Evidence of meeting #51 for Canadian Heritage in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was going.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Bloc
Martin Champoux Bloc Drummond, QC
My goodness! Those were the quickest two minutes and 30 seconds of all time. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Martin.
Now I'll go to Peter Julian for two and a half minutes.
NDP
Peter Julian NDP New Westminster—Burnaby, BC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Mr. Singer, I found Mr. Waugh's comments somewhat insulting and inappropriate, and I'd like to apologize on behalf of the committee. He needs to be understanding, I think, more importantly the role that community newspapers play, including in his community, where he's got the Saskatchewan and Alberta weekly newspapers associations asking for legislation like this.
I'd like to come back, Mr. Singer, to your comments about community news, because you are absolutely right to identify that one of the reasons why we're seeing the rise in hate in all of its toxic forms—more anti-Semitism, more racism, more homophobia and transphobia, more Islamophobia, more misogyny—is in part that those links that community journalists play, that community newspapers play, are being exploded as big tech tries to profit from hate.
As you know, in the United States, a major campaign that involves a whole range of organizations fighting back against hate is Stop Hate for Profit. Could you re-emphasize the importance of having a community journalistic sector that helps to counteract how big tech has shamelessly exploited hate to pad its bottom line, so that there is some counterbalance and we can start to re-establish community links right across North America?
Managing Director, Econ One
I certainly blame big tech for a lot of things, but I don't necessarily want to blame them for directly causing this.
Let me suggest that the effect might be indirect. In other words, their business model is hurting the local community papers and when those community papers go down, basically misinformation kind of fills the void. All the bonds that the community newspapers used to create are now shrivelled, people feel isolated and they lash out. They no longer feel a connection to their community.
Whether or not that is a scheme.... I don't want to suggest that big tech is scheming for that end and that was the objective. They're not evil, I don't think, but I do think that evil has occurred.
I think that the most important thing now is, rather than trying to castigate or throw stones, that we should just figure out how we get money back into the pockets of the local newspapers.
To me, the most efficient route to doing so is to set up a design mechanism in which the two platforms can write a cheque for the value they're appropriating. It will be determined by an arbitrator. That money should flow back to these community newspapers and hopefully they can restore all the great things they did before they were taken out.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much, Mr. Singer.
Peter, that's it.
I'm going to the Conservatives again and Martin Shields for five minutes, please.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I appreciate the witnesses being here today.
Going to weekly newspapers in Saskatchewan and in Alberta in particular, I know that in my riding we have probably a dozen weeklies. They don't belong to that association or agree with that position because they're owner-journalists. They may have one...and they don't see the value in this. They're very clear. When it's said here that all of Alberta and Saskatchewan.... No, they don't have that same view. Let me tell you that.
They feel they've been excluded from this. They don't feel they're a part of it. They feel that this piece of legislation is going to kill them and they will be gone because there's nothing left for them.
When you talk about negotiations, they can't afford to get into negotiations. They're not part of the organizations' negotiations and the money, as we know, is almost gone.
Ms. Gardner, what are the unintended consequences for small, weekly papers with an owner-journalist? I have a number of them.
McConnell Professor of Practice (2021-22), Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, As an Individual
Yes, absolutely.
I would throw in there, too, the indie publishers and the digital start-ups—all the little guys, whether they're operating at a local level or not.
Originally, the indie start-up folks opposed Bill C-18. Then when it became pretty clear that it was likely to go through—and I think this has happened with a lot of entities—I think they shifted their focus to try to tweak it and have some amendments made so that they would be less disadvantaged by it.
They do not want it and it doesn't surprise that local news operations don't want it either, especially those that are explicitly excluded from it because they have fewer than two full-time journalist employees.
The unintended consequences—
I'm sorry. Go ahead.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
When you go to more unintended consequences, I would go to, for example, it talks about “general”. I was in a newspaper shop when an indigenous paper started in the 1960s. It was one of the original ones. Are those general? Would the indigenous newspapers, because of their orientation, be left out of this as an unintended consequence?
McConnell Professor of Practice (2021-22), Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, As an Individual
Right. I have had those questions myself.
I think it's so important that this kind of legislation be considered in the context of what is actually happening in the news industry and not just in the context of the news industry needing dollars because one thing that has been happening in news is a fragmentation of audiences.
I'll try to keep this brief, but it used to be the case that we all watched the same television news. We all read pretty much the same newspapers. We all got the same view of the world. That was good for social cohesion, but it was also exclusionary and marginalizing for lots of different kinds of people. They didn't see themselves reflected.
What we're seeing now is a flowering of many hyper-specific and somewhat specific news operations aimed at indigenous people and aimed at people who are particularly concerned about climate change. There are start-ups aimed at, I think, Asian diaspora in North America, and millennials.
There are a lot of different kinds of operations today. This legislation wants to be and should be responsive to that. You could take a number of different views on that. You could decide that it is important that there be general interest publications for social cohesion in the sense of a country as a whole and/or you could decide to have a policy objective that follows that trend and supports smaller news operations for distinct identity groups and distinct sets of interests.
That's the kind of thing you don't get with this bill, but that should be considered in anything that is trying to support quality journalism in Canada because that's part of the question of what is quality journalism.
