Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 28th, 2023

[Imran Ahmed]

I really can't. You'd have to ask them why on earth they took the decision to sweep away their shame under the carpet. These companies.... Again, we see them playing ball with repressive regimes around the world, while at the same time showing a complete lack of respect to a democratically elected government such as that in Canada.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

Thank you.

We'll go to the second round. It will be a five-minute round for the Liberals and Conservatives.

We'll start with Marilyn Gladu for five minutes for the Conservatives.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today. I'm going to start with Dr. Geist.

Dr. Geist, you may have seen some of my interventions here at committee on C-18, where I did start by pointing out to the then minister of heritage what had happened in Australia when Meta blocked news content. I asked him what actions he was going to take to make sure that didn't happen in Canada. He said it was a simple business decision.

When Meta and Google were here, I asked them whether, if C-18 was passed in its current form and if the government made them pay for people to share news links, it would be a reasonable business decision to decide not to do that because they would have to pay. They both said it was, so I was not surprised when this result happened, although the Liberals and NDP seemed to be shocked and surprised. It looks like it's had very negative impacts on small and local businesses, when the whole point of C-18 was to try to protect small, local news outlets.

Were you surprised? What do you think the impacts have been?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

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.

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

Thank you.

It appears there are even more harms coming from the way C-18 was implemented than expected. You may have seen the Substack from my colleague Michelle Rempel Garner yesterday, where she expressed concern about how the rollout of C-18 was going to impact especially diaspora and ethnic small media.

Could you comment on what you think the impacts of C-18 have been on them?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

With your permission, I'd like to expand that not just to C-18 but to C-11 as well.

One of the real concerns with the legislative approach that this committee and that the legislation has taken on both the streaming act and on the news act has been to have significant negative implications for access to foreign content for diaspora communities. One of the real fears of what we're seeing play out at the CRTC is the likelihood that the increased cost of regulation and registration—but even more than registration, the actual costs of regulation—could well lead many foreign streaming services to simply block the Canadian market, because it doesn't become economical anymore. It's particularly those communities that may be most directly affected. The same is true on the news side.

Yes, this was a likely outcome. Again, I'm going to come back to my opening remarks to emphasize that, if you weren't listening to these players, if you decided all you needed to do was by and large listen to News Media Canada and a few other cheerleaders, then you'd miss that large story.

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

Let's go there for a minute.

You said News Media Canada was the biggest lobbyist on this bill, and they got everything they wanted. We saw, immediately after C-18 was passed, that Bell Media decided to shut down over 1,200 news outlets that were local, and Métro followed suit. It looks, at the end of the day, like C-18 utterly failed to meet its objective and, rather, lobbyists and the CBC, Bell and Rogers ended up with the lion's share of the taxpayers' money.

Would you agree with that?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

I'd say nobody has ended up with anything right now.

There is certainly some hope that there may be a deal with Google, and if there is one, then there is some revenue. I have to say, given what seems to be a permanent position, where Facebook, Meta and Instagram will not be coming back into the news market under this current environment, it's going to be very hard to make up the damage that's been caused by this legislation already. I think this helps explain what we just saw in the fall economic statement, which was the $129 million supplementing and more than doubling what's available per journalist as part of the journalism labour tax credit.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

Thank you, Mr. Geist.

We'll move to the Liberals for five minutes.

Go ahead, Michael Coteau.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today. My first question is for Mr. Ahmed.

Thank you for being here. I was really compelled by many of the things you said in your opening statement.

I want to ask you if you could give us, basically, a perspective on the trajectory of hate over the the last decade—we've seen a substantial growth in online hate—and on how larger platforms have contributed to those milestones within that trajectory of the potential growth or decline in online hate.

[Imran Ahmed]

Sure.

With regard to observations on the actual metrics, clearly there's been a substantial rise in online hate, and that is having an off-line effect. When I started the CCDH in 2016, it was somewhat controversial to say that what was happening online was having off-line impacts. I kept being told that I was crazy for saying that. By now, there's no one arguing that.

What we are seeing, however, is an increase in the normalization, so the fringe ideologies are becoming mainstream through the algorithmic action of companies trying to put the most engaging, controversial, chewy content into as many timelines as possible. It's the normalization of fringe concepts.

Second, we are seeing an increase in the volume of hateful content, which is actually having an impact on BIPOC communities and on LGBTQ+ communities. I'm brown, and I wouldn't go out in my streets in Washington, D.C., if people screamed abuse at me every time I went out. I'd just stay at home. It's the same with social media platforms. Who on earth wants to go on a platform that's rife.... As we found when Elon Musk took over X, there was a 202% increase in the volume of hate speech against Black people when he took over. Why would people want to post on that platform, which is rife with people using the most offensive terms possible? There's that.

