream 24 hours a day on the likes of Facebook or other platforms, and it would be raking in the cash. Small producers do not necessarily have the content or capacity to do this. This, in fact, would rank up these large organizations even higher due to the amount of content they would put on social media, and it would be funded by the structure of the legislation. The CBC’s advertising revenue is low compared to its massive budget, so this would be an easy way to bring in the cash with literally no effort.

We have heard the government cite Australia as the model to follow. However, our research shows complaints have been made by small media publications in Australia about its news media bargaining laws, the same laws the Canadian government is seeking to copy here.

In a submission to the Australian senate economics committee, the Country Press Australia association, a bargaining group of small regional publications, precisely the kind of group the large media organizations and government say would likely emerge to represent smaller publications in Canada, said of Australia's own Bill C-18, “The Bill is weighted to large media organisations and does not take into account the ongoing need for a diversified media across Australia.” It also said it “could in fact lead to an outcome that is opposite to the intention of the bill, i.e. a reduction in media diversity”.

I am very concerned with the unintended consequences that would be created by this bill, especially with the largest of organizations and the Canadian state-owned media being the biggest benefactors. Sports media companies such as The Athletic have found innovative ways to uphold local sports coverage under the umbrella of an international publication.

Copying Australia's homework would not help us very much if it has already gotten a failing grade. Former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd testified that Australia’s legislation would be “enhancing the power of the existing monopoly”. Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, called it “bad media policy”. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, said laws like Australia’s could make the internet as we know it “unworkable”. Vint Cerf, another founding father of the Internet, once attributed its astonishing economic success to two words: “permissionless innovation”.

Regulations such as Bill C-18 are a permission, and they are the swiftest killer of innovation and the greatest tool of existing media powers to kill competition. We can forget Internet searching as we know it. Calling upon the threadbare CRTC to enforce a dysfunctional Australian-like media policy would do nothing to help the small media markets in places such as my community of Kelowna-Lake Country. It would make permanent the actions of the government to bail out legacy media giants from their own business model mistakes and lack of nimbleness.

If the government was so interested in ensuring that small, regional and rural media have their share of ad revenue, it should stop pumping millions into mainstream media, which gives them the ability to reduce advertising rates and remove $1.3 billion a year from state-owned media. If it is so valued by the Canadian public, it should be able to attract advertisers and fundraise, just as other public broadcast organizations do around the world.

The biggest winners in this legislation would be the biggest media outlets, which is why we see them advocating so strongly for this. In my life experience, anytime I hear the largest of organizations say they are looking out for the little guys and they have their best interest, it is always the little guy who ends up losing.

[Maxime Blanchette-Joncas, Bloc, Rimouski-Neigette—Témiscouata—Les Basques, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I salute my colleague and commend her on her speech.

Bill C-18, which was introduced by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, sets out which major platforms will have to negotiate with local and regional news businesses so that they get their fair share. It is important to understand that the web giants are taking content from regional and local media outlets and sharing it on their platforms without paying royalties.

The Bloc Québécois fully supports this bill. Of course, we expected it to be introduced sooner, but it is never too late.

I would like to ask my colleague a question. We noticed that the digital companies targeted by this bill are the large, dominant platforms in Canada. This bill mainly targets Facebook and Google. However, we know that other platforms are using the content of local media outlets. Why then does this bill target only Facebook and Google?

I would like to know what my colleague thinks about the possibility of continuing these negotiations in order to broaden the scope of the bill to include platforms other than Facebook and Google.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, this is exactly the premise of this. In fact, it will perpetuate even greater success for the large media companies.

For the small media independent organizations in communities across this country to even be at the table, they will need to form some type of a collective to negotiate some type of arrangement moving forward, so therein lies the issue. As I mentioned, for a lot of the bigger players, the way this is perpetuating would actually help them considerably more than it would the small independent media organizations.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I am certainly not going to suggest the CRTC is the best avenue to deal with the digital giants. I listen to my hon. colleague and, when she talks about these big media companies, she is missing the fundamental fact that the biggest media company in the world is Facebook, with $82.4 billion in ad revenue.

The other fact of this ad revenue is that Facebook falsified its metrics, which anywhere else would be fraud, but when one has monopolistic control, people had no choice. Facebook is actually deciding what people see through the algorithms. We can get an extreme right-wing marginal publication such as Breitbart be one of the highest read on Facebook because of the algorithms. It is the editor. It is deciding what is being seen. It has falsified its metrics. Its profits are unprecedented.

I do not see why the Conservative Party is bending itself backward to defend a company such as Facebook, which has shown such dismal commitments to human rights, democracy and working for innovation, other than making Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest people on the planet.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, what we are talking about here has to do with online media, and this has to do especially with small independent media in communities all across this country. That is what this legislation is a lot about. Also, it is about giving the CRTC sweeping powers.

I was happy to hear the member say that he was not a huge fan of maybe some of how the CRTC operates. A big part of my speech was that we would be giving an organization sweeping powers. Already, it is questionable whether it is meeting some of its mandate, and it would have these sweeping powers to make all kinds of new regulations and have a huge arbitration process without really knowing what it is going to mean. That is extremely concerning, especially for the small independent news media organizations.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I am wondering if my colleague would quickly answer a question about the arbitration process she just referenced. Is it possible for nine members appointed by the minister of the government to be truly free and fair in their decision-making? I ask her opinion on that.

[Tracy Gray, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Mr. Speaker, that is extremely concerning. We have seen, even in other appointments and many different ways with the government, how it is questionable how non-partisan and how independent some of those appointments are. It is extremely concerning to have taken it out of a completely non-partisan separate organization and put it right into the minister's office to make appointments. That is extremely concerning, and it is what this legislation would do.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to wish everyone in this chamber and all of the people of Saskatoon a merry Christmas and a very happy new year.

This is the time of the year that many of us get to spend with family, friends and other loved ones. For some of us, it is truly a joyous season full of wonderment. For others, the holiday season reminds us of people lost and of relations lost. It is a hard time for those individuals.

As we all reflect on the past year and look forward to the next year, I want to offer these words of hope to all of the good folks throughout Saskatoon. May 2023 bring new beginnings, peace, good health and prosperity to members and their families.

As the member of Parliament representing the west side of Saskatoon, I will continue to work hard to raise up our city, our neighbourhoods and each of us to the best that we can be in 2023.

As we get into these last days of 2022, Bill C-18 has landed back in the House of Commons for its final round of debate before being shipped off to the other place. This legislation is one of three Internet censorship laws that the NDP-Liberal government has brought in since the last election.

Its goal is to ensure that voices other than its own, and news stories it does not like, are silenced in our democracy. I had the chance to speak to Bill C-11, which would have given almost dictator-like powers to a branch of the federal government to decide what people post on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other Internet platforms.

If the content is not in line with the NDP-Liberal messaging of the day, algorithms would be manipulated to remove that content from one's feeds and searches. Members do not have to take my word for it. The head of that very government agency admitted as much to the Senate committee when it took up that legislation. What is worse, the NDP-Liberals just shrug their shoulders because that was the very point of the legislation.

This legislation, Bill C-18, is the second Internet censorship law that the NDP-Liberals are forcing down the throats of Canadians. Simply put, this law would force Facebook, Google and other Internet companies to prioritize CBC and other government-approved news outlets on our feed over the smaller alternative news media platforms that may be more critical of the NDP-Liberal view of the world.

The third piece of legislation currently before this Parliament is Bill C-27, which I hope to address in the new year. That legislation is the so-called digital privacy legislation, which is a laughable topic from an NDP-Liberal government that tracked millions of Canadian’s cell phones during the pandemic without their consent and has been responsible for the personal data of hundreds of thousands of Canadians ending up on the dark web.

The truth is that the Internet and social media are an integrated part of our lives today. Until now, they have been an unfettered part of our lives. Canadians use social media platforms to access and share a variety of different news articles and information among colleagues, family and friends. Canadians I talk to are very worried that these three laws will limit their ability to have open conversations online.

For legislation that is supposedly about promoting online news, the NDP-Liberals and their allies in the CBC and traditional media have been spreading a lot of misinformation about it. The current government wants to have Bill C-18 so it can use algorithms to keep information it does not like away from our feeds and Internet searches.

Bill C-18 essentially grants the government the ability to force online platforms, such as Facebook and Google, to sign deals under the duress of government penalty to promote government-approved content. These commercial agreements do not just have to be acceptable to the platform and the news organization but to the government as well.

The government agency in charge of implementing Bill C-18’s censorship provisions is called the CRTC, and it would oversee every step of this process to ensure they are satisfactory to the NDP-Liberals. Surprise, surprise, all nine members of the CRTC are appointed by the Liberal Minister of Heritage.

I am not the only one seeing past the government’s spin on this. Outside experts such as Michael Geist, who is the research chair in Internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, said this at the heritage committee in relation to Bill C-18, “Bill C-18’s dangerous approach…regulates which platforms must pay in order to permit expression from their users and dictates which sources are entitled to compensation.”

The former vice-chair of the CRTC, Peter Menzies, told the committee how the government can influence news companies:

You could end up with companies wishing to please the CRTC or the CRTC feeling pressure to make sure money in newsrooms is spent on certain topics, and they might be good topics, but it's frankly none of their business to have.... An independent press spends its money on whatever it wants.

Who are we to believe, the independent experts or the CBC, which is already in the pockets of the NDP-Liberal government?

A question that comes to mind is who benefits the most from this Internet censorship? It certainly is not the average everyday user of the Internet who is logging into their feed to keep up with the news. It is definitely not the independent journalists trying to make a living and provide accurate news. It could be no other than the legacy media, more specifically the folks at the CBC.

The CBC and other legacy news organizations have been complaining for years about their inability to keep up with the modern online news media. Then they proceeded to lobby the government for $600 million in bailouts. CBC, for example, rakes in $1.2 billion in federal funding and receives $250 million in combined TV and online advertising revenue, yet it still struggles to survive in the Canadian market, as it cannot keep up with the modern tech era.

This is where Bill C-18 comes to play. The government is looking to tip the scales further in CBC's favour. The government has decided that it is a bad look to continue giving more billion-dollar bailouts to the CBC, so now the government is forcing tech companies like Facebook and Google to make NDP-Liberal approved commercial deals to fund the legacy media.

Instead, the legacy media should be competing on the open market, as many independent journalists are doing as we speak. At the end of the day, online platforms and Canadian taxpayers should not be footing the bill if the legacy media is unable to keep up with the times.

Let us talk about how this legislation would affect the news Canadians access.

Bill C-18 would prohibit digital intermediary operators from giving what the CRTC determines as “preference” in news ranking. That sounds relatively fine, does it not? No, it is not. With this unclear language added into the bill, just about anyone could call up the CRTC to contest their ranking and be brought up to the top of any search engine or platform.

I think this gets to the heart of the matter. Trying to regulate content on the Internet will always introduce bias into the conversation. At best, it is an innocent hassle. At worst, it can be used by the government to suppress real information and control people. In my view, the risk of the worst case is not worth it. As they say, the juice is not worth the squeeze.

Let us talk about Google, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and the Internet in general.

First let me say that Elon Musk's recent purchase of Twitter has shaken up Silicon Valley and the status quo in big tech quite a bit and has perhaps breathed some fresh air into what was becoming a stale industry. His commitment to free speech and his willingness to stand up to the powers that be show how big tech can directly influence elections or stay neutral, as they should.

Of course, in Canada, this legislation has the potential to tip the scales toward the NDP-Liberals during elections. Big tech recognizes that and they do not want to be tools of censorship in Canada or anywhere else.

Last spring, I met the executives of Google and it was an eye-opening experience. They are concerned. They worry that Bill C-18 does not have the tools to provide relief to smaller news outlets. After all, it was not the small independent news outlets that wanted this in the first place. It was the large media networks that lobbied for this to get done and that are now foaming at the mouth to get this legislation rammed through Parliament.

Members should not kid themselves. Google is not just afraid for its bottom line. It is a multi-billion dollar business and will absorb the costs associated with this legislation. Its real fear is about freedom of speech on the Internet. They may run worldwide organizations, but the Silicon Valley boys are still hackers at heart, living out of their mothers' basements playing Halo, sharing on Twitch and posting on Reddit. Google is concerned that the government is making it more difficult for Canadians to access quality information.

I also met with Amazon World Services in the summer, and we talked about a variety of issues related to this legislation. I can tell members that Google and Amazon do not just meet random opposition members from Saskatoon unless they have real concerns about where this country is going. It is Canadians who are the best judge of what content they want to consume, not some government bureaucrats.

We have seen Canadian content creators thrive in an open and competitive market, one being Hitesh Sharma, a Punjabi hip-hop artist from Saskatchewan who built up a large following on TikTok and later made it to the Junos. He did not need the CRTC to give him a path to fame.

It is very important that we allow our creators, whether they are influencers or media, to flourish against the top creators in the world. That is not to say we should not support our local media when we can, but we should recognize the talent we already have, all of whom have succeeded without the involvement of big government interference.

With Bill C-18, local Canadian content creators could be squeezed out of our newsfeeds and replaced with the CBC. I guess that is fine for the few people who tune into CBC on a regular basis, but for most people, especially younger people, the desire is for a free and open Internet where we can search for whatever we want, free of interference by government or anyone else. That is what Canadians want.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, I suspect there is widespread support in recognizing that tech giants, whether it is Google, YouTube or Facebook, which really dominates the social media industry, get billions of dollars in revenue every year, and a lot of their sourcing comes from news agencies that are finding things difficult. There is a sense of unfairness there. This legislation would ensure there is a higher sense of fairness. The creators and news agencies are reporting on the news, and their content is being utilized by these giants, which are not paying anything for it.

Do the member and the Conservative Party believe that Google, Facebook and other giant conglomerates have a responsibility to pay for some of the creative journalism we are seeing in our communities?

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, providing funding to all organizations big or small is a laudable goal, and it is something we need to work on, but that is not what I see here. What I see in this legislation is too much risk. The government would insert itself into this process at the risk of being able to essentially contaminate the well, as they say. There is too much ability here for the government, and frankly any future government, to manipulate things and coerce through very subtle means or very direct means. That is the concern I have. I do not think this is the right approach.

