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.