Second of all, we're seeing hybridization of movements. Because of that churning activity that I described with Instagram with “Malgorithm”, where conspiracy theories are being cross-fertilized, we are seeing the development of new, online-first conspiracy theories. I would argue that the “great reset” is a very good example of such a hybridized conspiracy theory, in which convergence between conspiracist movements and hateful movements is leading to new hybridized ideologies. That actually is happening at warp speed, so it's making a more vociferous and more complicated threat environment. I'm sure that your national security people are telling you the same thing.

The reason for that is the companies' algorithms, but it's also their failure to enforce their own policies, the community standards that are our responsibilities as users and, therefore, our corollary right to expect others to abide by them and for someone to enforce those rules. All in all, it is a bit of a mess.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

The spread of online hate is actually monetized by platforms. Is that correct?

[Imran Ahmed]

Yes.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Do you think these platforms that participate in making money off of spreading hate have the ability to self-regulate, or has it gone past that point to where there needs to be more government regulation in order to prevent the spread of all these falsehoods?

[Imran Ahmed]

Could they self-regulate? Yes. Will they self-regulate? No.

By now, the indulgence of people who once were young, cool, liberal-seeming, San Francisco executives—of course they're going to try to do the right thing.... I think they've lost the ability to claim that this was the benefit of the doubt. It is time for comprehensive regulation as the European Union has passed with the Digital Services Act and as the United Kingdom, my home country, has passed with the Online Safety Act, which finally received royal assent a few weeks ago.

I think it is about time that Canada joined the rest of the world in promulgating legislation that will actually ensure that the negative externalities of these companies and their failures to think about safety by design, their negligent product design, actually result in economic disincentives that create a culture in which these companies start to think about the impact they have on our information ecosystem and, therefore, our world.

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

Thank you. We're right on time.

We'll move now to the Bloc for two and a half minutes with Mr. Champoux, please.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Roy, I'm going to go back to the subject that Mr. Ahmed addressed.

Legislation such as the Online Safety Act, which was recently passed in the United Kingdom, as Mr. Ahmed said, and the regulations introduced in some European Union countries impose serious penalties on the digital giants.

Do you think these kinds of legislative instruments would work well in Canada? Should we follow that path to prevent online violence?

[Jean-Hugues Roy]

I've always wondered why we in Canada couldn't do what the European Union is managing to do. Once again, it's solely up to you parliamentarians to do it.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I conclude from what you're saying that you'll be pleased to come back when we discuss those bills.

Won't you?

[Jean-Hugues Roy]

With pleasure.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Mr. Geist, earlier you talked about the lobbyists who intervened in the study of Bill C‑18. You mentioned News Media Canada in particular. You're right in saying its members were very active. That organization represents 830 newspapers, dailies, weeklies and community newspapers across Canada. Since it's the group most affected by the crisis, particularly as a result of the domination by digital businesses, it's quite natural for the members of that organization to be the most active group seeking regulations.

I understand that we can have very broad discussions regarding the business models of both digital and conventional businesses, which perhaps should be reviewed.

I recently suggested that we take a break and conduct an extensive study on the state of conventional media in Quebec and Canada, particularly on the state of news media.

Do you agree with that idea? Isn't it time we held a kind of summit to review those models and look to the future with a clearer idea of what lies ahead?

[Dr. Michael Geist]

There may not be a lot of time, but thank you for the question.

I would say that I think the time to conduct the kinds of studies you're talking about—to better understand the sector, to better understand the digital sector—is, in many ways, before you jump in with legislation.

Candidly, even the title of this hearing seems to presuppose exactly what the outcome is going to be. As a researcher, typically I start with the question, conduct the research and then come to the conclusion. The title of this study seems to have the conclusion already there, and now we're going to fill in the blanks.

To answer your question, it's the same thing. To put forward the legislation and then study the sector...? I think we should have done it the other way around.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

Thank you for that. We have to move on.

I gave you an extra 30 seconds, Mr. Champoux.

We move now to Mr. Julian from the New Democratic Party.

Go ahead, Peter.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Roy, we hear about islamophobic, anti-semitic, homophobic and racist attacks, which have an impact in real life. We know there's a connection between what people see online and what's conveyed in the real world. Earlier it was mentioned that we're subsidizing Meta and Google to the tune of more than $1 billion a year. The Library of Parliament calculated that number.

You mentioned intimidation tactics. We're still subsidizing companies that refuse to respect our democracy and engage in practices that undermine our society. Many people feel that those practices trigger violence.

Do you find that disturbing?