I would say that if this were a bill about journalism, I think there would have been a lot more support for it. We should be clear that it's not. It mentions the word “journalism” once, with respect to qualified journalism organizations. It has three sections that mention journalists.
It's not about journalism or journalists. It's about funding some of these legacy media organizations. In fact, there are no standards with respect to journalism at all, and you need to contrast that with what the government has approved with QCJOs, the qualified Canadian journalism organizations, which sets a wide range of standards to ensure that what you are producing and incentivizing the production of is high-quality journalism. There is none of that in this legislation.
With the low standards of allowing entry to qualify for this, what you are effectively doing is incentivizing clickbait. This is low-quality journalism that people will get paid for on the basis of clicks, because they can demand to be part of this table through the collective bargaining, as you just heard. When we look to platforms to try to mete that out and use the algorithms to prioritize the high-quality journalism and demote the low-quality journalism, legislation hits you again, creating potential liability when they demote that.
The danger here is that we are not going to be supporting high-quality journalism. We'll be supporting some legacy companies, to be sure, but if this were really about journalism, one would have thought you would mention it in the bill more than a couple of times.