Thank you.
Good afternoon. I'm Matt Hatfield and I'm the campaigns director of OpenMedia, a grassroots community of nearly 220,000 people in Canada who work together for an open, accessible and surveillance-free Internet.
I am speaking to you from the unceded territory of the Stó:lo, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish and Musqueam nations.
My question today is this: Who's in Bill C-18 and who's out? Who is producing high-quality journalism that deserves government-mandated subsidy and promotion, and who isn't? How much are they entitled to, and will the public ever have transparency to see that these questions are being answered fairly?
We believe the government is trying to dodge responsibility for answering these highly sensitive questions, yet Bill C-18 still answers them. Burying these questions just means its answers are more obscure, secretive, unequal and potentially damaging to trust in journalism.
There's a real problem that Bill C-18 is trying to solve. Canadians need high-quality, trusted, fact-checked journalism, and lots of it. Our democracy depends on it.
It's true that huge online platforms—Google and Meta chief among them—are collecting a lot of revenue in Canada. It's fair to ask them to contribute more of that revenue back to things that Canadians need. That's why we support the digital services tax, and that's why we wish we were debating a much simpler version of this bill that directly taxed them.
Linking news revenue primarily to the spread of news content on platforms is a toxic poison pill. News simply isn't a primary revenue driver on platforms—that's a fact—and a lot of the reporting of great importance to society is least likely to go socially viral.
Linking news support to links and clicks gives both platforms and news publishers strong incentives to cheat the system in ways that discourage the spread of quality news. It fails to target the resulting funds where they're actually most needed, subsidizing today's biggest winners in news production while not bringing back lost outlets or supporting the emergence of new ones. It makes news outlets dependent on the continued success of online platforms to survive, which is a dangerous weakening of their credibility and independence.
Also, because Bill C-18 uses links and clicks as a substitute for stronger evidence of public interest journalism, Bill C-18 sets such a low bar for identifying a qualified news outlet—lower than the already flawed QCJO system—that low-quality outlets, click farms and even malicious foreign actors could potentially qualify for mandatory promotion and subsidy.
For these reasons, we believe that without substantial amendment, Bill C-18 will be enormously destructive to the quality of, distribution of and public trust in Canadian journalism.
The money is not going where it needs to. Minister Rodriguez has told us that small news publishers aren't really interested in Bill C-18's support—despite hundreds of publishers who have said otherwise. Canada's news problem is largest in small communities that have lost their primary outlets and in hollowed-out, downsized regional newsrooms.
Will Bill C-18 do anything to bring dead local outlets back? No. It does nothing today for communities with no existing news source, and if a small local outlet reopens, it locks them out from support until they hit a significant and possibly unattainable size.
Will it induce major news chains to restaff downsized local divisions? How and why would they do that? What rational business will staff up the slow and expensive local accountability beat when your new primary revenue stream is the most viral and clickbaity of social media content? And that's before we consider that 75% of Bill C-18's revenue is predicted to go to TV and radio broadcast, predominantly to giants like Bell, Rogers and the CBC.
This committee has criticized the secrecy of the deals Google and Meta make with publishers. Fair enough, so why doesn't Bill C-18 fix that? You can't rejuvenate public trust in journalism by making these problematic secret revenue deals larger and more secret, with more opportunity for the CRTC, government and platforms themselves to quietly influence them. Under Bill C-18, negotiated deals are still secret, as is the process for assessing eligibility for QCJO status and the reason for accepting or rejecting applicants. That's not a recipe for building trust in the news.
Our biggest concern is what Bill C-18 will do to our online feeds. What kind of content do you think gets the most Facebook shares or the most retweets on Twitter? Do you think it is the in-depth, long-form investigative—