Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 18th, 2022

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting No. 47 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

I would first like to acknowledge that this meeting is taking place on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

Pursuant to the order of reference adopted by the House on Tuesday, May 31, 2022, the committee is meeting on the study of Bill C‑18, An Act respecting online communications platforms that make news content available to persons in Canada.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House Order of Thursday, June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefits of the witnesses and members.

First, please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by videoconference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic and please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

Regarding interpretation, those on Zoom have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either floor, English or French. Those in the room can use the earpiece and select the desired channel. Today, given that the chair will be presiding in French, I think the interpreters into the other language will have a bit more work and the participants will be using the earpieces more often.

Also, a reminder that all comments should be addressed through the Chair.

In accordance with our routine motion on this subject, I am informing the committee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

I would now like to welcome new committee members and today's witnesses.

Two representatives of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association are appearing by videoconference: Evan Jamison, President of that association and Vice-president Manufacturing, Great West Media, and Dennis Merrell, Executive Director of that association.

We also have Kevin Desjardins, President of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.

Two representatives of Channel Zero are joining us by videoconference: Cal Millar, President, and Greg O'Brien, News Director, CHCH‑TV.

We also have, by videoconference, Brian Miles, Editor of Le Devoir.

Also with us is Colin McKay, Head, Public Policy and Government Relations for Google Canada.

And last, Ben Scott, Director of Reset, is with us by videoconference.

Each organization will have five minutes for their presentation at the start of the meeting.

We will begin with the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association. Mr. Jamison or Mr. Merrell, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Evan Jamison, President, Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association and Vice-President, Manufacturing, Great West Media]

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to appear before the committee today.

I'm Evan Jamison, the president of the Alberta Weekly Newspapers Association. I'm the third generation of my family in the newspaper business, and also the third generation to sit as the president of our provincial newspaper association. Our association represents all but a few of the community newspapers in Alberta. Today we've come to advocate on behalf of those businesses, often considered to be the lifeblood of the communities they serve.

The passage of Bill C-18 is important to the media landscape in Canada and can help shore up declining revenues at many newspapers, especially the larger ones. There is, however, a significant concern among our membership regarding the level of support it will deliver to smaller publishers. We have heard encouraging reports out of Australia regarding deals signed by publishers of all sizes; however, there's a lot of secrecy around those deals and the level of support being provided to any given news outlet.

The Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer recently released a report estimating that revenues gained under Bill C-18 could provide 30% of the cost of creating news content. This is encouraging, and we would advocate that 30% is likely the minimum amount needed to have a meaningful impact at most news operations. However, it is unclear where the 30% estimate the PBO used came from, as it was based on unspecified “available information”.

We also wonder how this 30% will be achieved, depending on which platforms are forced to negotiate. It appears to many that Meta is avoiding new deals with news outlets and is working its way out of hosting news content in general. What happens to the 30% if Meta isn't involved? Does Google pay the full 30%? Is the 30% assumption even accurate? Should this be some sort of a mandated target?

We must also keep in mind that the digital world and platforms are constantly evolving. It is difficult to say which platforms and technologies will be dominant into the future. Governments and private lawsuits around the world are challenging the major platforms out of concerns around anti-competitive practices, privacy and misinformation.

How do we support small news operations that do not meet the qualifications of a qualified Canadian journalism operation? There are many independent publishers, often family-run, in print and online, that will be left out of Bill C-18. We need to find ways to support these news outlets. They are often the only source of news in the communities they serve.

As has been pointed out in previous hearings, there is no single solution to support all news outlets. The business models and scales on which they operate vary greatly. What may work at a national scale with broad audiences will not necessarily work in a small town with a limited pool of interested readers.

The situation is dire for many news outlets. Some would blame this on an inability to adapt. Too often we are described as “legacy” or “dinosaurs”, married to the old way of doing things. This isn't the case. Many operators are experimenting with different business and distribution models. Newspapers have long been early adopters of technology—computers, desktop publishing, emails, PDFs, digital cameras, robotics and artificial intelligence. We are not afraid of technology.

