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.