[René Villemure, Bloc, Trois-Rivières, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I can agree with my colleague on the fact that the CRTC is a stale, last-century institution that is not equipped to deal with today's reality. However, I do not share his obsession with CBC/Radio‑Canada.

That being said, there is currently an imbalance in the market between David and a few Goliaths. This imbalance contributes to cultural flattening by allowing one type of news to dominate. I would like to know whether my colleague recognizes the imbalance of power. Could he explain to me what he will do to mitigate the consequences of this imbalance, which is having an adverse effect on culture?

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, we have a wonderful thing in the free market, and we need to allow companies to flourish. I mentioned one example from Saskatoon, and there are many more.

We have a radio station in Saskatoon, 650 CKOM. John Gormley runs a show there, and he does a great job. He has managed to figure out how to use social media to his advantage. I am quite certain they make a great deal of money from their programs, and it is possible for this to be done.

Sure, there needs to be a way to share revenue, but as I said, the concerns here come back to control and the way the government has allowed its fingers to be in this process with an ability to promote or unpromote certain things based on the whims of the Government of Canada.

[Charlie Angus, NDP, Timmins—James Bay, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I certainly found what was said very entertaining. I do not like to go down the dark wells of conspiracy minds very often, but it was nice to see how the Conservatives look when they look internally.

The member talked about Elon Musk and what a great breath of fresh air he is. The guy has almost crashed one of the biggest platforms in the world in the space of two weeks.

What is so fresh about Elon Musk? Well, there is the rise of anti-Semitism. Jeez, that is a breath of fresh air. There is Vladimir Putin's troll armies against the people of Ukraine. What a breath of fresh air that is for backbench Conservatives. Then, of course, Elon Musk wants to jail the United States' most illustrious doctor for the work he did in preventing the pandemic. I bet the Conservatives just love that. What a breath of fresh air that is. If only we could go after medical science.

Then, on the other hand, we have the big, bad CBC running everything. I thought it was George Soros doing this. I thought it was Klaus Schwab. When the leader of the Conservative Party said he was going to go after cryptocurrency, replace the Bank of Canada and shut down the CBC, I did not know it was because of the conspiracy that the CBC controls everything.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Mr. Speaker, this reminds me of a very simple thing: dad jokes. If we hear a dad joke, one person likes it, but the next person does not even find it funny, which is my point here. We cannot allow one person or one group of people to control what we see on the Internet. We have to allow a broad cross-section. Some people will like one thing; some people will like another. Some things might be true; some things might not be. However, as soon as we try to arbitrate those things, we get ourselves into trouble.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I will begin my speech by saying that on entering the House of Commons earlier, I felt a twinge of sadness at seeing the bouquet of flowers placed on the desk of our departed colleague, the member for Winnipeg South Centre. Last week, I was lucky enough to have the privilege of shaking his hand after his very moving speech on the bill that he was sponsoring.

The bouquet of flowers placed on his desk today is a lovely tribute to him. I think that the thoughts of all members of the House, especially my colleagues in the Bloc Québécois, are with Mr. Carr's family, to whom we offer our deepest condolences.

We are now at third reading of Bill C‑18. Earlier, I was listening to my Conservative colleague answer questions after his speech, and I noted that the Conservatives, in good or bad faith, are lumping Bills C‑11 and C‑18 together. Perhaps it is a matter of opinion or belief, I am not sure. They are lumping them together using the same unfounded, fallacious and somewhat warped arguments. One claim in particular is that, through these bills, the government is going to be able to control the news, entertainment content, music content, and so on that Quebeckers and Canadians consume on the Internet.

Perhaps it is time people heard the truth. I am not saying that there is no need to discuss these issues, because they are concerning, but it should be done using facts, not just the spin coming from those who oppose regulating the companies that have been running the show online for too long already.

Let me summarize briefly. Since day one, Facebook, Twitter and Google, but especially Facebook and Google, of course, have been appropriating news articles and reports without compensating the authors, media outlets or journalists. For too many years, these digital giants have been instrumental in methodically dismantling our traditional media. They may have done so involuntarily, but because they are corporations whose sole purpose is to generate revenue, they can hardly be blamed for doing so by any means at their disposal.

That is why the time has come to set up a framework to govern these sectors, which can no longer develop in a healthy way for everyone involved. A legislative framework is a must. We need rules. Contrary to what some of our colleagues would like, it cannot be a wild west. Some advocate for a free market, free access, and no rules governing these web giants, but the impact on some people is major and, in some cases, devastating.

Web giants like Facebook and Google have appropriated advertising revenue from local advertisers. This revenue is often the bread and butter of regional media and small weekly papers in small rural communities. In fact, it may even be their only means of keeping the lights on, paying their staff and journalists and providing high-quality news. In short, it may be their only means of survival.

It is estimated that web giants appropriate, or essentially swipe, 80% of advertising revenue, to the detriment of our regional media. Those web giants have never been asked to pay anything. Their revenue has never been taxed. They are not held to account. Even though it took some time, I think that we need to commend the government for taking the initiative, even at this late stage, to legislate and put its foot down. Oddly enough, there is only one party in the House that opposed this initiative and stood by its point of view throughout the study of Bill C-10, which became C-11, and of Bill C-18, which is currently before us.

There are dozens of media outlets, dozens of small newspapers that closed their doors over the past few years because of this crisis. Since I took office as the member for Drummond and as the communications critic for my party, not a week has gone by that news media stakeholders have not expressed their concerns to me.

One weekly newspaper in a region represented by a colleague wanted to be reassured. I was asked where we in the Bloc Québécois stood and what we were doing. I was asked if they would get what was rightfully theirs and if we would create a more balanced market. That is what Bill C-18 does. This is not at all about controlling what people see on the Internet. We will refute those lies. I will do that a little later.

Let me digress for a moment to talk about newspapers. Everyone has noticed this. My children are puzzled by the thing that lands on our doorstep every Saturday. I renewed my subscription to a newspaper that is delivered every Saturday, and my kids ask me what it is. The media world has changed. Printed newspapers are rarely seen anymore. Until very recently, the Journal de Montréal was the only newspaper that still distributed a paper version seven days a week. Quebecor announced last week that it could no longer continue publishing print editions seven days a week beginning in 2023. It is going to stop delivering the paper version on Sundays. The entire industry is changing. News organizations keep us informed and up to date, but in order to keep doing that, they will need to have the best possible resources and take advantage of the technology that is becoming the primary means of transmitting information, whether we like it or not.

Quebec and Canadian news media moved very quickly in 2020 to ask the government and elected officials for regulations. At the time, the government had commissioned the report "Canada's Communications Future: Time to Act". No one remembers the real name. It has been referred to so often by its other name that it is now known as the Yale report.

It was an excellent working document that suggested that part or all royalties should contribute to the production of news. Then the COVID‑19 pandemic hit, exacerbating the difficulties facing news media, and that increased the urgency for and the pressure put on the government by these businesses to follow Australia's lead and put in place a code or legislation similar to what was enacted there. Paul Deegan, president and CEO of News Media Canada, said at the time that the negotiating framework with arbitration, inspired by the Australian approach, is the best solution to the news media crisis.

Initially, the Bloc Québécois proposed an idea that I still think is excellent. It was not what the industry wanted. It was not in keeping with the existing consensus within news media groups. We proposed taking a percentage of the web giants' revenues. The exact amount had not been determined, but around 2%, 3% or 4% of their revenues earned on Canadian soil would have been used to create a fund from which we could have generated royalties based on needs that we consider essential, such as protecting regional news companies, which are often the most affected by the arrival of web giants.

The industry preferred something inspired by the Australian model. I think that I speak for my 31 colleagues in the Bloc when I say that we are committed to representing the people who elected us. We will not go against the will of those we want to represent, so we went with what was proposed, namely legislation inspired by what was done in Australia.

Bill C‑18, the online news act, requires digital platform businesses, that is, digital news intermediaries, to negotiate agreements with news businesses. That is a pretty broad summary. From there, we had to determine which news businesses are eligible to negotiate, which created an interesting challenge. In clause 27 of the bill, eligibility for news businesses relies mostly on fiscal criteria, the same criteria used to determine eligibility for various journalism assistance programs.

All of this is reasonable, but there are some gaps.

News businesses eligible for compensation were originally required, and still are, to be designated as qualified Canadian journalism organizations, or QCJOs, under subsection 248(1) of the Income Tax Act. A non-Canadian company could also qualify if it meets certain criteria of a QCJO, namely, if it regularly employs two or more journalists in Canada, operates in Canada, actively produces news content, and is not significantly engaged in producing content that promotes the interests or reports on the activities of an organization.

That said, the bill also excludes magazines, companies that make specialized news content. For example, companies that publish automotive or sports magazines are not considered eligible under Bill C‑18.

The Bloc Québécois succeeded in getting what I felt was an essential amendment made to Bill C‑18. We want to protect news, but news evolves. The definitions of news and journalism have been watered down in recent years. There seems to be a lack of understanding, some difficulty distinguishing journalism from opinion pieces, columns and editorials. I felt it was very important to make that distinction.

In essence, what we want to protect is journalism, journalistic coverage, news, especially regional news, and weekly papers and small media outlets, which are vulnerable. These tend to be in the regions we represent that are more rural and located outside of major centres. Their reality is very different from that of big media outlets.

We felt it was important to have criteria relating to the quality of journalism, so we proposed an amendment after consulting with media organizations, such as the Quebec Press Council. We suggested adding the requirement that a news organization be a member of a recognized journalistic association or that it follow the code of ethics of a recognized journalistic association or that it have its own code of ethics that adheres to basic journalistic principles.

This is where the basic criteria and the principles of journalism need to be defined. We must not be too precise in doing so, because trying to be too precise can sometimes leave the door open to interpretation, which we do not want to see in this kind of legislation.

The three basic principles of journalism are as follows. The first is independence, which means avoiding conflicts of interest, ideological influences and commercial policies. The second is rigour, which refers to the accuracy of information, impartiality and the presentation of balanced and complete information. The third is fairness, which refers to respect for privacy and dignity, the absence of discrimination, openness to the right of reply and prompt correction of errors. These are the three basic criteria for journalism.

In the discussions on our amendment, some people raised certain fears. People wondered what would happen if, for example, a particular media outlet expressed an opinion that was not in line with what the government wanted to hear.

Once again, I want to come back to the difference between journalism produced in a newsroom that applies these fundamental criteria from the outset and opinion journalism, such as columns and editorials, that are based on opinion, a bias or a biased or different point of view. They certainly do not constitute impartial news coverage or information.

That gave rise to some interesting discussions both in society and in the journalism community, which is an ever-evolving environment.

It was very important for us that this amendment be included in Bill C-18. It was important that these rigorous criteria, namely the basic principles of journalism, be included in the eligibility criteria for companies that can benefit from the bill's legislative framework.

Bill C‑18 does not solve all the problems. I think everyone knows that. There are still major challenges facing news organizations, as is also the case for the cultural industry and any business working in an industry affected by web giants like GAFAM. That basically means every business because these days pretty much everyone is affected by the web giants.

What will have to be done to again protect regional news media? The government will have to continue supporting them and maintaining its programs.

Clearly, this is not an easy task, and this bill will not suddenly and magically address all the problems the industry has been grappling with over the past 25 years. The sector still needs to be given a huge amount of financial support through existing programs, which will have to be enhanced, tweaked and made permanent. That remains to be done.

What also remains to be done is to see what will happen to specialty magazines, such as consumer, automotive or sports publications. We will have to see how these magazines, which publish content shared by digital intermediaries, will fare in the digital world. We will have to watch them and possibly support them.

We will have to ensure that we stop believing all the lies and disinformation and that at some point we use common sense. We will have to stop believing everything we hear.

This is not a dictatorship or a banana republic, despite what we may think from time to time when we see some of the programs managed by the government. I do not have an example. If I gave examples, I would be here all night.

No one is going to start controlling what people can and cannot watch online. When we talk about giving our media, our companies, a place, that simply means rebalancing a market that clearly disadvantages our local businesses. Hundreds of our news businesses and media outlets have shut down. Billions of dollars in advertising revenue for those companies have been lost.

That is what this legislation seeks to correct. In that sense, it is very good. This is not going to penalize Google and Facebook. Believe me, they are not short on money.

The other lie or disinformation—whatever we call it—is that the lion's share will go back to the major industry players, while the little guy will be left behind. There is no set amount. Nowhere does it say that $500 million will be shared and that the bigger companies will take the largest share, with nothing being left for the smaller companies. It does not work like that.

Should this not work, there will be a negotiation process with arbitration. That model seems equitable for both smaller and major players. What is more, if the small players wish, they can come together and stand united to have more weight in the negotiation. I think everything is quite clear, that everything is in place to give the smaller players as much of a chance to get ahead as the major players.

I will conclude on the issue of CBC/Radio-Canada. I heard my Conservative colleague mention it earlier. It is a good question. Do we allow CBC/Radio-Canada to have the same negotiation rights and earn revenue from sharing their content on digital intermediaries or not, given that CBC/Radio-Canada is publicly funded? The principle here is not how the CBC is funded. The issue is whether those who produce content shared through digital intermediaries should be paid for it. The answer is yes.

I am open to the idea of having another debate on funding for CBC. I am sure there will be some good suggestions.

However, for now, this is how Bill C‑18 is structured. It is not a perfect bill, but it is a good one. It is a good starting point, and we will support it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Mr. Speaker, at the beginning of the member's speech, he member made reference to Jim Carr. It did mean a great deal to Jim when the member and one of his colleagues walked over to shake his hand afterward, which I thought was a classy thing to do.

I wonder if the member could provide some additional thoughts on this. Many different other types of media outlets do not get the same sort of reference to which the member mentioned, magazines and so forth. They could be automotive industry or sport magazines. There are a number of them.

The CRTC would be given a fairly significant responsibility. The ultimate goal is to ensure that we have an independent and free media that is far-reaching. Could the member provide further thoughts on that?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Winnipeg North for his comments.