The problem is that there isn't a clear path to success in today's digital world, especially for smaller local publishers. Good journalism takes time, is expensive to produce and is ephemeral. Simply regurgitating news releases isn't enough. We must rebuild and strengthen news outlets that have been decimated by years of revenue declines. We need to not only preserve what still exists but also find adequate resources to provide quality news and information to local communities, not just for existing players but also for new entrants.

We didn't come with any silver bullets today, but we do have some suggestions that we think would help preserve quality journalism in smaller communities across Canada. We support Bill C-18 but think more is needed through the continuation of existing programs and perhaps the addition of others. Programs such as the Canada periodical fund's aid to publishers and special measures for journalism have been critical over many years, with the special measures being a more recent addition. The local journalism initiative, which has funded journalists throughout many news operations by reimbursing their wages, has really helped many operations step up their game and provide better-quality content.

A refundable subscription tax credit in lieu of today's non-refundable credit could be a big game-changer for small outlets especially, because the value of today's tax credit just doesn't make any difference for small outlets. There's just not enough there.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

You have 30 seconds left, Mr. Jamison.

[Evan Jamison]

We should also consider other mechanisms—perhaps a tax on digital advertising sold in the Canadian market, which would be redistributed to Canadian news outlets. Advertising has long supported journalism.

We fundamentally believe that quality news coverage, however it is served, is vitally important to all communities, and we encourage the federal government to work on ways to support our industry in a time of great need. Time is of the essence.

Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. Jamison.

I now give the floor to Kevin Desjardins from the Canadian Association of Broadcasters.

Mr. Desjardins, you have five minutes.

[Kevin Desjardins, President, Canadian Association of Broadcasters]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee, for giving me the opportunity to appear before you today on the subject of this important bill.

The Canadian Association of Broadcasters, the CAB, is the national voice of Canada's private broadcasters. It represents over 700 members across Canada, including a large majority of private radio and television stations, as well as specialized services.

Canada's private broadcasters welcome the introduction of the online news act as an important step towards recognizing the value of broadcasters' news content and providing the necessary framework for fair negotiation between news organizations and online platforms.

Maintaining professional newsrooms in communities across the country is a fundamental commitment of Canada's broadcasters. Last year, Canadian broadcasters invested $681 million in news and community information programming.

Unfortunately, broadcast news is a very challenging enterprise. It has depended largely on entertainment programming that draws the largest audiences and the greatest ad revenues. Over the past decade, foreign online platforms have moved aggressively to corner the markets in search advertising. Using their dominant positions, they have dramatically impacted the advertising market through the algorithmic exploitation of user data. Now foreign digital platforms take more than half of those ad revenues out of Canada's economy. They are offshored to entities with little connection to Canadians' values or public interest, and they profoundly undermine Canadian news organizations' ability to support and maintain a robust news-gathering infrastructure. At the same time, these entities are exploiting Canadian news organizations' online content to deepen their competitive advantages in advertising.

Search and social platforms may help to direct audiences to online news sites, but they are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. In reality, they are retaining most of the value from those user interactions with news sites through their ability to gather, aggregate, resell and exploit user data to advertisers through their algorithms. Nevertheless, social and search platforms provide no compensation to news sites for the value they derive from those interactions.

Today, Canadian news organizations have no realistic option but to agree to the platforms' terms, given their dominant positions online and lack of regulatory oversight. As news broadcasters and publishers struggle to maintain the resources necessary to continue to inform Canadians, it is critical that a policy framework be developed to help recognize the value of their online content. This framework should recognize Canadian news organizations' unique contributions to the public good and the value that is extracted from them by dominant digital platforms. This is why Bill C-18 is so necessary.

We believe that Bill C-18 strikes the right balance. It would enact a fair and reasonable negotiation framework for Canadian news organizations and large global digital platforms, and it would provide an arbitrated backstop should those negotiations not be concluded constructively.

