Thanks for the question.
No, I wasn't surprised. I appeared before this committee a couple of times on C-18, and I thought that if you understood the business model that existed....
We've heard a lot of the negative aspects of the business model, which is why I think there is a role to play for regulation when it comes to some of the harms that have been articulated, but that wasn't what C-18 was about. If you understood the business model of trying, as we've heard, to keep people on the platform, capture information and deliver ads to them, the idea that news content was something they couldn't live without never made much sense. The reality is that it's the sort of content that actually sends people away, off the site. Given what had been taking place, it seemed to me that this was likely to occur.
I also have to say that sometimes it felt as if people didn't fully think through some of the implications. I mean, with all respect, it was this committee that established a specific exception for campus broadcasters to include them in the legislation, and we just heard today that campus news isn't included. This committee literally included it within one of its amendments so they would be eligible under the system.
It's also this committee that passed legislation that said that facilitating access to all news, whether in Canada or anywhere, brings you within the scope of being a digital news intermediary. You could have made the choice to say only news that's from a qualified Canadian journalism organization or only those who qualify for payments, which actually would have excluded some of these other entities and would have excluded many of the foreign entities, but that wasn't the choice that was made.
It seems to me these were the choices made in the legislation and the outcomes were pretty predictable.