I reminisce about the handshake my colleague from Rivière-des-Mille-Îles and I shared with the member for Winnipeg South Centre. It was a poignant moment. I did not realize things would happen so fast after that, and I thank my colleague for his kind words.

In answer to his question about publications left stranded by Bill C‑18, I think we will have to come back to that and consider publications and magazines with specialized content that have also been taken over by digital intermediaries, by web giants. We need to have a thoughtful conversation about those types of media too.

At this point time, I think it was urgent to deal with news media. We really had to take action to protect news content creators. I think this is the first step, but it paves the way for us to keep working on this, which is what I think we need to do.

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

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleague from Drummond for his great work. The committee members worked really well together.

We made a number of changes to Bill C-18. Which of the amendments that were made to improve Bill C-18 does my colleague think is the most important?

I think that the original bill was good and that the bill now before the House is much better. I know that the member also helped a lot with that.

In his view, which of the amendments that were adopted is the most important?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby for his comments and also for being such a pleasure to work with. We enjoy ourselves, but we also work efficiently. I think he too has a strong desire to improve the bills that are brought before us. That was certainly true of Bill C-18.

Several very important amendments were made to this bill, which is much better today than it was in April, when it was introduced in the House. Obviously, I have a soft spot for the amendment I proposed to demand a certain quality of journalism by imposing, as part of the eligibility criteria, a code of ethics that must be followed, with the basic principles of journalism.

My colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby also proposed some very significant amendments on which we were in complete agreement, particularly on the recognition of community media and the importance of indigenous media in Bill C-18. Some very important progress has been made.

Now, how will this work out in practice? I look forward to seeing how the businesses in question will benefit. However, one thing is certain. The amendments have considerably improved the bill.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the committee sat for months on this bill. There is one discrepancy that I want answered before this comes out, and nobody knows the answer.

The Canadian Heritage department officials say that $150 million will go to media in Canada through Meta, Google and so on. The PBO says that it is $329 million. Which is the right? Is it the Canadian Heritage estimate or the PBO estimate that has it at $329 million, 75% going to the big conglomerates like the CBC, Rogers and Bell? Which is the right number, the Department of Canadian Heritage or the PBO?

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Saskatoon—Grasswood for his comment, which was more of a comment ending with a question.

I will not fall into the trap. I am not going to do what the Minister of National Revenue did last week and take a swipe at the Parliamentary Budget Officer. I think that, for numbers, I would place more trust in the Parliamentary Budget Officer, despite the great respect that I have for the officials of the Department of Canadian Heritage.

I thank my colleague for his question.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his excellent intervention.

I would like to say that, this weekend, I was pro-gas. My Conservative colleagues are shocked, but I am referring to Pro‑Gaz R‑N Abitibi—Témiscamingue and the Studio rythme et danse team. The Pro-Gaz team won the peewee hockey tournament hosted by the Conquérants de La Sarre.

I wish our local media had been there to report on this event. I would have loved to hear a report about our goalie, Alexy, made a spectacular save in the semi-finals; how the leadership of players like Jules and Eliot carried the team all week long; how players like Alex and Samuel followed the game plan to the letter and excelled on defence; how the puck clung to Skyler's stick like a magnet; how Nathan is an all-around player; how our forwards put the pressure on and contributed to the win; Frederique and all this—

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

I hope the member has a good question.

[Sébastien Lemire, Bloc, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

—that should appear in our local media, and more importantly, how we can ensure that we hear about the achievements of our players, like Anthony, who was recognized as the top forward of the tournament.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Speaker, you can see how hard it is to rein in our young colleagues' enthusiasm.

I thank him for his impromptu member's statement and I agree wholeheartedly. That is precisely the purpose of Bill C‑18, specifically, to ensure that these news stories, which make local residents proud of what is happening in their communities, can continue to receive the prominence they deserve and have space to evolve in our increasingly digital world.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

The hon. member for Mégantic—L'Érable on a point of order.

[Luc Berthold, Conservative, Mégantic—L'Érable, QC]

Mr. Speaker, pursuant to Standing Order 43(2)(a), I would like to inform the House that the remaining Conservative caucus speaking times are hereby divided in two.

[The Deputy Speaker, Chris d'Entremont]

Resuming debate, the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby.

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

Mr. Speaker, I understand I will be having to split my time before and after question period.

I wanted to start off with a tribute to Jim Carr. We have this tradition in place that we refer to members of Parliament by their riding names, like the member of Parliament for Winnipeg South Centre. When they pass away, as Jim did, and we received the sad notice of that yesterday, we can use their real names as opposed to their riding names. It is a sad moment, and we have been through this over the last few years with a number of members of Parliament.

With Jim, it was particularly saddening, because tomorrow we would have been paying tribute to him in the House of Commons with a round of speeches. We were aware that we needed to do that, and I think all 337 of us would have loved to have had Jim hear those words of praise for him. We will now be doing that in his absence and in his memory.

It is important to note that his popularity was such that within the NDP caucus a number of members of Parliament wanted to rise to speak. The tradition is one speaker from each party. We had difficulty determining that in our caucus, because people respected Jim so much. He was a gentleman. He was very eloquent. He was passionate about Canada. He will be sorely missed, and I want to pass on my condolences to his family. As we pay tribute to him informally through the course of our work today, having had to suspend the House yesterday, I know that through the course of the week and tomorrow, we will be paying more formal tributes to him. He will be missed.

The object of the debate for the next few minutes is Bill C-18.

My first letter as Canadian heritage critic to the Canadian heritage minister right after the election in 2021 was to push the government to bring immediately to bear a bill that would force big tech to start making its contributions to Canadian society.

As members know, over the past few years we have seen a hoovering up of ad revenues, which have decimated our community news, whether we are talking about radio stations or newspapers, right across the country. My community of New Westminster Burnaby has lost two publications: the New Westminster News Leader and the Burnaby News Leader. We continue to have Burnaby Now and the Royal City Record. We also have new online publishers and two community online publications that do a terrific job: the Burnaby Beacon and the New West Anchor.

The reality is that the impact has been felt right across the country. It has decimated local news and it has meant fewer journalists. What has been worrisome about this is that at the same time we have seen a parallel rise, because big tech has not taken any sort of responsibility for the rise in hate, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, homophobia and transphobia. These two trends are connected.

On the one hand, there is pressure on local community media that brings us together in the community and ensures that people understand that even if their neighbours are different, they all share the same values and goals in the community. Second, there is what I would not even say is big tech's reluctance to curb hate. What it has actually done is promoted it, because extremism, hate and disinformation help to fuel revenues for it. It has been proven many times that the algorithms big tech uses help to foster hate and conflict in the community. Big tech profits from that. The increase in so-called “engagement” leads to more revenues for them.

The importance of bringing forward a bill like Bill C-18 to force big tech to start to provide that support for local community journalism is absolutely fundamental.

That is why the NDP, right after the election, told the government it had to bring forward this legislation on the Australian model. Although it has many weaknesses, which I will perhaps address in the second half of my speech, the Australian model is also a good one, because it stared down big tech. The Australians decided that even though big tech was threatening to withdraw, they were going to push companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to take responsibility and provide funding for journalism. It paid off.

Therefore, we pushed the government, and it introduced Bill C-18, which represents a significant step forward in forcing big tech to provide supports for local journalism and journalism right across this country.

The reality is that when Bill C-18 was tabled, it was a bill that we supported being brought to committee, but at committee we wanted to improve the bill. There was much that was missing in the bill regarding transparency, supporting local community press and journalism, supporting non-profit journalism, and allowing indigenous news outlets to have a role. There was radio silence regarding indigenous news outlets.

We had to fight to get all those things into the bill. We brought it to committee, and I am pleased to announce today that 16 NDP amendments were adopted by the committee working together to ensure just that, a better Bill C-18, one that we can be proud of. It includes, in a comprehensive way, indigenous journalism and indigenous news outlets. It ensures community supports. It ensures that the community radio and non-profit outlets can benefit, and it ensures transparency. Therefore, I am pleased to say that because of the NDP's work, and working with committee members from all parties, Bill C-18 is better than ever, and I am proud to support it in the House of Commons.

I look forward to the second half of my speech after QP.

The House resumed consideration of the motion that Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada, be read the third time and passed.

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

Mr. Speaker, I just want to conclude my remarks by thanking members of the committee. The 16 amendments from the NDP that were adopted have improved Bill C-18 immeasurably, and we have a much better bill coming into the House.

I look forward to questions and comments from my colleagues.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I appreciated the comments prior to question period that were made by the New Democratic House leader. With respect to the Facebook, YouTube and Google search engines, they have been a major benefactor of journalism here in Canada, yet the creators, the journalists and so forth of a lot of the things that appear in social media do not get the credit and, in particular, the compensation. What this bill would do, in good part, is ensure through the CRTC that there would be an appropriate compensation of sorts. I am a bit surprised that the Conservative Party would not support that and I do not quite understand why.

I wonder if the member has some thoughts in regard to the importance of passing this particular piece of legislation and if he wants to provide commentary as to why the Conservatives would not support this.

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

Madam Speaker, the member for Winnipeg North is asking me to imagine what it is like to be in the mind of a Conservative and I have great difficulty in doing that.

I found a bit of a muddle from the Conservative side, and we have seen this before in other legislation. On the one hand, Alberta community newspapers and Saskatchewan community newspapers stepped up. These are newspapers that basically represent nearly half of the Conservative caucus. Their representatives came to committee and said that Bill C-18 has to be adopted, but to improve the aspects from journalism so that more journalists and more Canadian newspapers can benefit from this.

Conservatives should have taken their marching orders from their constituents, including the local community newspapers across Alberta and Saskatchewan who said that Bill C-18 was needed but improvement needed to be brought. The NDP brought forward that improvement. The NDP brought forward an amendment that would allow for a two-person operation, even if they are owners and operators of that business, to access the money that would come from big tech and those negotiations. What did the Conservatives do? They voted against the NDP amendment.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, later today, I certainly will have the opportunity to, in great detail, let the members of this House and all Canadians understand why the Conservatives voted against the measures in this bill.

One of the more controversial discussions was about the fact that we wanted this to benefit local news media outlets, many of whom have one person who is the owner-operator and the journalist. Although we brought amendments to include them at committee, the NDP and the Liberal members voted against that. Why did they want to exclude ethnic media and those smaller media outlets in rural communities that only have one journalist?

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

Madam Speaker, that is exactly my point. Conservatives voted against the NDP amendment that opened it up for owner-operators. That is what the community newspapers in Alberta and Saskatchewan and across the country asked for: owner-operators and part-time journalists who are working.

The NDP amendment opens it up so that if a couple owns and operates a community newspaper, they would now qualify. If two part-time journalists are employed by that newspaper or that community publication, they would now qualify, even at a part-time level. Even if we are talking about one and a half journalists in terms of full-time equivalents or even one journalist in a full-time equivalent, the publications would now qualify.

That is why I find it passing strange the NDP amendment that was so successful and has been praised by a wide variety of groups was opposed by only one party, the Conservative Party.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, again, I thank my colleague from New Westminster—Burnaby. As I said earlier, it is a pleasure to work with him at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

It is true that the NDP proposed many amendments and spoke for labour representatives, such as representatives from Unifor, who proposed many amendments that were championed by my colleague from the NDP. Several of these amendments were good ones, and some were adopted.

I would like to ask my colleague if there are any amendments he was disappointed did not get adopted. Would any of the amendments that did not get adopted have greatly improved the bill, in his opinion?

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

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from Drummond for his work. The amendments that were adopted expanded the scope so it would apply to all indigenous communities and to indigenous journalists. Bill C‑18 now allows indigenous publications and indigenous journalists to receive funding. That is a big improvement. Transparency and accountability are in the bill now, thanks to the NDP's amendments. The member for Drummond also proposed some very valuable amendments.

As far as transparency is concerned, the most important amendment is the one that ensures that owners who operate a small publication somewhere in Saskatchewan or in Alberta are now eligible even if those operators are also journalists. Even if they work part time, they are eligible. Every party around the table voted in favour of that amendment. The only party that voted against it was the Conservative Party.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Madam Speaker, has the member ever shared a link to a news story on Facebook or Twitter? If he has, why should Facebook have to pay the Toronto Star, or wherever the link was from, because the member shared it?

Has he ever shared a link on Twitter or Facebook? Should Facebook or Twitter have to pay a fee to the newspaper whose link he shared?

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

Madam Speaker, I invite Conservative members to read the bill. It is always very important to read the bill before coming into the House.

What Bill C-18 does is provide an obligatory process of negotiation. Big tech has been vacuuming up money from communities right across the country, including Pembroke, Burnaby, New Westminster and communities across the length and breadth of this land. Big tech is now obliged, as it is in Australia, to fund local journalists and local publications. Big tech has benefited enormously from the journalism that has been done in communities across this country. It is now obliged to pay its fair share, because there is an obligatory negotiation process.

I am particularly proud of the NDP amendment that puts in a strict timeline, so big tech cannot play around. It cannot skate around in circles. It is obliged to negotiate fairly and fund local journalism. I am proud of the NDP amendments that were adopted. I am proud of the committee members for working together.

Bill C-18 is a bill that will benefit all Canadians, including indigenous people.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to speak to Bill C-18, in part because there has been so much misinformation and disinformation being spread by the government, including the minister and the NDP, about the bill.

First, let us talk about the situation that brought us the need for the bill.

Across Canada, local small media organizations have been disappearing. Many of them have gone out of business, in the hundreds. Even before the pandemic they were in disarray. The idea behind the bill was to try to help these local small media organizations.

When we look at clause 4 of Bill C-18, which I will read because it is important and it is the only clause I voted for, it states:

The purpose of this Act is to regulate digital news intermediaries with a view to enhancing fairness in the Canadian digital news marketplace and contributing to its sustainability, including the sustainability of independent local news businesses.

That is the intent of the bill, and I am very much in favour of that. A lot of the local media outlets, like the ones in Sarnia—Lambton, are going out of business. Where else are we going to get the local news content that we all want to have?

The idea was to somehow create a fund that would then be shared among local media outlets. The problem started there, because then the idea was to make tech giants, the digital network intermediaries like Facebook, also known as Meta, and Google pay every time somebody shared a news link.

