Canadian Heritage Committee on Jan. 29th, 2021

[Heather McPherson, NDP, Edmonton Strathcona, AB]

Thank you.

The other issue that I take a bit of offence to as well is that when my colleague from the Conservatives asked about your relationship with Facebook—or the department's relationship with Facebook—and the consultation being done with Facebook, you compared the consultation with Facebook to meeting with the NCCM. I find that very problematic.

When we see the vast amount of hatred towards the Muslim community on Facebook, to compare those two is massively problematic, I think. One of my questions is about, for example, the Proud Boys, which was recently labelled by this Parliament as a terrorist entity. We know that Facebook has allowed the Proud Boys to organize and share their content on its platform, as well as to promote their posts to their users.

Knowing this, why do you think that it is acceptable for you or your officials to have meetings with Facebook about legislation such as Bill C-10 and presumably the legislation that will be seen on hate speech?

[Steven Guilbeault, Liberal, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

I'm not sure I understand the question.

If we're doing legislation, we should gather as wide an array of opinions and points of view as possible to ensure that we have all the information we need as legislators when we do move ahead with legislation.

As an environmentalist I would talk to people in the oil and gas sector all the time to understand what they were thinking. Should we only be talking with these people—that would be hugely problematic. That's not at all what we're doing. We've consulted about 50 to 60 organizations—and we'd be happy to share the list with you—specifically on the issue of online hate. That's not broadcasting or what we're doing on media, but specifically on online hate.

Yes, we spoke to Google and Facebook, but we spoke to a bunch of other organizations as well.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Minister. I appreciate that.

I'd like to thank the minister and his staff for being with us today. I'm going to have to break very quickly and suspend and get ready for our next guests.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, folks. We're now back in session for the second part of our Facebook issue here, which is the motion that was passed back in late 2020.

I'm going to introduce Mr. Chan first.

Mr. Chan, if you wish, please introduce the folks with you who are from Facebook. Following that, we'll proceed with your five minutes for opening remarks.

Thank you again for joining us.

[Kevin Chan, Global Director and Head of Public Policy, Facebook Canada, Facebook Inc.]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'm Kevin Chan. I'm the director of policy for Canada. I am pleased to also be joined here today with my colleagues: Marc Dinsdale who is the head of news partnerships, and Rachel Curran who is a policy manager at the company.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Okay. Please proceed for your five minutes, and then following that we'll go into questioning.

[Kevin Chan]

Mr. Chair, members of the committee, I thank you for inviting us to this meeting.

My name is Kevin Chan, and I'm head of policy at Facebook Canada.

I understand the committee would like to discuss a job opportunity we had open last year. The facts are the following. The job was publicly listed and openly advertised on the Facebook careers site, shared widely on social media and with a broad set of public policy professionals in the private, non-profit and public sectors. Interested and qualified candidates were required to apply online and then went through a rigorous interview process. I am pleased to share with you that Rachel Curran is the successful candidate from that process, and she is with us today. She is the only one who received an offer of employment, and she accepted it.

I also understand that some committee members are interested in the flow of people from one sector to another. Public policy professionals regularly cross over between the private, non-profit and public sectors This kind of cross-sector experience helps build a better understanding of complex and nuanced economic and social issues.

The public service of Canada facilitates this practice. Interchange Canada, a cross-sectoral career mobility mechanism, has, since 1971, offered public servants opportunities to “build a better understanding and improve networks between the core public administration and other business sectors”.

The specific allegation that Facebook tried to recruit directly from Canadian Heritage is false, as was noted in our letter to the editor of the National Post, as was a headline about the matter that appeared in the print edition of that publication.

We will of course be happy to answer any questions you may have on this subject, but first we would like to tell you what we've been doing to support Canadian arts and culture since the beginning of the pandemic.

A recent New York Times headline referred to a “Great Cultural Depression” in the wake of COVID-19, and that is not an exaggeration. Many performance halls, venues and festivals across our country have been closed since March 2020, and the impact on the performing arts has been devastating. In the early weeks of the pandemic, I reached out to officials at the National Arts Centre to see how we could work together quickly to help. On March 19, 2020, Facebook and the NAC launched #CanadaPerforms, a $100,000 relief fund to support Canadian artists for their live online performances.

