Canadian Heritage Committee on Dec. 5th, 2023

[Dr. Courtney Radsch]

I could try to answer in French.

It's very important to have several sources of funding for the media [Technical difficulty], from the government, the platforms, advertising, and to have a number of funding options.

then the influence of one actor or one entity over news does not become so important and dependence is not so important. That is why it's important to look at government subsidies, taxation, and benefits, etc., as well as appropriate compensation by tech platforms and a robust digital advertising infrastructure.

However, let's remember that local advertising is also affected by big tech. We have Amazon putting local businesses out of business or constraining them to their logic. These are all intertwined. The role of big tech is seen throughout the entire advertising ecosystem, which affects directly the digital advertising that news organizations can obtain but also the simple ability of local businesses that used to advertise in news to remain sustainable.

I do worry about capture, but when you have this type of regulatory scenario where you have an independent regulator, you have distance between the fund that is created and the ultimate beneficiaries. That is beneficial. You need to have multiple types of entities that are represented on that board.

I would just go back to say that in addition to the Swiss study, American researchers recently took the study and looked at what would happen in the American market based on revenues and usage there. They found that it should amount to $12 billion that the platform.... Well, for Google it would be about $10 billion owed to news organizations. I think we need to reconceptualize how we're thinking about value.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

I will now go to the Bloc Québécois and Martin Champoux.

You have six minutes, please, Martin.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I hope the connection is good enough to provide my anglophone colleagues with acceptable interpretation, and I would ask them to tell us right away if that is not the case. There do appear to be some technical problems this morning.

I'd like to thank the witnesses who are with us this morning. Their testimony and comments are very interesting.

I am pleased to see you again, Mr. Trudel. Once again, I'd like to thank you for shedding light on a matter you feel strongly about.

I'm now going to talk about something less pleasant.

Layoffs were announced at CBC/Radio-Canada on the news yesterday. I know that will affect a lot of people. It will certainly have an influence on the quality of the news and on the transmission of Quebec and francophone culture. Needless to say, if some 250 jobs at CBC/Radio-Canada are cut, in programming services alone, there will doubtless be consequences.

How would the current context be different today if we had taken action earlier and followed the recommendations of the Yale report in which you were involved?

If we had acted earlier to regulate the web giants in the information and culture sector, do you think we'd be where we are today?

[Pierre Trudel]

Unfortunately, Canada and other countries have lagged far behind in implementing measures to ensure that the ground rules are the same for national stakeholders, by which I mean national companies, and international ones, meaning the web companies.

We've lost decades by doing nothing about the tech giants, by taking a romantic view of the marvels of the Internet. And of course a state of affairs was allowed to establish itself, one from or which it is now extremely difficult to extricate ourselves.

If we are to succeed in making up for lost time and doing damage control on the current state of affairs, efforts will have to be redoubled. I believe it requires an urgent intensification of collaborative work with other countries because this erosion of the media structure, which has hit Canada hard, is also affecting all democratic countries.

The bottom line is that I think this challenge should have been addressed much earlier. The real challenge will be to redistribute the resources that have captured the attention of people who will henceforth be online, meaning just about everyone. Rather than doing that, we are still working within older models.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Your answer raises a lot of questions.

There has been a proliferation of cutbacks. For some time now, we've been hearing about a new one every two weeks or so. There have been cutbacks in news and in the production of local or regional content, particularly on the francophone side, which is what interests me the most. I get the impression that the cutbacks are also having a nefarious impact. It has been weakening news services everywhere in Quebec and French Canada. The main impact of that is that it may well mean even more of a shift towards digital companies.

Do you get the impression that this is drawing us into a rather pessimistic spiral?

[Pierre Trudel]

Yes, that's the impression I'm getting, and it's important to ask why it's like that. It's because advertising revenue is now being generated on platforms from which the public, and in particular young people, are getting more and more of their news content. Many of our fellow citizens are now spending much more time on these platforms, which don't feel any obligation to disseminate news that has been gathered using traditional journalistic methods. So much so that a company like Meta can say that it's going to censor Canadian media, ostensibly on grounds that it's a way of fighting against legislation it doesn't like.

Those companies ought to have been told that they wouldn't have the right to practise any censorship, except when national laws impose restrictions, and that they would have to use some of the resources they have earned from increased user attention to be partly reinvested in the production of Canadian news and content. That's the Canadian model that has been around for many decades, and it's a model that should have been continued and strengthened.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Monsieur Trudel.

Martin, your time is up. I'm so sorry.

I now go to the New Democrats, with Peter Julian for six minutes.

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

Thank you to all the witnesses for attending. They have added some very interesting perspectives to our study.

I'd like to start with Ms. Kotsis.

I want to thank Unifor for its defence of journalists and workers in the media sector.

I note that the Unifor survey that came out last year found that “60.6% of [journalists] had been harassed in the field [and] 69% experienced anxiety as a result of their work.” It goes on to say, “The Unifor survey found much of the abuse contained racist and misogynist attacks, including threats of violence against the journalists and their families.”