We know such a framework can work. As Professor Rod Sims said earlier to this committee, “Australia's code has been extremely successful in achieving its objective.” More specifically, the Australian code has helped to address the power imbalance I referred to earlier and has compelled the platforms to negotiate in good faith. It has helped news organizations of all sizes to maintain and grow their newsroom staffing.

Bill C-18 would not create a “link tax”; nor would it incentivize clickbait. It would not break the Internet, as it has not in Australia. The incentives that are built into the bill clearly focus on sustaining journalism jobs in Canadian newsrooms. Moreover, because a government agency is involved only as a backstop to resolve disputes when no agreement between the parties has been reached, the proposed legislation poses no concerns to press freedom or free speech.

Ensuring the viability of our newsrooms is critical to Canada's democracy. It is particularly essential as Canadians are increasingly confronted with misinformation and disinformation online. We know that when Canadians turn to online news, the most popular sources are sites associated with Canadian broadcasters. The content that is ultimately of most use to citizens and to the continued value of our democracy is developed through trusted news organizations, including television and radio broadcasters.

We do have a certain amendment with regard to clause 51, which is essentially just to strengthen this section and to make sure it does what it was intended to do.

Canada's broadcasters want to continue to be a dependable source for local, national and international news for Canadians, but to do so we require a fair opportunity to be compensated for the value of our news content.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. Desjardins.

The representatives of Channel Zero will now have their turn. Mr. Millar or Mr. O'Brien, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Cal Millar, President, Channel Zero]

Thank you, and good morning.

We appreciate the opportunity to appear today.

My name is Cal Millar. I am the president of Channel Zero, which is an independent Canadian broadcaster, and the owner-operator of CHCH television in Hamilton.

With me today is Greg O'Brien, who is head of news at CHCH and also the former editor and publisher of Cartt.ca, which is Canada's leading news outlet for our broadcasting and telecom sectors.

In our brief opening comments, we want to speak to three things today.

First, we'll speak about what the history and current operations of CHCH tell us about the importance of local news, and how it has never been profitable on its own and has always required subsidy.

Second is how government support, designed correctly, does not compromise journalistic integrity or editorial independence.

Third is how Bill C-18 checks both of these boxes, which is why we support it.

As you know, and also as specifically recognized in Bill C-11, local news is key to local broadcasting. Unfortunately, while in the past local news was sustained with a cross-subsidy from profitable U.S. programming, the draining of Canadian ad revenues to U.S. platforms now makes that impossible.

[Greg O'Brien, News Director, CHCH-TV, Channel Zero]

CHCH's history is emblematic of this. Today we are the number one news organization in Hamilton, Halton and Niagara, and the number two-rated television station for local news in the entire greater Toronto-Hamilton area. We air more local news and information programming than virtually any other local broadcaster in Canada, with well over 30 hours weekly. We are available on every platform, including CHCH.com and through our social channels on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. We reach our citizenry wherever they are and on whatever platform they use, wherever they are looking for news and even when they don't know they need news.

Our resources, talent and devotion allow us to be on top of things in our area like no others. Just last month, we had a tragic live shooting incident spread across our region. It was national news—a shooting in Mississauga, followed by another in Milton and a final one in Hamilton. Only CHCH News was live at all three scenes that evening, telling our viewers what had happened and what was happening in real time.

Rewind 13 years, and it was a very different story. CHCH, then owned by Canwest Global, was on the brink of extinction. The old model of cross-subsidy from top U.S. network programming was failing. Channel Zero stepped in with a recommitment to local news and information programming and crucial support from what was then the CRTC's local programming improvement fund, or LPIF.

Fast-forward to today, and it is the CRTC's independent local news fund, ILNF, which was introduced in 2017, that provides us with vital support for the production of locally reflective news.

[Cal Millar]

The trouble is that the ILNF support, which is based on a percentage of revenue contributions from licensed television distributors, or BDUs, is declining just as the needs are increasing, which is why this bill and Bill C-11 are so important to us.