The Supreme Court in 2011 ruled that there was no value in sharing a link. In fact, the whole purpose of the Internet is the freedom to share information that is of interest to us and others and there should not be a value put on it. As soon as we start to put a value on it, for example, that we will only charge a value and give to the news intermediaries, it is a very short step to say that everybody who shares that is sharing something of value and why should it not happen with all of them. That was the problematic premise of the bill, which just got worse. The definitions with respect to who is included or excluded are being made by the government.

Freedom of the media is a fundamental principle in Canada. That means we cannot have the government determine who is in and who is out, who can participate in this and who cannot, yet that is exactly what has happened in Bill C-18.

To make it worse, there are so many vague definitions in the bill, which have been criticized by critics, people who are copyright experts and many others. They have said that a lot of these things will need to be clarified. The government's response was not to worry, that they should trust it because it would define them in regulations, with no parliamentary oversight. That is a very dangerous situation.

The reality is that Canadians do not trust the government. Polls of late show that only 22% of Canadians have trust in government or politicians. That is four out of five who do not trust the government to do what is right, and I am in the four out of five. There was no willingness to take amendments that would have clarified the definitions and put some of these things down, with the oversight of the different parties at committee. That was the first thing.

Then the Parliamentary Budget Officer did a study that said that with the money that Facebook and Google would be giving and the approximate volume of the different links that would be shared, there would be a certain pot of money to be shared. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said it was $350 million and the department officials said it was more like $150 million. Therefore, it is somewhere between $150 million and $350 million.

However, the most interesting finding was that the Parliamentary Budget Officer said that 75% of the money would go to Bell Media, Telus and the CBC. The whole point of this bill is to try to help the local small media outlets. If Bell, Telus and the CBC walk off with the lion's share, that leaves very little money left to share among the little ones.

Why should we be giving any more money to the CBC? The government already gives billions of dollars to the CBC. In fact, it just figured out that the CBC should not have to go looking for advertising money and, really, should be publicly funded for another $400 million.

There is CBC, which is likely to get the lion's share, already being funded and now taking away from the very individuals we want to benefit in this bill. It makes absolutely no sense.

In terms of trying to keep the government from excluding the voices it does not want to hear, we tried to bring some clarity to the definitions. At the beginning, it said there needed to be at least two journalists. Other than being recognized in the Income Tax Act, there was not a lot of clarity brought. Some of the amendments were brought to keep out foreign interference, but there were many ethnic and smaller outlets that were mom-and-pop shops, where maybe the owner was the blogger.

We were very happy to support that concept, but unfortunately it was tangled in with a bunch of things we could not support.

The government has the ability to fix that. It has since excluded any organization that does not have more than two journalists, and I think that is a problem.

The other thing is that the Governor in Council will get to decide everything, and then the CRTC, once it has decided who is eligible to play in the game, is going to provide the oversight for this process. When the CRTC officials came to committee, I asked if they had a lot of experience with regulating oversight of digital news intermediaries. They fully confessed that no, they have no experience in that area. It is ridiculous for the government to want to decide who can win and lose and play in the game and then put the CRTC, which already said it does not know anything about managing this, in charge. This is just a recipe for disaster.

Facebook, Meta and Google have been very clear that they want to help small media outlets in this country and would be very happy to donate that $350-million pot and let a consortium of small news media outlets decide among themselves how best to split it up so that there is sustainability. There needs to be fairness.

We introduced amendments at committee to include indigenous voices. I think there are other ethnic voices in our country that have been excluded by the definitions, but if we took the money and had a panel that was looking at the local small media outlets, it could be fair in making sure there was an equitable dispersion.

Instead, Bell Media, which already shut down a whole bunch of small media outlets, is going to get part of that, 75% of it. What do we think giving it more money is going to do? It is going to continue to shut down small media outlets, and it is not going to achieve the purpose of the bill.

There were concerns expressed after Australia implemented a similar legislative model. Facebook at that time threatened to shut down content. It said it did not want to participate in this. It did not want the government regulating the Internet and regulating free speech. There was a shutdown, and then there was a renegotiation and changes were made.

When we recommended that those changes be brought to the bill and that we could learn from what was problematic in the Australian experience, we learned that it was about this phrase “undue preference”, which meant it was going to be illegal in Bill C-18 for those platforms to do what they do, which is using algorithms to upvote and downvote content. They try to keep hate speech down and things that are misinformation down, and they try to upvote things that people are interested in, things that are popular, so they need to be allowed to do that.

That was another problem we saw with this bill.

Then there are the privacy concerns of sharing information. The CRTC has a broad ability to ask people for any information it needs in order to verify that they are eligible, and then there are going to be arbitrators involved, who are not necessarily bound by the same codes of confidentiality. I have a privacy concern about that.

When it comes right down to it, we did everything we could to recommend that the government abandon this bill and instead work with the big tech giants to get a fund, get it together and divide it up among the local media outlets, so that the people who really need it will get that help.

However, here we are, in the middle of the Christmas season. Love did come down at Christmas, and not just for everyone in general but for me specifically. I am very happy to announce that I got married and so, with that, I wish everybody a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

I congratulate the hon. member on her wedding.

Questions and comments, the hon. parliamentary secretary to the government House leader.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, to add to your comment, I congratulate the member on her marriage. I wish her many years of wonderfulness.

The issue before us today is about the reality that the Conservatives do not believe, as they are showing in their actions, that the tech giants, from Google and search engines to social media giants like Facebook, should have to pay into any sort of pool that would enable fairer compensation for creators here in Canada. This issue is having a devastating impact on journalism, and the member even made reference to it closing down.

Does the Conservative Party not recognize that the message it is sending to these giants is that they do not need to make changes? The Conservatives might say there is a need for changes, but when it comes down to voting, they are going to be voting against this legislation. They might have some issues with it, but at least it would enable a fairer playing field for our journalists.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, unfortunately, no, I do not believe the bill would do what its purpose intends.

Let us be clear: Facebook, Meta and Google have publicly said they are willing to donate funds that could be split up among smaller local news media. That would involve no government bureaucracy. It would mean the government is not picking who can be in and out. There would be nobody saying something is a violation of freedom of the press or freedom of the Internet. That could still happen, and my recommendation to the government is that it ought to happen.

That being said, I certainly do not think Bill C-18 in its current form would do anything more than give the nests of CBC, Bell and Rogers more money.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Madam Speaker, I, in turn, congratulate our colleague from Sarnia—Lambton for Saturday's happy occasion. I wish her many years of wedded bliss.

I heard my colleague express some concerns about the eligibility of news businesses. I just want to distinguish between Bill C‑21, which we have also been hearing a lot about, and Bill C‑18. Unlike the first bill, in Bill C‑18, the government did not include a list of businesses that are excluded or included.

On the contrary, the bill has a list of criteria that businesses must meet to be eligible. This clause was improved by an amendment that requires eligible businesses to also follow a code of ethics based on fundamental principles of the journalism profession.

I want to know if my colleague, who voted against this amendment with her Conservative colleagues, believes that this amendment actually guarantees that eligible businesses will be serious, rigorous news businesses. I would like to hear what she has to say about that.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, I absolutely agree with the idea that organizations must have a code of conduct. However, I think with this amendment, the problem was with students and other individuals who do not follow the same rules. I moved a subamendment, but it was defeated. I think there is a bit of a problem there.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, I hope members will humour me so I can take this opportunity to wish my daughter Ella a very happy 18th birthday.

In addition to that, I would like to congratulate my friend from Sarnia—Lambton on her recent marriage.

On the topic before us, my local newspaper reached out to me very early on in this process and expressed its support for this concept, because it believes, as many Canadians do, that the enterprises that create content should be compensated when that content is syndicated.

Is this not a worthy goal? I would ask my friend from Sarnia—Lambton why so many of the amendments the Conservatives brought forward seemed to side with the web giants like Meta and Facebook.

[Marilyn Gladu, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Madam Speaker, what is clear is that we want to keep the Internet free and we do not want the government choosing what needs to be done there. To do that, the best thing to do is get rid of Bill C-18 and allow the tech giants to fund something that small media outlets could themselves divide.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Madam Speaker, right off the top, I want to state the Conservatives agree that Meta, Facebook and Google should pay. I keep hearing the Liberals, NDP and Bloc say that the Conservatives do not believe that. We do. I will talk about it in my speech, because we do believe that Meta and Google should pay. As for what they are going to pay, let us find out, because there is a big difference between what the government thinks publishers are going to get and what the PBO thinks is going to be available.

Bill C-18 came out of committee just last Friday, and this week I think we are going to see its quick passage. I really enjoyed the intent of the bill when it came out. When it was first introduced over a year ago, I loved it. It was all about helping local media. I was part of that media back in Saskatoon for years on the television side. However, Bill C-18 was about local newspapers then. That was the objective of Bill C-18 when it was first introduced over a year ago.

Our Conservative team then invited Saskatchewan and Alberta newspaper associations to testify at committee. We need Meta, Facebook and Google to pay for news. I have stated that. However, what we heard from Steve Nixon, executive director of the Saskatchewan Weekly Newspapers Association, was that the bill needed to include one-person operations to really make an impact on saving the news industry in Saskatchewan. Steve Nixon mentioned in committee that only four or five operations are going to be eligible in Saskatchewan. Through amendments, those with one and a half people and over will get money from Meta and Google. We wanted it at one, but we did not get that in committee.

Dennis Merrell of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association said that only 50% of Alberta weeklies would qualify for money under Bill C-18. There are one-person newsrooms in Alberta, but they do not count. They would get no money out of this bill. Two people are needed to qualify.

The bill had all the right intent to preserve rural reporting of news, yet we did not get there. Unfortunately, the bill was hijacked early with the lobbying of the CBC, Bell Media and Rogers. They found a way to convince the Liberal government that they needed more money.

Many already made deals with Meta and Google before we even started in committee. This was kind of funny, because Colin McKay, representing Google, came to committee and admitted it already had 150 publishers signed up. Those with the ability to make the deals beforehand have made the deals. They saw what happened in Australia, so they made deals before the bill was even introduced, and they get the first cut of the money.

How much did these agreements go for? We do not know and probably will never know. Torstar, The Globe and Mail, National Post, Le Devoir and others have made one-off agreements with the tech giants. The little guys, whom I feel for, are left to defend for themselves. They may have to join others to negotiate. If not, they are done and will close.

We agree with Kevin Desjardins, president of Canadian Association of Broadcasters, who said there will be winners and losers with Bill C-18. It did not have to be this way, but I would say before we got started on this bill, it was all decided beforehand.

I believe, as the Conservatives believe, that the CBC should not be involved at all in Bill C-18. The CBC is already funded by the taxpayers of this country to the tune of $1.2 billion, yet the government, in the fall economic update, gave it another $42 million, with $21 million to deal with this year and another free $21 million to deal with next year.

Let us level the playing field. How do we do that when the public broadcaster already gets $1.2 billion and an additional $42 million? We can say we are going to level the playing field, but tell that to rural Manitoba. Tell that to rural Saskatchewan, Alberta or even Ontario, where they are trying every day to make payrolls.

The Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that the public and private broadcasters would get $248 million of the $329 million paid out annually through this bill. It is possible that the CBC will be the single biggest winner. Why should that happen? As I said earlier, it gets more than enough funding through the taxpayers of this country.

An interesting note is that heritage department officials came up last week with the number that they thought Meta and Google would pay newspapers and those involved in Bill C-18. Their number was $150 million, which kind of surprised me a bit because the Parliamentary Budget Officer, a long time ago, said there was going to be a pot of $329 million. However, 75% of the $329 million will go to CBC, Rogers and Bell. The little guys will fight over the rest.

Unfortunately, these local newspapers are struggling now, and the national players have already lined up and made their agreements with Meta and Google. With the one-horse show we are seeing in rural Canada, too bad for local newspapers. They thought they were going to get help in Bill C-18 because the Liberals talked about it a year ago, saying this is a bill for newspapers. However, it turned out to be anything but.

Instead of looking through the classifieds, we know that everyone goes to social media. People sell their furniture on Facebook Marketplace. Companies put jobs on LinkedIn. Service classifieds go to sites like Craigslist. It has all changed; we see it. Papers have always made their money through the classifieds, but that no longer happens.

Then there is the concern about subscriptions. They are getting cancelled because everyone wants free stuff and they are getting it for free online right now with Facebook, Google and so on.

Finally, there is advertising. The Liberal Party of Canada spent $4 million on Facebook. It could have helped rural Canadian newspapers instead of spending that on Meta last year. The federal government spends a lot of money on Facebook, Google and so on.

Local papers used to be a primary target for government advertising and information about government programs. Years ago, they got some advertising and it helped them a lot. However, they got very little this time. When the COVID-19 Emergency Response Act was passed by the government, it gave most of the money to the big boys, such as Facebook, Google and so on. Much of the traffic does not go to the local newspapers now.

We have heard from industry on more than one occasion, both large and small outlets, that the government simply does not advertise as it used to. It does not make its way down to the local newspapers or outlets in any meaningful way. Instead, the government has turned more and more to online advertising on social media.

I heard about the issue when the government was advertising the COVID relief programs. Most of the money went to the big tech conglomerates, which is a bad outcome for local news. Many papers across this country have been forced to close up, leaving a void in their communities.

I am especially worried about the archives when a newspaper closes in a community. Where do the archives of that newspaper go? We should all be concerned about Canadian heritage. When a newspaper closes its doors, so does the history of a community. It is not replaced by Facebook and it is not replaced by Google. That should concern everybody in this country.

We heard testimony from department officials that funding is only afforded to the outlets with one and a half journalists or more. Many of these outlets will be left behind to perish. This is tough because we had a newspaper in Davidson, Saskatchewan, that sold for one dollar. It is still operating. Two years ago, it sold for one dollar and it is still producing local news in the Davidson area today. I feel that many of the papers in rural Canada will sell for one dollar, but the problem is that instead of selling, they are going to close their doors for good.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, listening to the member or, in particular, the Conservative member who spoke prior to him, one gets the impression that the Conservatives have an answer.