You've noted in your brief to this committee about big tech “allowing for the proliferation of toxic and hate-filled harassment and abuse on their platforms”. I note that far-right politicians have been attacking professional, fact-based journalists. You noted in your presentation that we need to “stand up to bullies”.

How should the federal government be acting to stand up to bullies so that fact-based journalists can actually operate in our country without the threats and intimidation that they are getting online and from the far right?

[Julie Kotsis]

Thank you.

Through you, Madam Chair, I'm going to defer to my colleague, Marc Hollin, on this question.

[Marc Hollin, National Representative, Unifor]

Thank you.

There are a number of things we believe the federal government can do to limit the amount of toxic harassment and abuse that journalists and media workers experience. First of all, we tend to look at this issue with a two-pronged approach. One is to provide support for media workers and journalists who are the victims of harassment. They need immediate support in most cases. Any response should be built around that idea.

Then, of course, the second prong is to prevent the harassment from happening in the first place and to hold the perpetrators accountable.

One thing we would like to see, which we've recommended in a number of releases, is tougher take-down requirements. One example of a tool that's been used in other jurisdictions is requiring the platforms, when there's a complaint, to act quickly—sometimes within 24 hours or faster—to take down online content that is hate-filled or harassing and abusive.

There are a number of other tools that we would recommend. I know that a number of countries are in the process of developing some version of an online harms bill. That is an extraordinarily fraught bit of legislation, no matter where it's undertaken.

Really, we fall back on some basic principles around platform accountability. The platforms have to take more responsibility themselves, and they have to be made to take accountability by legislators. In many ways, the platforms want to have their cake and eat it, too. They want to appear to be passive entities, like a community bulletin board where users just post material and share TikTok videos and interesting content, when in fact, as the witnesses today and other witnesses have stated, we know that the tech giants control, moderate, mitigate and frankly profit from the transition of information and content in a myriad of ways.

We know that they're capable, when it suits them and they profit from it, of dealing with online content and with all sorts of content in different formats. For us, falling back on the principle of platform accountability is the number one way to make sure that the tech giants aren't able to sit back and say, “It's not us. We're just this friendly, passive entity. We're just a friendly, neighbourhood bulletin board.”

We know that's not true. It's factually untrue.

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

Yes, we heard testimony from the Center for Countering Digital Hate. In their report, “Malgorithm”, they found evidence that Meta's Instagram recommendation algorithm is “actively pushing radicalising, extremist misinformation to users”, including anti-Semitic and far-right, white supremacist tropes.

Thank you for that.

As you're probably aware, Canada heavily subsidized Meta and Google to the extent of over $1 billion a year in indirect subsidies. These are writeoffs that businesses can undertake by advertising on the Meta platform.

Does it make any sense at all for us to be massively subsidizing Meta, when they are refusing to heed democratic decisions in Canada and when they are promoting such hate in the pipeline of hate, as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Centre have so clearly spelled out?

[Marc Hollin]

Through you, Madam Chair, again, certainly not. It is our belief that the government should not be providing even more financial incentives to these companies. Really, we fall back on the principle of them paying their fair share. These vastly wealthy global digital companies should be forced, if necessary, to pay their fair share in every aspect of their presence in any given jurisdiction.

It's really a question of national sovereignty and the right of legislators and citizens to enact rules of self-governance and to expect any entity that exists within that area to abide by them. It's really about those platforms paying their fair share and not being given a free ride, especially while they're not only allowing hate but, frankly, profiting from it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Hollin, and thank you, Peter.

I'm going to go to the second round now. It's a five-minute round.

I'll begin with Kevin Waugh for the Conservative Party. Kevin, you have five minutes.

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

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Here's some disclosure up front: I spent 39 years as a Unifor member. I was a media guy in the private sector, meaning CTV as opposed to public. When I hear you guests come on and say it's a level playing field and all this.... It has never been a level playing field. CBC has never had to undergo, as a public broadcaster, the threats that I see with the private, because when you lose a rating point in the news hour, you lose news directors and you lose production people, whereas the CBC is unaccounted for.

It doesn't have one of its networks as number one in the country. It never has. Its ratings are brutal throughout this whole country, and it's unaccounted for, yet it gets the $1.3 million or $1.4 million. Now it can get $400 million in advertising and from the government, Google and so on.

It's never been a level playing field.

Mr. Menzies, I'll start with you, because you have three decades in journalism.

I'm right. It has never been and never will be a level playing field, so we should understand that in this country.

[Peter Menzies]

We don't have that. You know, broadcasters complained about having the CBC use their taxes to compete against them for years, and we saw that when I was at the CRTC, but it was okay, because everybody was still making money then. Everybody was still making lots of money, so it didn't happen so much.

In 2016, this committee heard from a number of newspaper publishers. I recall distinctly The Globe and Mail's presentation, in which they encouraged the committee to have the CBC not expand its online business because that was...I think The Globe and Mail described the CBC as their greatest private sector competitor in that area.