The other important lesson from our history is this: I challenge anyone to find any evidence that the support and subsidy we have received from funds like LPIF or ILNF have affected our editorial slant or our independence in any way. I can tell you categorically that they have not and they will not in the future, whether they come via the CRTC funds, Bill C-11 or Bill C-18. As long as support is transparent, automatic, not discretionary and from a body that is at arm's length from government, there is simply no real trigger or basis for government or other third party influence over that editorial.

To conclude, in our view, Bill C-18 meets the twin test of introducing a mechanism to provide material support for local news and doing it in such a way as to preserve editorial independence.

Should the committee choose to entertain amendments, we do have one suggestion. We believe that both for the purposes of fair bargaining and to provide greater public transparency, there should be greater public disclosure on deals—namely, on all news businesses that do deals with platforms, including exempt deals, and including the total consideration, if not the deals themselves. We understand that Friends has proposed a specific amendment to clause 32 in this regard. We support that proposal.

Thank you for allowing us to make this presentation. We'd be pleased to respond to any questions you might have.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. Millar and Mr. O'Brien. Your allotted time is up.

I would also like to apologize to the previous speakers and those who follow: the reason why I interrupt during a presentation to indicate that you have 30 seconds or one minute left is simply to give the witnesses a bit of guidance.

I will undoubtedly do the same for Brian Myles from Le Devoir, who will now have the floor for five minutes.

[Brian Myles, Editor, Le Devoir]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Distinguished members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, thank you for having me here today.

Le Devoir is a newspaper of record that is not like the others. It is part of a select club of media that rely on subscriptions, for both the digital and print versions, to cover their costs. Subscription is working: it brings in nearly two thirds of our revenue and means that we can look to the future with what I would characterize as cautious or relative optimism.

We are able to achieve profitability through careful management, optimum use of Quebec and Canadian tax credit programs, and a revenue diversification program. Le Devoir has been profitable in six of the last eight years. For the past four years, it has even managed to grow, from 100 to 175 employees. I point this out because few media have managed to make this transition while at the same time hiring so many people.

Nonetheless, the transformation involves constant challenges. There are new ones every year, if not every day. The environment is demanding. We have to compete with influential actors that rely on free content and with Google and Meta on the advertising market. We do not have the luxury of taking losses, nor can we count on support from sponsors.

For these reasons, Le Devoir supports Bill C‑18. However, we think it might go a little too far. I will come back to this later.

Of course, you are aware that Le Devoir has signed contractual agreements with four of the digital platforms. Well before the government stated that it intended to legislate, we had signed agreements with MSN in 2014 and with Apple News+ in 2020. For reasons of our own, we got out in front with the agreements signed with Meta in May 2021 and with Google in October 2021. That does not prevent us from supporting Bill C‑18, publicly and privately, and saying that we are going to adhere to the new scheme, obviously.

These agreements were in line with our revenue diversification strategy and made it possible for us to accomplish something important, which is what I would like you to understand today. It enabled us to build renewed relationships with Meta and Google based on trust and collaboration. We knew that sooner or later, the time was going to come for us to bargain with those companies. In fact, that is the central idea of Bill C‑18. Rather than facing them from a position of conflict, we simply chose to bring the point when we had to rebuild the relationship forward.

Given the foregoing, it is important for us to be able to bargain individually within the framework of the bill. At Le Devoir, we think our interests will be best served by direct bargaining. However, we acknowledge that others will want to bargain collectively.

In our industry, there is unfortunately still a lot of misunderstanding about the impact of digital platforms. At Le Devoir, we are uneasy with certain publishers or professors, as respected as they are, when they say that Google and Meta have stolen our advertising revenue and our content. That amounts to ignoring the fact that we voluntarily allow our content to circulate on those platforms. Yes, the business models broke down because of the actions of Google and Meta, but they did not steal anything. We are in an environment of technological innovation without a legislative framework in the world because of a very liberal vision of net neutrality, in which the audience can be segmented on a planet-wide scale. In this situation, those companies are competitors that we cannot compete against.