Instead of voting in favour of the legislation or instead of recognizing that the CRTC has an incredible history of serving Canadians and ensuring there is Canadian content and a much higher sense of fairness overall, the Conservative Party's approach seems to be not to worry. We should have trust and confidence in Facebook and in Google search, and they will come up with agreements with the different community media outlets. I do not have that trust and confidence that the member seems to have or the Conservative Party seems to have.

Does the member not recognize that it is only the Conservative Party inside this chamber that seems to have that trust? Could it be that its trust might be misplaced?

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Madam Speaker, the parliamentary secretary should know that the CRTC has never regulated newspapers in this country. It has only dealt with television and radio. Now we are going to ask an agency to look after newspapers. The CRTC will decide who is going to win and who is going to lose. Ian Scott, the chairman, is leaving next month, so there will be a new five-year appointment coming up.

Is the CRTC capable today of regulating? We all know the answer already. It has difficulty in broadcasting. Can it afford to make the same mistakes that it made with broadcasting that I think it will make in the newspaper sector in which it has no background at all?

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech on this important issue, Bill C‑18.

I sense that he is concerned about the issue of local and regional media, and I share that concern. I have had the opportunity to talk to people in the media back home who have told me to do something, but we clearly continue to have concerns about Bill C‑18.

Nevertheless, should we not help our local media by moving forward with Bill C‑18 and making sure that our small media outlets are really covered by this plan? The other option is to do nothing at all, slow down Bill C‑18 and throw the door wide open to the libertarian model embraced by GAFAM and their ilk. Should we not make sure they are fully covered by the bill?

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Madam Speaker, I am concerned. I said that right off the top. When Bill C-18 was introduced over a year ago, the bill was designed to help local newspapers in this country. Now we find out when we peel back the onion that public broadcaster CBC, Rogers and Bell, are going to get 75% of the funding from Meta and Google. Why are they at the trough?

We dealt with Bill C-10 and Bill C-11 before, which pertained to those industries. Bill C-18 was designed for newspapers, as we have found out with the department saying only $150 million will be raised. Is it $150 million, or what the PBO said is a bigger pot of $239 million?

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Madam Speaker, I worked very closely with my colleague at the heritage committee in the last Parliament.

I know the member. I know he believes strongly in Canadian media. I know he fights for Canadian media. However, I do have concerns with some of the messaging that we are seeing from the Conservative Party. During debate on Bill C-10, as an example, I heard one of his colleagues say that every single time he gets to send out an email to his constituents about Bill C-10, he makes about $1,600.

My worry is whether the Conservative Party is taking this opportunity to fundraise or taking this opportunity to misinform Canadians for their own benefit, rather than actually trying to find productive solutions to fixing some of the problems that our media faces in this country.

[Kevin Waugh, Conservative, Saskatoon—Grasswood, SK]

Madam Speaker, a number of us in the House support local newspapers in this country. I would say 250 out of the 337 of us now, since yesterday, sponsor local newspapers with ads.

You are shaking your head, Madam Speaker. Are you are not one who puts an ad in a newspaper? I am sure the member for Edmonton Strathcona is one of them, because she knows the importance of local media, especially around Edmonton.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The member is out of time, but I was actually referring to the fact that we lost a colleague yesterday.

Resuming debate, the hon. member for Edmonton Manning.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Madam Speaker, 50 years ago there were metal boxes on city street corners where, for 25¢, one could buy a newspaper. Each box had a window showing the top half of the front page if it was a broadsheet and the whole page if it was a tabloid. If one wanted to read anything more, one had to put a quarter in the box and remove a copy of the paper. In our cities, it was common to find three or four such boxes for competing newspapers on the same corners of the downtown of any city. Those newspaper boxes are, for the most part, long gone as the nature of the news business has changed.

Home delivery, one of the mainstays of the newspaper industry, has declined drastically. These days, most people get their news online. The news industry has changed in how news is gathered and changed in how it is delivered to consumers. Gone are the days where most people subscribe to home delivery for the morning and the afternoon.

For those in the news media, the challenge has always been to provide a public service while ensuring sufficient revenue to continue their function. Canadian journalists and publishers have always risen to that challenge.

This is not the first time technology has upended the news industry. As television became popular in the 1950s, many feared the end of print publication or journalism. Newspapers survived the challenge posed by this new medium by concentrating on in-depth reporting, which television, with its constraints, could not do. Quality journalism was still possible back then.

One could say that Google and other search engines function today as the newspapers did in the 1970s. They show the headlines but not the whole story. They provide a link for people to click on. Facebook, the other online giant the Liberals seem to be most concerned about, does the same thing. Providing a link that allows people to access and use websites could be considered by some to be a public service or an aid to the news industry. If people want to read the full article, they have to follow the rules set by the news organizations that publish it.

In the early days of the Internet, many news organizations placed their material online free for anyone who wanted to read it. Most of those now allow limited access to non-subscribers. In some ways, one could argue that the news industry should be paying the tech companies for attracting readers to their articles or their content.

Facebook and Google sell advertising on their websites and have lots of advertisements. Perhaps some of that might have gone to other media in the past. Given the way the Liberals think, it is possible and only natural that the government wants to intervene in what would be a private commercial industry.

Canada's Conservatives believe that the Canadian news media should be fairly compensated for the use of its content by platforms like Google and Facebook. The issue here is how that should happen and what should be the role of government, if any, in the process.

Media companies could inform Google and Facebook that linking to their news sites is no longer allowed and that breaking that rule without permission would be a copyright violation. Media companies deserve compensation for their work, and some have negotiated agreements with the tech companies for the online use of their content, which has me wondering why government feels the need to intervene.

The government, which has in the past shown its willingness to give taxpayer dollars to the news industry, does not seem to understand the difference between public and private. One would think that a billion dollars a year to the CBC would be enough to exempt it from receiving more money under the bill, but it is not.

This is flawed legislation. It seems as if this government has taken a worthy idea, which ensures that Canada has a healthy, free and vibrant press, and brought in a bill for which the ramifications have not been considered.

Why is the CRTC being given oversight? Despite what some Liberals may think, the Internet is not broadcasting. Print media are definitely not broadcasters. Where is the logic in asking the CRTC to oversee something when it neither has the expertise or the resources to do so? Is this all about building a new bureaucracy? Indeed it is.

The online news act is supposed to protect the struggling Canadian news industry. How could anyone disagree with such a noble purpose? Would this bill solve any problems, or would it create new ones? How would fair compensation be determined? Who would be compensated under this act and who would be excluded? Why should a government agency be making such determinations?

The tech giants have widened the reach of Canada's news organizations by bringing their materials to the attention of the people who might not otherwise know of them. I am sure this increased audience has been beneficial to all sides. Mechanisms already exist through which media can be compensated by those using their materials. We have a Copyright Act. Some companies have come to an agreement with the tech giants, so why is more government needed?

There is no need for this bill, except that the Liberals love to meddle in things that do not concern them at all. What other areas does the government wish to shove itself into rather than letting companies work out their own agreements?

If these technology companies feel there is value in linking to Canadian news organizations, why can they not negotiate contracts without government interference? If Canadians are turning to these tech companies for news, then the companies need to find a way to provide content. Short of starting their own news organizations, which strikes me as an unlikely possibility, they have to turn to existing news organizations. If they find value there, they will pay for it. It is very simple.

This bill defines a news outlet as “an undertaking or any distinct part of an undertaking, such as a section of a newspaper, the primary purpose of which is to produce news content”. It is a very nice definition. Those words, however, do not reflect reality. This is a dispute about money, pure and simple.

Producing news content may be the goal of those in the newsroom, those seeking to produce quality journalism for the public good. It may even be why a given publication was first founded, but is not the reason for its existence. The reality is that news outlets, like the big tech companies, exist to make money. This bill is about who gets the biggest slice of the advertising pie, pure and simple.

If news organizations perform a service by keeping the public informed about important issues, that is, in many ways, only a by-product of the business. Those running news organizations are rarely, if ever, journalists themselves. If news organizations thought they could make as much or more money by publishing only chocolate cake recipes, they would do so. Let us not delude ourselves into thinking otherwise.

Bill C-18 is flawed and probably unnecessary legislation, which puts it in line with the rest of the current government's legislative agenda.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Madam Speaker, Edmonton was the place I had my start in journalism in 1998 at the Edmonton Journal, and at the time there were several newspapers in town, along with several radio stations and several TV stations, which were all producing news for the city of Edmonton. Over the past 20 years, the media landscape has really shrunk. There is not the same number of journalists out on the street reporting the news.

This is because of what the Public Policy Forum calls “vampire economics”. Facebook and Google take 85% of the funding that used to go to news for advertising. That now goes to Facebook and Google, and at the same time, they take the content produced by journalists and distribute it for free. What we have learned is that, yes, Facebook and Google are making deals with these outlets ahead of legislation similar to Bill C-18. They did it in Australia. They are doing it now in the U.S., and in Europe they are also considering similar legislation.

These are deals that are completely without government influence. They are business deals between organizations and Facebook or Google, so there is no government interference, and what we have learned is that Facebook and Google probably would not make these deals, if the legislation were not already on the table.

I am wondering if the member opposite agrees that it is a huge threat to our democracy to see this demise of journalism in our—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

I apologize, but I do have to give time to the hon. member for Edmonton Manning to give an answer.

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Madam Speaker, I thank the member for being such a good Edmontonian and congratulate her for coming this way.

She mentioned the change in the landscape in advertising and of newspapers. The hon. member said what I said in my speech, which is that it is about the money and how big a slice of the pie is going to be. If this is a business deal that has been done in the private sector, why should the government intervene now?

The twist toward the threat to democracy is a bit rich here. The Liberals know where the threats to democracy are, and I think they have been playing to that for the last seven years. I ask them to please spare us on that.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, my riding has seven local media outlets: Le Clairon, Le Courrier, Boom FM, Journal Mobiles, Radio-Acton, La Voix de l'Est, and La Pensée. They all do an outstanding job.

It is, however, abundantly clear that local and regional news are dying. Philanthropy and subscriptions are no longer enough. We need to help them.

In the current context, we need them. We need them because local and regional news outlets showcase talent, happenings and current events.

In the current context, with a free market dominated by digital giants, that is no longer enough. Digital giants must contribute a portion of their profits to help local and regional media.

Why does our colleague still disagree?

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Madam Speaker, this is another twist. This world is full of competition, and big companies are there because they have all the tools needed to be a presence.

Most of us in the House and beyond use the services of Facebook, Google and others to advertise what we do and what we stand for, so I do not think there is anything in the bill to tell us where the money is going to go and whether the money is going to go to support those small local news outlets the hon. member mentioned. That is why the bill is about nothing. It is meaningless. It is about nothing, and it is unnecessary.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, the member talks about the slice of the pie. In 2020, big online web giants gained $9.7 billion in online advertising. That is the size of the pie we are talking about, and Google and Facebook benefited from 80% of that revenue. Because smaller online platforms such as Isuma TV and Nunavut TV do not have the same negotiability that Google and Facebook have, the bill is quite important to those smaller platforms.

Does the member not agree that those supports for those smaller platforms are needed to fight against big platforms such as Google and Facebook, which are making at least $9.7 billion a year in advertising revenue?

[Ziad Aboultaif, Conservative, Edmonton Manning, AB]

Madam Speaker, basically, this bill does nothing to help these industries. Let us make sure we understand what is going on here. This bill does nothing. It is just a symbolic bill that would really do nothing.

If the small industry needs to be a presence, it needs to work on itself and needs to increase its activities in a proper business model.

That is what we support.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Madam Speaker, I rise today to speak to Bill C-18.

The Internet is supposed to be a place where anyone, regardless of their wealth, status or background, can express themselves in a place free from excessive restrictions and regulations.

The Internet was designed to be open and free. It was supposed to be a place where one could contribute on one’s terms, where a business can grow on its terms, where society can learn, share and communicate on its terms, free from government overreach.

The absence of government intervention was one of the very reasons why the Internet flourished into what we know it is today, and few other inventions can be attributed to creating such a significant economic, social, and cultural growth as the Internet, but now the Liberal government has made it its priority to regulate the Internet in an unprecedented way.

The Prime Minister has decided to target the free and open Internet, and maybe for those very reasons. First, it was Bill C-10, then it was Bill C-11 and now it is Bill C-18. I believe that the expansion of the government will harm the principles of a healthy media environment for years to come.

When people hear about governments regulating the Internet, few think of Canada, and rightfully so.

At a time when inflation is reaching record highs, when the cost of gas and groceries continues to rise and when heating a home is becoming unaffordable, the Liberal government is fixated on Internet regulations. Maybe the Liberals hoped that Canadians were distracted by real-life pressures and would ignore the Internet regulations, or maybe they do not care about the real issues that Canadians are currently facing in their everyday life.

Here we are, debating another government bill to regulate the Internet. Bill C-18 would force online platforms to give away their revenues to news organizations who choose to upload their content to their platform. Canadians are rightfully skeptical when the government talks about wealth redistribution. Canadians are even more concerned when the government talks about wealth redistribution within the news and media industry.

A free and independent media is critical and important to our nation’s democracy. Whenever the government tries to intervene, elected officials should pay close attention. It is our job to thoroughly examine the consequences of any attempt to hand out money or change the rules for news and media in our country.

Canadians are still questioning the government’s $600-million media bailout, but now the government is trying to create a new revenue source for media with somebody else’s money. I must ask how we can maintain a free market if we indirectly subsidize companies by extracting the profits of their competitors.

It is important to note that no one is forcing news organizations to upload hyperlinks to online platforms. They are free to make this choice. Many publishers upload their content to platforms such as Facebook and Google to benefit themselves. It is no secret that more people are likely to read an article if it is uploaded online because it suddenly becomes more accessible to the public. When an article is uploaded to the Internet for the world to read, it breaks through those geographic walls that a print newspaper is restricted to.

Many writers across Canada have experienced incredible success because of their ability to upload content online. In fact, many publishers pay Google and Facebook to boost their content through ads. Without online platforms like Facebook and Google, many writers and independent news organizations would not exist today.