I'm not personally opposed to the idea of there being a public broadcaster and there being a good public broadcaster. I saw for myself, when I was the Alberta and the Northwest Territories commissioner, the value that CBC North added to very remote regions and small, what I think are described these days as news deserts. I'm not opposed to that at all.

What I am opposed to is this unlevel playing field that is before the media industry. Notwithstanding all the issues with big tech and all those other things, as Ms. Radsch said, we need a diversity of sources of revenue for media not just to be independent, but to be seen to be independent. As long as the CBC is unbalancing the playing field, we're not going to be able to get there.

Therefore, I'm asking this committee and its members to really take that message forward. Can we please get the playing field level? Then we can have a good discussion about the multiple things we need to do to make journalism flourish again in this country.

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

Okay. I have to move on.

It's $1.3 billion, not $1.3 million, as I said. It's with a “b” for CBC.

On digital news.... You pointed this out, because that has been the deciding factor in the last five years in this country. CBC is stealing reporters from newspapers and local markets to do the digital. That is what is killing the newspapers. That is what's killing independent TV and radio stations. They simply cannot compete against the CBC digitally.

In Britain, the government has restricted the BBC on its digital platform. I think that's what's needed in this country to make it a so-called level playing field.

Do you agree with me?

[Peter Menzies]

I think that could be part of the discussion. It's not a recommendation I've taken up myself.

Like I said, I think the first step is getting the CBC to become a public broadcaster again. There's a lot to say about how it might be funded, how it might sustain itself and how it might compete elsewhere. Personally, I think the idea of having a Creative Commons licence for CBC content would go a long way toward doing that, so all CBC content could be made available to all of its competitors inside the country for free. If it's publicly funded information, there's no reason it shouldn't be publicly shared.

That being said, your idea could have merit, as well. I think it's part of an urgent discussion. I don't want to say “longer discussion”, because I don't want to get into one of those thumb-sucking “Whither the CBC?” conversations. We need to move quickly. I think matters are urgent for the news industry, and some grown-up decisions have to be made.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Kevin. That's it. You ended your time.

Now, we go to the Liberals.

Ms. Anju Dhillon, you have five minutes.

[Anju Dhillon, Liberal, Dorval—Lachine—LaSalle, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I'd like to start with Dr. Radsch.

My first question is about your testimony today.

You spoke about it somewhat, but could you please add anything you think would be pertinent, in terms of whether this new Google agreement will better help journalists and Canadians, and in what way?

Thank you so much.

[Dr. Courtney Radsch]

Thank you so much.

I think the agreement will help journalists and the media in Canada [Technical difficulty—Editor] for negotiations. One of the things that—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'm sorry, Dr Radsch. We're having problems with the sound again.

I noticed that, when you move your hands, there is a little.... Perhaps you could try to be very still when speaking.

Thank you.

[Dr. Courtney Radsch]

Okay. I'm sorry. I'll try not to speak with my hands.

What I was saying was this: Part of what this act does is create a forum where all publishers have the opportunity to come to a negotiating table, because one of the biggest challenges I've heard from media and journalists around the world—I've interviewed and surveyed hundreds of them over the past two years as part of this research—is that they have no way to get in touch with the platforms. Even when they are fact-checking partners and even when they've attended training, they're unable to get in touch with the platforms. They can't even get verified on the platform, much less get a negotiating opportunity.

That is one of the most important things this legislation does. It also creates a precedent that says, “When you are creating a company that becomes valuable off the backs of other industries' work, they need to be compensated.” I think that's an important part of what this legislation does.

Furthermore, we've seen around the world that Meta and Google are trying to actively head off this type of legislation, despite the fact that there is growing momentum around the world to force big tech platforms—as well as, again, generative AI systems and platforms, many of which are dominated by the same big tech firms—to pay for the news they use.

This is a very important stake in the ground that I think will benefit Canadian media, as well as, potentially, media around the world. It is adding to this momentum. It's an attempt to at least.... I don't think you can even say this is rebalancing the playing field, because the playing field is so skewed. It is a little drop in the bucket.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Excuse me, Dr. Radsch. We're told the interpreters cannot interpret at the moment. I don't know what the problem is.

Perhaps we can suspend and hold you at this particular point in your testimony, in order to see what the problem is.

[Philip Lawrence, Conservative, Northumberland—Peterborough South, ON]

On a point of order, Madam Chair, in all candour, I have enjoyed this witness's testimony, but we are getting into the latter half of the meeting. We have heard the testimony.

If interpretation for languages is not possible, I don't think we should ask any more questions of this witness, as it would be unfair to our francophone listeners, as well as to our participants.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Lawrence, for that suggestion, but I think we should allow witnesses to answer questions. We cannot restrict that. We're trying to see if we can do something about the interpretation.

There seems to be a lot of trouble today. I am told by another committee that West Block is the worst place for audio. There's always a problem. I don't know what it is. Is it the way the rooms are configured? Is it the bricks in the building? I have no idea what's happening, but I've been on another committee that has a lot of trouble in West Block. I have no idea if that's the issue.