Media that rely on subscriptions, like Le Devoir, cannot disregard the impact of Google and Meta. Those companies make it possible for readers to discover our content. They enable us to expand our base of users and potentially convert them to subscribers. We are in a complex relationship, a relationship of independence and complementarity, that we unfortunately do not talk about enough, as publishers.

With that said, we cannot fail to mention the imbalance that characterizes the relationship between media and the digital platforms. In fact, it is because of that imbalance and the concentration of advertising revenue in the hands of a duopoly that we need Bill C‑18.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

You have one minute left, Mr. Myles.

[Brian Myles]

I am now going to make a few quick comments about how Bill C‑18 could be improved.

The imbalance in the market is not just a question of advertising. There is also an imbalance when it comes to subscriptions. The application platforms decide what percentage of revenue they will keep, and they retain important information like email addresses for themselves. Bill C‑18 should contain somewhat more binding provisions regarding subscription-related transactions and the exchange of information.

Le Devoir is also associated with the French fact. We are concerned about linguistic duality. We believe that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission should have a duty to ensure that future negotiations respect linguistic duality and the small francophone markets, in both Quebec and Canada, that exist in a cultural and linguistic situation that is completely different from other media.

We also believe that the best way to proceed is to call for bargaining based on labour costs. That was done in Australia, in fact, where it was set at 30% of labour costs, 20% for Google and 10% for Meta. However, if we take that route, to avoid distortions, we should limit eligible salaries, as was done for the federal tax credit, to ensure that a new system is not created in which the biggest companies are the biggest winners, at the expense of the smaller players, local players, and niche players, such asLe Devoir.

On that note, I will thank you and invite your questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. Myles.

We have two more presentations to hear.

Colin McKay, Head, Public Policy and Government Relations for Google Canada, will now have the floor for five minutes.

[Colin McKay, Head, Public Policy and Government Relations, Google Canada]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Thank you for the invitation to participate in your study of Bill C-18.

Access to authoritative news is critical for democracy and core to our mission at Google. For 20 years, we've been helping Canadians find the answers to what they are searching for online, including relevant and authoritative news content. Connecting people to news is a responsibility we take very seriously.

Let me be absolutely clear. Google shares your goal of supporting a sustainable future for journalism and the news in Canada. This includes thoughtful approaches to regulation and continuing to provide meaningful contributions, financial and otherwise. Our concerns with Bill C‑18 are serious. So is our commitment to working with the government and the news industry on solutions.

In its current form, Bill C‑18 will make it harder for Canadians to find and share trusted and authoritative news online.

The bill will have, at best, unpredictable outcomes for the evolving Canadian news ecosystem.

We have four principal concerns with Bill C‑18.

First, the bill includes an undue preference provision that prohibits a platform from disadvantaging any eligible news businesses. We appreciate the desire to prevent a platform from retaliating against a publisher, but that's not what this language does. Under threat of legal action, this measure will restrict Google and other platforms from applying policies and providing features that elevate trusted information sources over lower-quality content. This makes the search less relevant and less safe for Canadians. It is essential that the undue preference language be amended.

Second, unlike the Australian code, Bill C‑18 defines eligible news businesses extremely broadly and does not require a publisher to adhere to basic journalistic standards. This will lead to the proliferation of misinformation and clickbait. Combined with the undue preference provision, this means Canadians could be served foreign propaganda outlets alongside reporting from Le Devoir or The Globe and Mail. This isn't a hypothetical example. This happened in Germany under similar regulatory language. The government's existing framework of qualified Canadian journalism organizations is a model that should be built upon, not undercut.