#CanadaPerforms has now grown beyond our wildest imagination, bringing in additional financial support from other partners, growing the relief fund to $700,000. In those very difficult first months of the pandemic, we were able to support 700 Canadian artists and published authors, and their performances reached 4.75 million people who tuned in from coast to coast to coast.

I'll now turn it over the Marc Dinsdale, our head of news partnerships.

[Marc Dinsdale, Head, Media Partnerships, Facebook Canada, Facebook Inc.]

Thank you.

We are all aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the revenue pressures faced by news publishers. In response, we moved quickly to try to help. We announced a grant program for 85 Canadian local news publishers for emergency expenses associated with COVID-19 reporting, totalling more than $1 million. We also invested $1 million in a partnership with the Canadian Press to launch the Facebook-Canadian Press News Fellowship, creating eight new journalism positions across Canada that are directly adding capacity for reporting from local communities. We just announced two additional indigenous news fellowships.

My role and the role of my team is to partner directly with news publishers to maximize the value that free Facebook tools provide for their businesses. This includes free distribution that sends people directly to their websites, a value we estimate to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year for the Canadian news industry.

In addition, over the past four years, Facebook has invested more than $10 million in Canada's information ecosystem, and we look forward to continuing these partnerships. We're committed to doing this not because information is an important revenue generator for us—it's not—but because it's good for Canadian society and democracy.

I'll turn it back to Kevin now for some closing remarks.

[Kevin Chan]

Thanks, Marc.

I'd like to end with some thoughts on Internet regulation.

Facebook welcomes more regulation.

We support strong privacy laws that provide citizens with clear protections and hold companies like ours accountable when they make mistakes. We agree that multilateral tax agreements should be updated through the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, process in which Canada participates.

We agree that regulations could set baseline standards for what kind of content is prohibited online and require social media companies to build systems to enforce these standards. The status quo of having private companies decide what is and isn't acceptable speech online is not sustainable longer term and lacks transparency and accountability.

Finally, we agree that more needs to be done to support the future of journalism. That said, we do think it's important to clarify that people and publishers choose to share news links on our platform, not Facebook. Requiring Facebook to pay for this, as proposed in Australia, doesn't recognize this fact.

We look forward to working collaboratively across sectors to develop fact-based frameworks to ensure a thriving Canadian news ecosystem.

With that, Mr. Chair—and apologies for the technical troubles—we are happy to answer any questions from the committee.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

That's all right, Mr. Chan. Thank you for that.

Mr. Waugh, you have six minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you Mr. Chan, Mr. Dinsdale and Ms. Curran.

Ms. Curran, I wasn't here when you were in the PMO. I got here late in 2015. You were in the PMO for a long time.

Is it typical when you get an outside organization, like Facebook in this case, to send a note to an employee of Canadian Heritage asking if you could circulate this job application around? I believe personally that there is a conflict of interest in this because Facebook does so much with the Government of Canada, and Canadian Heritage in particular.

Either you or Mr. Chan can answer that, then we'll move on to a couple of other things.

[Kevin Chan]

Go ahead, Rachel.

[Rachel Curran, Policy Manager, Facebook Canada, Facebook Inc.]

No, go ahead, Kevin. I was going to refer that to you.

The public policy talent pool in Canada is quite small. Kevin can explain more about this, but it's quite common for job postings to be circulated widely in the private sector and the public sector, among government employees.

Kevin can talk a little bit more about that, but this is common practice.

[Kevin Chan]

This was a public job poster. It was circulated widely. As I indicated, there are actually instruments within the public service of Canada to very much facilitate this kind of cross-sectoral mobility.

I think the goal is to come to better outcomes for the country. That is why we have people who go to different sectors. I've done it and Ms. Curran has done it. This is actually something that helps create better understanding and bridges those divides that I think I heard expressed earlier as concerns.

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

Thank you.