The Internet has provided a lot of opportunity for media companies who were previously unable to enter the market due to high barriers of entry. Members of the House should be proud of the positive outcomes that online platforms have created for content creators.

Not only is no one forcing news outlets to upload their content online, but also nothing is preventing them from negotiating individual contracts with online platforms. As of today, many news outlets have proactively entered business agreements with online platforms to progress mutual business needs without government intervention, as I heard in a previous speech here from my colleague.

We must also ask who will be eligible to receive the government-mandated shared revenue if Bill C-18 were to become law. The government claims that only legitimate news organizations will be eligible for these funds, but who does the government deem as a legitimate news organization? According to one of the government-written criteria in Bill C-18, a legitimate news organization must produce news “primarily focused on matters of general interest”.

However, I must further ask what the matters of general interest are and who determines them. I can assure members of the House that the general interests in rural Canada are different than in urban Canada, and general interests in Atlantic Canada are different than those in northern and western Canada. These are important questions that Canadians deserve the answers to.

Instead, the Liberals have left these important decisions to the CRTC, the same CRTC that is already bogged down in a mountain of responsibility from other Internet regulations that the government has initiated.

I should note that, if Bill C-18 passes, Canada's government-funded media outlet, the CBC, will be eligible for compensation. Members heard that right. There will be more money for the CBC. The Parliamentary Budget Officer reported that more than 75% of the money will go to the CBC, Rogers and Bell.

The government claims that Bill C-18 is to share the wealth of online platforms to smaller media outlets, such as newspapers. As an MP who proudly represents many small-town weekly newspapers, I understand that these businesses have experienced significant market pressures in recent history.

The reality is that most of the money redistributed by Bill C-18 will only go to the media giants, such as The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail. They are the ones that have the most content online, and therefore, they will get the most money from this legislation.

Many local newspapers I represent do not even upload their content to online platforms. That means they would not see any of the money the government claims they will get. I wholeheartedly agree with local newspapers across this nation that are frustrated. However, Bill C-18 is not the silver bullet. In fact, many are warning that Bill C-18 would be detrimental to Canadian journalism.

At the beginning of my speech, I spoke about the importance of free and open Internet. It is a principle that I, and many Canadians, strongly believe in. However, Bill C-18 breaks the concept of a free and open Internet. Bill C-18 is bad for independent media, and it is bad for competition.

At a time when many Canadians believe the freedom to express oneself is threatened, the Liberal government continues down a path of unprecedented Internet regulation. It would be nice to see the government put as much effort into reducing Internet and cell phone bills as it is putting into regulating the Internet, but I digress.

I will end with a quote from Vinton Cerf, a founding father of the Internet. He stated, “if all of us...don't pay attention to what is going on, users worldwide will be at risk of losing the open and free Internet that has brought so much to so many and can bring so much more.” That is very true.

The Internet, a creation that was built on the principle of being open and free, is now threatened. We can either allow the government to expand its power over the Internet, or preserve the principles it was founded on. That is why I will be voting against Bill C-18.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage]

Madam Speaker, I have listened to a few Conservative speeches. It is interesting that they line up to be Facebook's PR team. We have not seen that in Australia, whose legislation Bill C-18 is based upon. It was brought in by a Conservative government. Republicans in the United States support similar legislation in the United States.

It is only the Conservatives in Canada who are against this type of legislation, which is especially shocking since they ran on this policy in their platform. It was on page 152 of the Conservative platform. Why was he in favour of it before he was against it?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Madam Speaker, I am looking at Bill C-18, which is what we are reviewing today. One of the more shocking and troubling things about the bill is the government knows full well that this is not going to the people who need the money the most. In doing research for this speech, it came up over and over again that it was not going to my local news media. It was not targeted to them at all. Here we have CBC, Rogers and Bell getting most of the money. What is with that, and why did the Liberals not fix it?

[Jean-Denis Garon, Bloc, Mirabel, QC]

Madam Speaker, our Conservative colleague spoke about free enterprise and individual initiative. He also spoke about the need to reduce the size of government as much as possible. At one time, the proponents of conservatism wanted the market and capitalism to work properly.

However, what I am hearing today is a member who is defending a market in which two companies hold an 80% to 90% share of the advertising market. That is not competition, and there is nothing fair about it. It is not effective, and it works against our constituents, those who elected us, and against consumers in Quebec and Canada. Despite all that, the Conservatives are rising in the House to defend monopolies. How does my colleague explain that?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Madam Speaker, I want to bring attention to something from Michael Geist's testimony in front of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on September 23. I would encourage the member to go back and review this testimony.

He talked about government overreach. He talked about several troubling aspects of this bill when it comes to constitutional obligations and CUSMA challenges with respect to trade. However, here is the most troubling one with respect to government overreach. He said:

With regard to constitutional concerns, the bill isn't broadcast, it isn't telecommunications, and it's not copyright. How, then, does it fit within federal powers? If the government claims powers over anything involving the Internet, there are no real limits on jurisdiction.

I would keep that in mind as we debate this bill. This is a massive amount of government overreach that we should all be concerned about.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, what I do like about this bill is it would provide a role for the CRTC to assist in the negotiation process between web giants and other providers. As I mentioned earlier, web giants are showing profits in revenue of $9.7 billion a year, so they can take advantage any way they want. There are smaller broadcaster platforms that do not have that same revenue, that need the assistance for the negotiation process that is so important and critically needed. A great place for it to go is to the CRTC to make sure there is fairness. Does the member not agree that fairness is absolutely necessary?

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Madam Speaker, the bill really was intended for those rural papers and helping them out. However, this bill is really disingenuous. It does not reflect it at all and it would not help out rural Canada at all, so we are in real trouble if this bill passes.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Madam Speaker, as always, it is an honour to enter into debate in this place and to talk about the important issues facing Canadians.

Madam Speaker, I would ask that I be given a little latitude here, as this will likely be the last time I stand in this place before we all break for Christmas, whether that be tomorrow or in the next couple of days. I would wish you and all members of this place, as well as all Canadians watching a very merry Christmas and many blessings in the new year.

Further, I also want to acknowledge the passing of one our colleagues, the late Hon. Jim Carr. I want to acknowledge his service to this country, his many years in this place. Although we have disagreements on many issues, it is at times like this where we see the true heart of Canadian democracy in looking back at one's legacy and one's record. Certainly on behalf of myself and the people of Battle River—Crowfoot, I would like to pass our condolences along to you and your colleagues, as well as the late Mr. Carr's constituents and family and friends, who I have no doubt are grieving his loss.

As we discuss the issue of Bill C-18, we see before us something that I would suggest is typical of the way the Liberals approach many aspects of government. We hear them making accusations about how the Conservatives are somehow supporting Facebook and other social media companies and their monopoly of the Internet. I would like to take a moment to refute that.

First, I have never heard anybody suggest that social media is overly favourable to Conservatives. I would like to unpack a little as to why the very foundation of this bill is problematic. I am going to unpack that to the very basis that assumes that a government agency, and in this case specifically the CRTC, should become intimately involved and exercise a great deal of authority over something which I think all Canadians, or certainly most Canadians I speak with, truly support and that is freedom of expression, freedom of the press and free expression on forums like the Internet, including social media.

One of the concerns that I have is that the very foundational elements of what is proposed here is to increase the size, scope and authority that an agency of government has. I would suggest that at the very foundation of what this bill is doing, that is deeply problematic.

It has been mentioned that Conservatives ran on a plan to ensure that big tech pays their fair share, and absolutely. However, when we look at Bill C-18 and what is included in this bill, we see that it misses the mark.

Instead of attempting to do what I think many Canadians actually support, the government instead simply increases the size of bureaucracy. As we have seen throughout the committee study, what the Liberals have said this bill would do and how much it would cost versus what the consequences of the bill could be and the actual cost are two different worlds.

Unfortunately, I do find this is par for the course for the Liberals who are great at making announcements, great at doing press releases and even writing preambles to bills. However, in many cases, when we look past the preamble, that is where the concerns and the problems are made very clear.

I am going to cut my speech a little short to ensure that some other colleagues have a chance to speak to this important bill.

I would simply highlight something that has been missing from the conversation, and that is rural voices. Specifically, I think it should be noted, as one of my colleagues did just a few minutes ago, that rural is missing out on the conversation. The biggest beneficiary of this bill would be the CBC. I have about 14 weekly newspapers, some of which do not even have a website, and local radio stations. There are small newspapers, family-owned businesses, and in some cases multi-generational operations that will not benefit from anything to do with this sort of bill.

At the very foundation, I find the bill flawed in how it would grant massive authority and jurisdiction to the CRTC, which has difficulty fulfilling its current mandate let alone a greatly expanded one. I look at almost anything this government touches, and the service outcomes of any department over the last seven years certainly have not been improved. Therefore, I hope members will forgive me for not trusting a massive expansion of the scope of an agency of the government. I find that deeply problematic.

To conclude, more bureaucracy and administration is not the solution. We need to see that freedom of the press is preserved and freedom of expression is preserved in this country. When it comes to ensuring that the big tech players in Canada pay their fair share, I fear this would create a bloated administration that falls far short of the mark that is required to actually deliver on what the objective was when the bill was first introduced.

With that, I will conclude a whole four minutes early and look forward to answering questions from my colleagues.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

Before we go to questions and comments, it is my duty pursuant to Standing Order 38 to inform the House that the questions to be raised tonight at the time of adjournment are as follows: the hon. member for Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, Democratic Institutions; the hon. member for St. Albert—Edmonton, Elections Canada; the hon. member for New Westminster—Burnaby, Health.

[Lisa Hepfner, Liberal, Hamilton Mountain, ON]

Madam Speaker, I wonder if the member has read the latest report from Australia, which has just reviewed its similar legislation one year in and found that journalism was supported. In fact, the smaller outlets in Australia did better in comparison to the larger organizations, and it has been a success. I am wondering why the member thinks it would be different in Canada.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Madam Speaker, I appreciate the question, but it comes down to the reality of what we are debating here today, which is not the Australian model but rather a Liberal proposal to give a massive increased mandate and authority to an agency of the Crown in this country that has a very poor track record in accomplishing the things the government already expects it to do.

Again, forgive me for suggesting that I have significant doubts as to whether or not the CRTC would be able to one, fulfill the mandate that is being suggested within the bill, and two, actually support journalists. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said that not only the cost would be more than double what the government estimated, but also that up to 75% of the revenue would not go to small, local and independent journalists. I am proud to have 14 independent weekly newspaper in my constituency. Rather, the revenue would go to the CBC, which is already funded to the tune of $1.2 billion.

This is not Australia. This is Canada. I think the Liberals should look very carefully before voting on their bill, which is based on something that is very different from what has been proposed, reported on and seen from the country of Australia on the other side of the planet.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, I want to share a few statistics. Fully 98% of Facebook's total revenue comes from advertising sales; Google and Facebook take 80% of all digital ad spending; and Meta, the company that owns Facebook, generated $193 million in revenue in 2021, thanks to journalistic content, of course.

Meanwhile, let us remember that local and regional media are scraping to get by. However, we know that, if there were a framework that forced that revenue to be shared, then according to a 2020 News Media Canada report, publishers could recoup $620 million, which could support 700 journalists.

Let us also remember that, in Canada, Facebook earns 35 to 58 times more from media outlets than it pays them.

Is that not a clear imbalance and a gross injustice?

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would simply respond to that question by asking a question. Does the member trust the Prime Minister to actually fulfill the stated objectives that are outlined in the bill? Does the member trust the CRTC, a federal Crown agency, to actually fulfill the stated objectives in the bill?

When I look at what the bill is stated to accomplish versus what is outlined in the substance of the bill versus the testimony that we heard in committee that casts significant doubt on whether it would be able to do so, there are oceans of difference between those three things. To me, that suggests it would be deeply problematic.

It is a laudable objective; however, we see a deeply problematic follow-through on the part of the government. I would urge the member to consider carefully whether or not he would entrust the CRTC with that much authority.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, I lived in a time when major cuts were made to the CBC, and I saw the impacts that had on my community in Nunavut. In Nunavut, the CBC is the only provider that consistently and reliably provides broadcasting in Inuktitut.

I wonder if the member could share with us whether he agrees that my community deserves to get some of the lion's share of revenue, so that more indigenous languages can be broadcast through the CBC in other parts of the country.

[Damien Kurek, Conservative, Battle River—Crowfoot, AB]

Madam Speaker, I would suggest that the bill does not accomplish what the member asked me if I would support. Yes, I absolutely support indigenous languages having coverage. In fact, I have found it deeply problematic that while the CBC has not faced cuts, it has cut service. I think it highlights a great discrepancy that exists here in terms of what this bill is purported to accomplish versus what will take place.

I agree with the member for Nunavut. There needs to be support for small, local stations, whether they be radio, newspaper or whatever the case may be.

When I read through the bill, the testimony and what the bill is purported to accomplish, the bill purely and simply does not do that justice.

Simply put, would the member trust the Prime Minister to accomplish those objectives, when the framework proposed in Bill C-18 simply does not exist?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise and speak in the House once again.

Before I begin, I also want to take a moment to offer my sincere condolences to the family of Jim Carr, the hon. member who passed away, as well as to his colleagues in the Liberal caucus who have worked with him over the years. I want to offer my thoughts and prayers to everyone.

When I decided to run for office in southern Saskatchewan, one of the driving principles for me and generally a lot of people in Saskatchewan was to see less government interference overall in our lives. That is one of the interesting elements in this bill, that it provides an opportunity to have less government interference in people's lives. That is the opportunity that exists with the bill. That is what we are going to get to as we get through the rest of this debate. As the bill has come through committee, we see how some of the interventions at committee reflect that.

Generally, a government bureaucrat in a distant office does not know what is best for individuals in a family given that family's own unique circumstances, so responsibility for those people should be left to the individuals and not to the government.

Usually, when there is a discussion about smaller government in Canada or somewhere else, it has to do with issues of expanding state power, which directly or indirectly restricts people's lives further. This results in less freedom, either because there are fewer options and choices available to make, or because sometimes it gets to the point of trying to plan citizens' lives for them. In this case, the problem with interference is not so obvious when we compare it to something like the situation in George Orwell's 1984, or maybe the other lurking threat that is another government bill, Bill C-11. It got a lot more negative attention in its previous iteration as Bill C-10, and later passed in this Parliament as Bill C-11.