Third is the payment for links. The Internet is built on the principle of freely linking between websites. We all find information, products and services by clicking through links. Businesses, including news businesses, want to be found by Canadians via search. Google sends billions of visits to Canadian news publishers a year at no cost to them, helping them grow their readership and subscriber base, build trust with readers, and make money. Including payment for links repeats the mistakes other jurisdictions have backed away from. It violates global copyright norms and local legal precedent, including the Supreme Court in Crookes. Payment for links also incentivizes cheap, low-quality clickbait content over public-interest journalism and clearly favours large publishers over small ones as they simply have more content to link to.

Fourth, as small and independent news publishers have warned, Bill C-18 lacks transparency and benefits large legacy publishers over small ones because they can afford the regulatory cost of this framework. A fund similar to the Canada Media Fund would resolve the issues we have raised and would ensure that a diversity of Canadian news publishers receive money in a timely, equitable and transparent manner.

This is a history-making opportunity for Canada to craft world-class legislation that is clear and principled on whom it benefits; legislation that actively supports diversity and inclusivity and ensures that financial contributions go to support thoughtful, local journalism; legislation that recognizes the full value exchange that already occurs between platforms and publishers and is laser-focused on supporting an innovative, diverse and sustainable Canadian news ecosystem for the long term.

Bill C‑18 is not that legislation.

I want to reiterate, Google shares your goal of supporting a sustainable future for journalism and the news in Canada.

In its current form, we do not think the measures enacted by Bill C‑18 are in the interests of Canadians, nor are they an effective response to the unique challenges facing Canadian news publishers. The bottom line for us is that Canadians deserve better than what we see in Bill C-18, which, to be frank, is simply bad public policy.

Thank you again for the invitation to appear. I look forward to your questions.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. McKay.

Ben Scott, Director of Reset, will now have the floor for five minutes.

[Dr. Ben Scott, Director, Reset]

Thank you very much for the invitation to this committee.

My name is Ben Scott. I'm the director of Reset. We are an international non-profit organization that works with governments to help realign the incentives of the technology industry back to support the values of democracy.

I can give you a comparative perspective of how these issues and bills like Bill C-18 are being considered all around the world. Though I'm currently based in England, I lived for years in Canada and have a great deal of familiarity with the Canadian market.

What I can tell you is that lots of folks around the world see the same problems you do—journalism in crisis, as you've heard from colleagues on this panel; market power in the digital advertising industry held by a handful of titans—and an opportunity to intervene to make sure that journalism continues to flow to the public. What you have in Bill C-18 is among the best bills I have seen of its type.

The point I want to begin with today is a simple but fundamental one, and as the only non-industry representative on this panel, I feel I have a duty to make it. This legislation must not be about publishers; it must be about the public. Too much of this debate plays out as if government were simply refereeing a contest between big tech and big publishers. That's wrong. What justifies this market regulation is the public interest in making sure that quality journalism is delivered to the people. Like you, other governments are looking at this problem and trying to make sure that they address the market failures in the right way, because these aren't just failures among industries; this has hastened the destruction of public service journalism in ways that really undermine democratic integrity.

This committee knows well the stats in Canada: $5 billion out the door in terms of news industry revenues, 450 news outlets closed over the course of the last 15 years, a third of Canadian journalism jobs gone. That's a crisis. There are many factors causing that crisis, but one of the more obvious ones is the market power over digital advertising held by two companies.

I'll refer you to some analysis done by the British Competition and Markets Authority, which breaks down the digital ad market into services provided to publishers, services provided to advertisers and the exchanges in between. Google has, according to the CMA, a 90% market share in the first two of those segments, and a 50% market share in the exchange. That's market power by any reasonable definition, and that's the reason why so much revenue is flowing away from news organizations. But we're only intervening here on behalf of the news organizations because they provide a public good called journalism, which the people need. There's nothing in here about a link tax; there's nothing in here that's going to break the Internet. This is about restoring fairness in the marketplace so it provides a critical public service.

So far, what I see is that Canada is doing as well as or better than other countries at keeping the public at the centre of this conversation. I want to make three points that I think are essential for making sure this bill delivers for the Canadian people.