Conservative
Martin Shields Conservative Bow River, AB
Lastly, the baseball arbitrator, the sports arbitration of last.... Do you see that as part of the CRTC...what they've set up in this legislation, to be anywhere near what a sports final arbitration mechanism is?
November 1st, 2022 / 12:10 p.m.
McConnell Professor of Practice (2021-22), Max Bell School of Public Policy, McGill University, As an Individual
You are asking the wrong person. I'm sorry, but I'm not a sports person. I know nothing about sports arbitration.
President, Internet Society Canada Chapter
Thank you, Madam Chair.
No, it's not like sports arbitration. Sports arbitration is one on an athlete versus his team. Here we're talking about what is now a partitioned group, various groups of news organizations that may coalesce or may not in approaching the bargaining process. The bargaining is going to be very different from final offer arbitration in baseball. It's going to exclude, in my view, by design, the very small players who are most in need of a top-up, if you will, at this time.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Mr. Palmer.
I'm going to the Liberals for five minutes.
We have Chris Bittle.
Liberal
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
Thanks, Madam Chair.
Dr. Singer, it's seems, looking to the United States, there are all sorts of conservative Republicans and very liberal Democrats supporting antitrust efforts to rein in big tech in the United States. I was wondering if you could speak to that a bit, please.
Managing Director, Econ One
They are. There's legislation in the U.S., the self-preferencing bill, for example, the ban on self-preferencing that made it through the Senate on the judiciary committee—I think it was 16 to six. By the way, the JCPA made it through the Senate judiciary committee. It was very popular. I think it was 15 to seven. It had Republican support as well.
I think Congress recognizes that there are some aspects of the platform's conduct that escape antitrust scrutiny. In particular, when you think about what the self-preferencing is doing, it's conduct that's occurring within the firm's boundaries. It doesn't cross a boundary. There's no contract to say that a supplier or a customer that's exclusionary.... The other thing, too, is that it doesn't generate an immediate short-run price effect. When Amazon steers a search to its own wares in the Amazon store, it will typically replace an independent with something cheaper, so there's no price effect to be found, either. These would be horrible fact patterns to go into an antitrust courtroom with, where judges are following case law that's looking for conduct that crosses a firm boundary and conduct that generates an immediate short-run price effect.
I would submit that in this newspaper matter as well, it would also make for a horrible fact pattern. No judge is going to recognize scraping, indexing, curation and appropriation, which is basically just flexing your monopsony muscle as a cognizable antitrust offence. It's certainly not a violation of section 2 of the Sherman act.
I think what Congress recognizes is that they're acts of aggression, anti-competitive acts by the platforms that escape antitrust scrutiny. Rather than try to force everything through an antitrust funnel, we're going to write new laws that get at these anti-competitive acts outside of antitrust, that is, to use tools that operate outside of antitrust, as we're doing for the JCPA.
Liberal
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
There's been recent reporting by Politico on tech giant “shady lobbying” in the European Union “during negotiations on two landmark EU tech laws.” Reports say that tech giants like Google and Meta “have deceived lawmakers by lobbying through smaller front organizations, leading [EU] lawmakers” to file eight complaints to their lobbying body. Someone in Canada remarked that there was so much Astroturfing in Ottawa, you'd think we're getting a major league baseball franchise.
I was wondering if you could speak to some of the tactics employed by dominant tech giants in the United States.
Managing Director, Econ One
Yes, what I see that's so unfortunate is they're not just Astroturfing randomly, but they're going after what are traditionally progressive organizations with funding, and asking them to come out and sometimes oppose these bills that would reign in the tech platforms, or remain silent.
It's one thing—and I mean this with a bunch of love delivered to libertarians—for a libertarian front to say there's no market failure here; we don't need government. It's quite another to have a progressive organization—I won't name names—to come out and say this bill is anti-consumer or it's nonsensical. It would open up a floodgate or somehow cause Google to start charging for search. That's happening. When those guys say it, when the progressives say it, they are basically used as a stalking horse, that's when the platforms can really maximize their politicking and their political leverage to try to achieve some wins.
For someone who is not paying attention to where the money is flowing, it can be very confusing, but I feel like lots of newspaper reporters, in the U.S. at least, have wised up to where the money is coming...and who is buying whom. They can suss this stuff out.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you.
You have 44 seconds, Chris. You can do something with it if you wish.
Liberal
Chris Bittle Liberal St. Catharines, ON
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
We heard one of the witnesses refer to legacy media and compare it to the buggy whip industry. I am wondering if you'd care to comment on that, Dr. Singer.
Managing Director, Econ One
I think the tactic that Google and Facebook are using here is to try to deflect the harm that they've caused onto some bad technology. They're trying to say that this was bad business acumen and that they're almost deserving of losing their businesses, but what they're doing is deflecting from the value appropriation. They are enjoying it, so it makes sense that they would put out these buggy analogies.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you very much, Chris.
Thank you very much, Dr. Singer.
I have looked at the clock, and we have time for one further full round.
I am going to the next round, which is the Conservatives with Marilyn Gladu.
You have five minutes, please.