The Liberals want to hand over way too much power to the CRTC with this bill, Bill C-18, which we are debating tonight. The Conservatives stood with the people and policy experts to make our opposition absolutely clear.

When the same Liberal government with the troubling history of Bill C-11 introduces yet another Internet bill, it is reasonable for Canadians to look at it with a healthy dose of skepticism. However, the problem with government does not always come from control or overreach; sometimes it seems friendly and tries to help out with something good, but it can still create problems despite the best intentions. Unfortunately, although what we saw with this bill when it was first drafted was an honest attempt to support small media outlets, it has turned into a large bill that needlessly grows the size of government institutions.

The CRTC already wields a great deal of power in regulating the Internet and the dissemination of information, and now the government wants to further add to it. Should it have the power to determine who is considered a journalist, or the eligibility of a news agency, which is part of the process of this bill?

It does not end there. The CRTC can resolve disputes and issue penalties. As part of that, the bill allows it to set mandatory terms to which both parties, news outlets and platforms, must agree.

What is perhaps most concerning of all is that the CRTC would have the authority to demand information from these platforms and news outlets whenever it pleases.

At the end of the day, Bill C-18 is inflating the size of the CRTC and giving it enormous power, with little accountability, to regulate the news all of us view. This begs the question: What are the impacts of doing this? An important part of a free society is having an independent press and free speech to hold our leaders accountable, but how much can we trust the Liberals to maintain these things? If the government and the Prime Minister want to talk as much as they do about defending democracy and promoting diversity around the world, they need to take these things seriously when it comes to our own country.

Sadly, over the last year they have damaged their national reputation with respect to these values by abusing emergency powers and allowing vulnerable Canadians, including veterans, for example, to be offered death instead of the help they need. They have undermined our freedoms and respect for human dignity.

My fellow Conservatives and I have spoken a lot about the danger of censorship. I also say that I understand the importance of small media organizations and their place in the local communities, because I represent a very large rural riding. To this day, many still rely on these small media organizations to inform them of the happenings both locally and on the global stage, and rural Canada is better off because of it.

There are many of them in my riding, and they all play an essential role. For instance, the Southwest Booster, which is located in Swift Current, has been producing a weekly paper since 1969. We also have the Prairie Post, which covers both southern Saskatchewan and southern Alberta. North of Swift Current, for example, in the small town of Kyle, we also have the Kyle Times, which has been operating for a number of years. Up in the northwest corner of the riding we have papers like Your West Central Voice and the Kindersley Social, both providing a unique perspective on what is happening in their communities.

Cypress Hills—Grasslands is also home to The Shaunavon Standard, which was founded back in 1913, along with the Maple Creek & Southwest Advance Times and the Maple Creek News, which provide a weekly newspaper and distribute it in the southwest corner. In the eastern half of my constituency, we also find many papers such as the Gravelbourg Tribune, The Herald and the Assiniboia Times. All these papers contribute greatly to the social fabric that we find in rural Canada. In a place where most people do not have access to reliable Internet, these papers are critical to keeping my constituents informed.

However, through the transition into a digital world, these organizations have had to adapt and provide their service online. Before the Internet, papers like the ones I mentioned used a physical newsstand or post office boxes to promote themselves, but today, with the Internet, search engines like Google are the updated newsstands. With Bill C-18 the government is trying to interfere with this updated newsstand, and is going too far in doing so.

In this discussion, we also need to talk about the existing government support for media and how we can fix this framework. As I said, having an independent press is fundamental. However, when our media are receiving multi-million dollar payouts from the federal government, their independence quickly comes into question. The common saying, “Never bite the hand that feeds you,” exists for a reason, and I believe it applies to this situation.

Let us be honest: The job of the media is at times to bite, to seek for answers, to find the truth and to hold those in power to account. However, they cannot fully do this when they know it may impact their subsidy. Many Canadians have seen a subtle shift in the private corporate media, with its reporting starting to resemble that of the CBC, which, as a state broadcaster, receives over $1 billion directly from the government. Because of that relationship, the question is raised as to how much the organization can operate like a PR firm of the federal government. That is why we have previously called for reviewing its funding and mandate.

Having said all this, my concerns with Bill C-18 do not stop with media independence and the newly proposed powers of the CRTC, but extend also to the current government's attempt to interfere in a free market. Bill C-18 would require search engines like Google to pay a royalty to an organization that is putting out information, but the government claims this is only minimal market intervention.

Earlier in my speech I talked about many of the small newsprint operations that we have in southwestern Saskatchewan. Here in the House, we have many former members of the press or journalists or those who have been news anchors or different things over the years. I would submit that the majority, if not all the organizations they worked for, would not receive a penny from any of the funds that would be raised by doing this.

First, the government would allow media outlets and organizations to reach a deal on their own. However, if they failed to do this, the CRTC would force both parties into a binding arbitration process whereby the government would get to set the terms of the deal. If an outlet and the organization reached a deal on their own, but the CRTC officials felt the outlet was not using the money appropriately, they would say the deal was invalid and force the two parties through the arbitration process.

They cannot call this “minimal market intervention” when they are giving an institution the power to force two organizations into a binding arbitration process as well as the power to apply hefty fines. A thing is not market-based when the government needs to step in and force two companies to make a deal or face a large fine from the government if they fail to make a deal.

While the government should aim to support small media outlets, protecting their independence should be front of mind. The implications of Bill C-18 are too far-reaching, and with the lack of guidelines there is great potential for the government to abuse this process. That is why we have opposed this bill and will continue to do so.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I find the Conservative Party interesting. I understand the Conservatives actually had an election platform issue on which all the Conservative candidates were saying they supported what is taking place in Australia and the Australians' approach to dealing with it. That is the approach this bill is a reflection of. Therefore, it seems to me that the members of the Conservative Party are saying, once again, that even though they would have made the commitment to do something, they obviously met with someone. Something has caused them to change their minds. Now they do not believe government should play a role in Google search engines or Facebook. They are saying we should just have trust in Google and Facebook, because they will work it out with all the other media outlets.

Why did the Conservative Party once again abandon an election platform? Is it the change in leadership? Is it the so-called new direction that the Conservatives are taking? Why did they abandon that policy commitment to Canadians?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, our party is not beholden to Facebook, and we are not beholden to Google. We do not take our marching orders from big corporations like that. We are not listening to special-interest lobby groups and informing our policy decisions based on that. Too often, we see that from the Liberal side of the aisle.

As I outlined in my speech, this is talking about our small-town news and print media. Quite often they are the best at providing the most up-to-date local, relevant information that people want to see and hear. They do appropriate and proper journalism.

What we are seeing from many of these large organizations is basically government-subsidized opinions. That is not what Canadian taxpayers want. What they want is to see better respect for the taxpayer dollar, but also to have media outlets that are going to provide them with true, accurate and reliable journalism. That is what our small-town papers do. They are the ones that are going to be left out, and the bill would do nothing to help those people.

[Andréanne Larouche, Bloc, Shefford, QC]

Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague for his speech.

As this is very likely the last time I will rise to speak in 2022, I want to offer my condolences to the friends and family of the Hon. Jim Carr. I also want to wish everyone happy holidays, including you, Madam Speaker.

That being said, my colleague spoke a lot about the importance of local media. As I said before, representatives from the local newspapers La Voix de l'Est, La Pensée de Bagot and the Journal de Chambly, and even Radio M105, a great community radio station that is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, all came to see me to say that legislation was required and action absolutely needed to be taken.

The Liberals have invested a lot in ads on GAFAM and other platforms, and the Conservatives are pushing for a form of libertarianism on social media and with GAFAM. This goes against the importance of news reporting that respects a code and aligns with what journalism should be. Journalism is about providing information on local current events and reporting real news, not disinformation.

What does my colleague think about the importance of local media for democracy and for a healthy news ecosystem?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, the member is absolutely right. We talk about our local news media or our local papers, and maybe someone is fortunate enough to have a local TV station. The local news media that is present in Quebec is obviously going to provide the local news and perspective for Quebec, and the local news media in Saskatchewan is going to provide our perspective, but when we see a bill like this, it is not going to boost and enrich the ability of the organizations to do what they are going to do. We are hearing the government say it is absolutely going to do that, but the reality is we always see that it is our small towns and our rural and remote communities that have people who have a diminished voice in this country. They are the ones who are always the first to lose out. They are the first ones to be eliminated because of decisions like this that are made.

We need to support and promote our small-town papers and our small-town TV and radio stations. The bill would not do that.

[Taylor Bachrach, NDP, Skeena—Bulkley Valley, BC]

Madam Speaker, my colleague from Cypress Hills—Grasslands made an impassioned defence of this idea of unbridled deregulation. I find it somewhat questionable, because when giant corporations form monopolies we see that many of the impacts on Canadian society are negative ones.

Does he not agree that the federal government, and governments of all sizes, have a role in limiting the negative impacts of monopolies in our country and in our economy?

[Jeremy Patzer, Conservative, Cypress Hills—Grasslands, SK]

Madam Speaker, we definitely do not want to see monopolies. Right now one of the biggest monopolies in the country is the amount of tax dollars that the CBC receives. I think the money the CBC receives could be better utilized and allocated to other means, and we have a good platform of what to do with the over billion dollars that heads in that direction.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, several of my colleagues have spoken in the last day and a half about a member who is no longer with us. Over the number of years I have been here, we have lost a number of members in different ways. It is not just a member from one group or one caucus. It is a member of the House. We are 338 members and it is one of us. We all know the role that we have here. We know the commitment people make to be in this position. It is an honour and a privilege to do it, but we all understand the loss when we lose one of our 338 members. It is always a hardship. I recognize the challenges we have as members and losing one of us is a tragedy for us all.

Moving onto Bill C-18, I had been on the heritage committee before but I came back onto the committee when it was just getting to the bill itself, the amendments and going through the legislation.

There probably is not a heritage minister who I have not seen in committee at one time or another. They all know I speak about weekly newspapers. I talk about how important they are in Canada. There is probably not a heritage minister who does not know that I would be up here talking about weekly newspapers and supporting how critical they are to our communities.

The bill's purpose refers to including the sustainability of news businesses and independent local ones. In my riding I have a minimum of 15 papers, and some other ones that people would say are not weekly papers, in communities in my riding.

These are phenomenal pieces of communication that are important to the riding and important to the communities. We saw what was initially set out in this piece of legislation, as I came to be back on the heritage committee, and there were many amendments that could have made this piece of legislation much better, but it was not improved.

That is the challenge in being on the committee. We are trying to work through it. Our job is to improve legislation. This bill could have been improved, but it was not improved enough.

I have many community newspapers in my riding. We have had Brooks Bulletin since 1910 from one family of three generations. The Strathmore Times goes back to 1909. The Bassano Times is more recent, from 1960. The Three Capital Hills paper is 107 years old. The Vulcan Advocate is from 1913. The Drumheller Mail is from 1911.

These are long-standing weekly papers in the community. They are very important for those communities. They really were hopeful that this legislation would be something that could help them. I have talked to a lot of the papers individually and in groups. They said that we should work for them and make this a piece of legislation that will support them. They are weekly newspapers.

I know my colleague to the west of me has worked for a weekly newspaper. It is an interesting challenge. My father had a weekly newspaper that I had the opportunity to spend time working at, especially during the summers when I was not in university.

It is often a one-person or two-person operation. People are working those deadlines to get those news stories out. They are getting out in the community and taking pictures. They are rushing to make a midnight deadline so the paper can be produced and they can go home before the sun comes up. They can get that local story out and get the local activities out that need to be promoted in the community. This occurs all across the country.

My riding happens to be home to the Brooks Bandits. The Brooks Bandits are a junior hockey team. There are 132 teams in this country in many of the smaller communities. Who covers those 132 communities? It is the hardest hockey championship to win in this country. The teams are in the smaller communities, like Okotoks, Drumheller and Brooks. The Brooks Bandits have won that championship three times in the past. Who is covering that? It is not the CBC. It is not Bell Media. It is the local newspapers.

One could say that it is just local hockey players. Well, guess what? Who was the MVP in the Stanley Cup? It was Cale Makar. Where did he play? He played for the Brooks Bandits. Nobody in the major media paid any attention to him until he was the MVP. That is the level of coverage that local communities do. For the 132 teams across this country, for example, and for many people sitting in the House, those teams are covered by weekly papers.

The weekly papers often have one or two employees. One of the amendments that I was asked to work on was for the owner-reporter, which was the one reporter working there, to qualify for this. Under the legislation, there had to be two journalists, and the owner-operator could not be one of them. What nonsense for weekly newspapers. They are often ma-and-pa operations. Often the editor-owner is a writer and has one other person writing with them. We did get an amendment that reduced it from two to one and a half, but that was not enough. Bassano Times is a one-person operation of a newspaper in that community of 1,200. It is one person, and it does not qualify for this.

The legislation could have been better. It could have met the purpose that it is was set out for, but it does not. It does not do what we need for weekly papers.

I mean, we have heard already that the money was on the table. Am I out there saying that Google, Meta and Facebook should be paying? Absolutely, and we have said to put the money in a pool and let us get it negotiated. Obviously, 75% of the money is gone. People have figured out that they need to negotiate. However, it is Bell, Rogers and CBC that got 75% of the money already. I do not think the Toronto Maple Leafs and that hockey team need more money. That is not what it was for.

This was for supporting journalists at the weekly papers that are the lifeblood in our communities. Those are the reporters of those single papers who are out there on the weekend, out there on a Saturday night or a Tuesday night, and on Sunday, they are writing the stories. Those newspapers do charity advertising for charities in our communities. Communities in Bloom, which is all across this country, is an example. Local papers are writing stories about how great their communities are doing, such as Communities in Bloom, and they doing it often for free. That is how they get promoted. Weekly papers are very crucial, as is this particular one.

As many ministers have known, I have asked, “Where is the money for your advertising?” Many ministers said to me, “Well it is decided by every department where their advertising dollar goes.”