The first one is that Bill C-18 has to prioritize fairness and inclusivity. It has to offer deals that are equitable and on similar and reasonable terms for small publishers and large publishers alike.

Second, we have to insist on the fact that any new revenue that comes in—it might be up to 30% of revenue, and that's a big number, as you've heard—has to go towards journalism production, not towards buybacks or debt load. It has to go towards the production of news. That's the reason why this legislation matters.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

You have one minute left, Mr. Scott.

[Dr. Ben Scott]

The third piece is transparency. We have to ensure that the terms of these deals are subject to rigorous regulatory oversight and as much transparency as the industry will bear. That ensures that these negotiations don't fall into the trap we're in now, where secret deals are made between publishers and platforms and no one has an idea of whether they are fair or whether they are delivering for the public or not.

This bill is not a perfect solution. It's not a permanent solution, but it matters. This is real money for real journalism that restores fairness and transparency in this market. Laws like this are going to be made all around the world. Canada, in my view, has an opportunity to lead and set a high standard that will deliver for the Canadian public and set an example for others to follow.

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Martin Champoux]

Thank you, Mr. Scott.

All of the witnesses have now had their turn to speak. We will now move on to the first round of members' questions.

The first question will be from the Conservative Party, with Rachael Thomas going first.

Ms Thomas, the floor is yours for six minutes.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

My first question goes to Mr. McKay.

Mr. McKay, the Department of Canadian Heritage has denied that this bill gives any sort of monetary value to links. However, when the heritage minister, Minister Pablo Rodriguez, was asked by CTV's Evan Solomon about this, he actually confirmed that, in fact, he did attribute a monetary value to the links. Referring to the links, he said, “there’s a value to that. If you click on the link and go to the news, there’s a value”. There seems to be a discrepancy, then, between what the department officials are saying and what the minister is saying.

I'd be curious, with regard to an industry perspective. Do you feel that there is, in fact, the discrepancy here that I have pointed out? I would be curious to know whether or not you agree with that, and then whether or not you feel it might be of benefit to bring the minister to the committee so that we would have opportunity to clarify this. Would that be good for you?

[Colin McKay]

Thank you very much for the question.

I'll start off by underlining that we share the same spirit of ensuring a sustainable news industry in Canada, both today and in the future. We agree with many of the observations made by my fellow witnesses.

To the question you're asking, in terms of payment for links, the legislation specifically creates an obligation based on making links to journalism sites available, and that creates the structure upon which Bill C-18 is built. There is difference among the department and the minister and then platforms on whether that constitutes a link tax, but I would underline that it confers value to links and then creates an incentive for publications to look for the repetition and promotion of links, which feeds into the conversation about what exactly is defined as an eligible news business.

To your second point, I will say that we are here because we want to participate in a thorough conversation about the details of this legislation so that it can move forward and be implemented in a way that achieves the public policy goals. That includes hearing from the minister and hearing from other stakeholders in future meetings.

[Rachael Thomas, Conservative, Lethbridge, AB]

Thank you.

Another portion of this bill—and I believe you touched on this very briefly in your opening remarks—has to do with the discretionary power that is being left with the CRTC given this legislation in its current form, which is the form that the government is hoping to push it through in.

What are your concerns with regard to the lack of clarity around the powers being given to the CRTC and how they might regulate you?

[Colin McKay]

I've tried to make the point today that there are some very broad terms with little definition contained within Bill C-18 that rely upon regulation and interpretation by the regulator. When we, as a company and a platform that serves billions of clicks to Canadians a day, evaluated that, we came to the conclusion that there are immediate implications of how the legislation is written.

It's always preferable that legislation provide clarity and direction rather than leaving it to interpretation by the regulator, especially when we're talking about a situation where you could have the amplification and promotion of misinformation or even disinformation, and certainly when you're talking about the concerns that have been raised by the other journalism organizations on this panel, which speak to innovation, capturing Canadian audiences and generating new revenue models.