I just finished The Tangled Garden. That was an interesting book. You've had some input on that, along with Richard Stursberg.

I noticed yesterday that the independent Oversight Board overturned four of five of Facebook's decisions to remove posts with controversial content, including two cases of hate speech.

Can you comment on that? The minister before you started talking about hate speech and what's coming forward. Yesterday was the first time, I recall, that the independent board overturned four of the five cases they had in front of them.

[Kevin Chan]

You are absolutely right. This was the first time the Oversight Board has issued decisions. It is still a very new board. It is a supranational governance structure that oversees and is the final board of appeal on all content decisions Facebook makes.

You are correct that yesterday, of the five decisions the Oversight Board issued decisions on, it overturned four of our decisions. As per the arrangement that we are bound to with this independent Oversight Board, we will honour and implement the decisions the Oversight Board made. We will take their policy recommendations and advice as advisory to our own content policies going forward.

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

Mr. Chan, in your introduction you talked about the millions of dollars Facebook contributes to Canadian media.

We've heard from coast to coast, as you know, and the newspaper industry does not share your excitement. Talk about the newspaper industry.

Everybody watched France. It has an agreement with Google and, I think, Facebook. Australia does not. The minister was before you a couple of moments ago. We don't have an agreement yet. We don't have a made-in-Canada agreement, which we desperately need.

The concern through the newspaper association—rightfully or wrongfully in your mind—is that you're stealing their content and paying nothing for it. That has been an issue for a number of years. Would you please address that today?

[Kevin Chan]

Absolutely, sir.

Specifically on this question of stealing, Facebook does not steal the content of newspapers and news publishers. As I indicated—

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

Do you pay for it?

[Kevin Chan]

We do pay for some news where there is a voluntary arrangement with that.

As I indicated, I think the challenge for us is very much an Internet mechanical problem. This is to say that if a publisher shares content onto Facebook and we are not able to control how much and how often they share, and if we are then required to pay for what they share, then I think you can appreciate how quickly that breaks down and we're unable to accommodate.

Having said that, as my colleague Marc Dinsdale said in the opening statement, on the flip side of this value proposition is the free distribution that we provide to publishers. As Marc said, we are looking at something in the order of hundreds of millions of dollars in value to the newspaper industry though free distribution on Facebook in Canada. We do think it's important that this be acknowledged and recognized.

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

I would agree with you there, “acknowledged and recognized”.

Yet, I do see the bottom lines of Postmedia, Torstar and such, and they would not share in the excitement. They see their product exclusively on Facebook and they're not getting their due share of revenue from it.

Going forward—and it doesn't have anything to do with Bill C-10, the Broadcasting Act—there is a media component here that the minister said we'll bring forward in the coming months. Newspapers are dropping like flies in this country. This is one of the biggest issues, if not the biggest issue, right now in that industry. They're getting nothing from you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Scott Simms]

Thank you, Mr. Waugh.

We now to our next questioner. Mr. Housefather, for six minutes please.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chan, Mr. Dinsdale and Ms. Curran, it's great to see you here. Thank you for coming.

I have three quick things. First, I think the email between Mr. Chan and Mr. Ripley has been adequately dealt with.

Second, I greatly appreciate Facebook's recent decision to ban Holocaust denial on its platform. I also appreciate your quarterly transparency reports. I wish that other platforms would do the same.

Third, many of my constituents and I share a real frustration about the growing amount of anti-Semitism on the platform and the lack of response with respect to complaints that are made. I'd request to have a call with you guys on that, separately, if that's okay.

I have a lot of questions. If you can answer in one word yes or no, or briefly, that would be great. If not, I'll ask you to follow up in writing.

There are about two and a half billion people who are regular users of Facebook and about 23 million in Canada. A number of those people do post messages that violate Facebook policies. Would you agree that Facebook has an obligation to deal with that content, Mr. Chan?

[Kevin Chan]

We have a responsibility to remove anything that violates our community standards, yes, sir.

[Anthony Housefather, Liberal, Mount Royal, QC]

You'd agree also that the people you employ in content moderation play a very important role in that. Is that correct?