I have said, “I have had many weekly papers where 30% of their income, because they are small, used to come from government advertising, and that is gone. Where did the Canadian taxpayers' money go?”

It went outside of our country to Facebook and Google. To me, that is hypocrisy. We should be advertising in media productions and weeklies in our own country. That is where the dollars should have gone.

I support the idea of creating the fund, working at it and getting it divided up. Obviously, 75% of it could be done without any interference from the CRTC. However, the weekly paper associations have told me that they would be lucky to get $400 or $500 out of this deal a year. All that will be left are crumbs. They will be working hard to get those crumbs, which is all that is going to be left for our weekly papers. This does not make sense.

What it was set out to do could have been better, but it is not, and that is why it is a challenge for me, for our journalists and our weekly papers.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, it is like following a bouncing ball. The Conservative Party said that it liked the Australian model, and put that in its campaign platform. The Liberal legislation is a reflection of the Australian model, and now the Conservative Party is saying that it does not support Bill C-18. The member says that, well, they want to be there for the smaller community newspapers, but a question was just raised that indicated that there has been a greater uptake than expected in the Australian example and community newspapers have benefited by it.

However, the Conservative Party, even though its members talk about the community newspapers, what they are really talking about is empowering Facebook and Google search engines to distribute the money how they feel is appropriate and that they will work with different media.

I wonder if the member does not realize that it is a pretty hard ball to follow because the Conservatives are bouncing all over the place on a very important issue.

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, I always appreciate a question from the member across the way.

I do not have any problem following the bouncing ball, like that one we see in the hockey games, where we watch the ball and which cup it ends in, and people figure it out and get to win a prize. I can follow that one. The member needs some more practice at that one because I can follow that bouncing ball.

I will give another example of where the legislation had a problem. Where was the indigenous piece in this?

In my father's weekly newspaper, there was a gentleman. He was a war veteran, indigenous, from the Kainai reserve. He started a weekly newspaper with support from my father, a weekly paper, the first one on the Kainai Blackfoot nation, and it was a struggle. This piece of legislation did not have it in there. Why not? Why was it not there?

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Madam Speaker, Le Clairon, Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe, Boom FM, Journal Mobiles, Radio Acton, La Voix de l'Est, La Pensée de Bagot, NousTV and TVME are the local and regional media in my riding. I want to pay tribute to them. They do incredible work. Some of them are community media. However, they are only scraping by. Not everything is rosy.

We need them. They are essential for bringing us the latest news on events, local culture, artists, sports teams, what elected officials are up to. We need them because these stories does not make national broadcasts and the national news. That is why we need information about what is happening in the area and the region.

What are we now telling them? We are telling them to give up, to let the digital giants dominate this market, crush them, suck them dry. Well, I am saying no. That would be suicide.

Why does my colleague not understand this?

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, I think that is just what I said. I am not sure what he missed in that, but I said this is a piece of legislation that is going to leave them crumbs to do what the member wants and what I want. It is not going to leave them what we think they deserve. This legislation is just not going to do it.

[Lori Idlout, NDP, Nunavut, NU]

Uqaqtittiji, Jeanette Ageson, with the Independent Online News Publishers of Canada, is quoted as saying that, with these amendments, small newsrooms that are operated by start-up entrepreneurial journalists would have been left out of opportunities to negotiate with web giants.

Can the member explain the discrepancy between the Independent Online News Publishers of Canada and how he understands this bill to be?

[Martin Shields, Conservative, Bow River, AB]

Madam Speaker, I appreciated the time that the member and I worked on the indigenous committee together. She brings a unique perspective, and I very much appreciated working with her on the indigenous committee.

She is exactly right in saying what the amendment did not do, which was go far enough to fix that. That is what we worked for. It was an amendment that would have given that type of production the ability to negotiate, but it has been left out because it does not qualify.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Madam Speaker, it is always a pleasure to participate in debate in the House of Commons on behalf of my constituents in Chilliwack—Hope.

I do want to take some latitude, as I have noted has been given to other members, to pay tribute to Jim Carr. I had the honour to serve as the critic for natural resources during the time Jim was the natural resources minister. I disagreed vehemently with Jim on almost all of his policies, but it was impossible to dislike him as a man. I had the opportunity to travel with him, as critics and ministers often do, and we spent more time together than I think I spent with many family members over that period of time, in places like Mexico, Rome and China. I got to see Jim shine in those scenarios.

I even got to see him dance at the opening of a Mexican playground. A Canadian mining company had opened a playground for the children in the community near its operation, and he was not invited to dance, but he took it upon himself to join in the festivities. It is a memory I will always cherish. He was a good man who loved his family, and he will be missed, not only back at home in Manitoba, but also here in the House. I want to pay tribute to him, and I think of his family and his colleagues, who have all been devastated by the news.

I will move now to Bill C-18, the online news act. We have been hearing all day about some of the issues Conservatives have with the bill, and we think it would miss the targets. It would not do what it is intended to do, and it has been a bit rich to hear members of the Liberal government and its coalition partners in the NDP talk about web giants hoovering up advertising revenue. If we go through the public disclosures of their MP expenses, we will see tens of thousands of dollars in voluntary advertising payments to Facebook, so forgive me if I think it is a bit rich to be hearing about these web giants swooping down to hoover up ad revenue when members of Parliament are feeding tens of thousands of dollars into Facebook or Meta's bottom line.

Let us not get too self righteous here about what we are talking about, because members of Parliament, when they want to communicate with their constituents, as do many Liberals and NDP members, have no problem giving money to those web giants to use their platforms to communicate with constituents.

Members do not simply give to their local papers. They do not simply give to local online news organizations. They have willingly given money from their member of Parliament budgets to Facebook and others, so let us just spare the self righteous sanctimony about the evil of Facebook, when they are voluntarily giving it tens of thousands of dollars a year out of their own budgets.

In Chilliwack—Hope we now have only one weekly newspaper in each community. There is the Hope Standard and the Chilliwack Progress, which serve those communities respectively. It used to be, when I was first elected, that there were two local newspapers in Chilliwack, the Chilliwack Times and the Chilliwack Progress, and they both published two papers a week. We are down from two organizations with two newspapers, for a total of four editions a week, to one edition per week.

However, if we ask the Chilliwack Progress's editor, he is quite bullish about its current situation. He talks about its various revenue streams, and whenever somebody calls into question the paper's longevity and whether the Chilliwack Progress will survive, he assures his readers and the people in Chilliwack that it is on a strong financial footing and that they will be just fine.

Out of those closures of some of those newspapers came innovation. Journalists who had been employed, for instance, at the Chilliwack Times took it upon themselves to gather a couple of other journalists, and they formed the Fraser Valley Current.

They put together an online news service that actually uses Twitter and Facebook to distribute its product to our community. They did particularly excellent work during the flood and mudslide events that took place in and around my community in November of last year. They were on the ground, providing detailed analysis, things that, quite frankly, a weekly newspaper just cannot do. That was born out of innovation. They did not wait for, or need, a government incentive to create this. They went out into the marketplace and have been very successful in doing so.

We also have the Fraser Valley News, which is an online organization run, as far as I know, by one journalist who used to work, for many years, in different radio newsrooms right across the country, as most radio news people do. They move around from small town to small town, covering small community events that are ignored by the bigger publications. Don Lehn had the final layoff from the local radio station when it was cutting back on its news services, and he took it upon himself to create the Fraser Valley News, which continues today. Again, he has a business model that seeks online ad revenue, etc. He did not need Bill C-18 to succeed.

We have Fraser Valley Today, which is another online news organization that has come out of when other newspapers have left the town and there is a void. When the newsrooms were cut from the local radio station, there was a void, and it was filled by journalists who wanted to provide a service to our community.

That innovation, the unique business model they have sought out, has been one that has worked for them. My fear was echoed by Jen Gerson at the committee, when she said this about the bill:

[I]t is predicated on a lie. The bill adopts a very ancient complaint of newspaper publishers that aggregation-based news websites and social media networks are unduly profiting by “publishing” our content. However, we know this isn't true. In fact, the value proposition runs in exactly the opposite direction. We publishers are the ones who benefit when a user posts a link to our content on Facebook, Twitter and the like. This free distribution drives traffic to our websites, which we can then try to monetize through subscriptions and advertising.

She went on to say:

I suspect that what we see here is a form of rent-seeking behaviour in which struggling media corporations are using every last iota of their dwindling financial and social capital to lobby for subsidies and regulations like Bill C-18.

I fear that Bill C-18 is going to backfire spectacularly, undermining the very problems it is trying to fix.

Peter Menzies, a former CRTC commissioner, said:

Bill C-18 will only perpetuate a market already distorted by subsidy and it will punish independence.

He went on:

If Parliament values a free press, it will not approve Bill C-18.

He continued:

Bill C-18 is as likely to kill journalism in Canada as it is to save it. The very prospect of it is already perverting news coverage and undermining trust, the commodity upon which the industry depends most. Bill C-18 will permanently entrench the industry's dependency not on the loyalty of citizens, readers and viewers, but upon the good graces of politicians and the ability of offshore, quasi-monopoly tech companies to remain profitable.

Those are some of the people who have been directly involved in the industry. Jen Gerson used to be involved in the traditional news model and has moved to an online subscriber model. She recognizes that this independence and this business model are what work for her, and that organizations who say they need a subsidy model are in fact distorting that market and are going to be competing with her and her organization, which has gone out into the market to seek innovative solutions.

There are local journalists who are struggling, but I think we need to encourage them to use the tools that are available and, quite frankly, to take a look at some of the entities that have succeeded in this market and are innovating and adapting to changes in the way we consume our news.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, advertising on Facebook and advertising in community newspapers, both of which I do, has not compromised in any way my wanting to see this bill pass. The Conservatives who advertise on Facebook take the position, after a reversal, that they no longer support the government's bringing in legislation to ensure that companies like Facebook, YouTube and Google are obligated to support media here in Canada.

I wonder how members of the Conservative Party can justify flipping their position from the last general election, now telling Canadians that this bill is bad for them, when in fact the Bloc, the NDP, the Liberals and I believe the Greens—

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The hon. member for Chilliwack—Hope.

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Madam Speaker, the fact that the Liberals, the NDP and the Bloc support the bill gives me confidence that our opposing it is the right position to take. Quite frankly, the Bloc, the NDP and the Liberals supported the amendments to Bill C-21 until very recently when they started to hear from their constituents.

What I pointed out was the hypocrisy of Liberal and NDP members standing in this place and talking about this magical hoovering up. I kept hearing that the tech giants are hoovering up all of this advertising revenue when no one was forcing Liberal and NDP members of Parliament to give Facebook and Google money from their members' operating budgets to pay for advertising. That was the part I was pointing out. There is a hypocrisy in crying about that and at the same time feeding the problem.

I will take no lessons from the member on this matter. It is a position that we do not support, and we will be happy to oppose this bill.

[John Barlow, Conservative, Foothills, AB]

Madam Speaker, as a proud journalist for almost 25 years and having worked for Charles Clark newspaper in High River, I would say that journalists face, much like politicians nowadays, a lack of public trust. We saw that with the Liberal bailout of the media several years ago, and I know many of my constituents are questioning the integrity of journalists.

When there are government subsidies or government bailouts of the free press, what impact is that having on community trust when it comes to Canadian journalism?

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Madam Speaker, I cannot put it better than the Independent Online News Publishers of Canada, which said:

Any government intervention into the free press, however well-intentioned, must be carefully considered, as there is a potential to warp outcomes, stifle innovation, determine winners and losers, and compromise journalistic independence.

In its current form, Bill C-18...fails this test.

I agree.

[Sylvie Bérubé, Bloc, Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik—Eeyou, QC]

Madam Speaker, with the passing of the Hon. Jim Carr in mind, I would like to begin by offering my condolences to our colleague's family and friends. I would also like to take this opportunity to wish all members of the House a happy holiday season.

Getting back to my colleague's speech, it is important to remember that Meta, the company that owns Facebook, generated $193 million in sales in Canada in 2021 from journalistic content. In Canada, Facebook makes between 35 and 58 times more money from the media than it pays to the media.

Facebook and Google should be forced to share those revenues, and the Conservatives know what “triple, triple, triple” means, so as to ensure that the media wins.

Would my colleague comment on that?

[Mark Strahl, Conservative, Chilliwack—Hope, BC]

Madam Speaker, as I have said, Bill C-18 would, in our view, threaten the independence of local media. It would not allow single-journalist outfits, like those I mentioned in my riding, to qualify. Therefore, we cannot support it.

[Kevin Lamoureux, Liberal, Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons]

Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order.

I suspect that if you were to canvass the House, you would find unanimous consent to allow us to extend Government Orders to deal with this issue, if the debate has collapsed, so that we can have a vote to possibly pass it with a division.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

All those opposed to the hon. member moving the motion will please say nay.

It is agreed.

The House has heard the terms of the motion.

All those opposed to the motion will please say nay.

(Motion agreed to)

Is the House ready for the question?

[Some hon. members]

Question.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

The question is on the motion.

If a member of a recognized party present in the House wishes that the motion be carried or carried on division or wishes to request a recorded division, I would invite them to rise and indicate it to the Chair.

[Chris Bittle, Liberal, St. Catharines, ON]

Madam Speaker, we request a recorded division.

[The Assistant Deputy Speaker (Mrs. Alexandra Mendès), Alexandra Mendes]

Pursuant to order made on Thursday, June 23, the division stands deferred until Wednesday, December 14, at the expiry of the time provided for Oral Questions.

It being 5:33 p.m., the House will now proceed to the consideration of Private Members' Business as listed on today's Order Paper.

The House resumed from December 13 consideration of the motion that Bill C-18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada, be read the third time and passed.

[The Speaker, Anthony Rota]

Pursuant to order made on Thursday, June 23, the House will now proceed to the taking of the deferred recorded division on the motion at third reading stage of Bill C-18.

The question is on the motion.

(The House divided on the motion, which was agreed to on the following division:)

Vote #244

[The Speaker, Anthony Rota]

I declare the motion carried.

(Bill read the third time and passed)