Thank you so much for having me here today.
A lot has been said about Bill C-18 in the media and at this committee over the past months. I want to start by acknowledging the real and often existential stakes involved for the journalism businesses on all sides of this debate. I'm just an observer to this, but I value the views of all those who are ultimately materially impacted by the policy decisions that you're making here.
Some want no government intervention at all in the market of journalism, which is a view I respect but don’t share. For me, journalism and, more broadly, the access to reliable information are a precondition for democratic society. In the face of clear market failures, they warrant careful public policy intervention.
With that said, let me make a few observations about this particular intervention.
First, I think we need to acknowledge the reality that platforms already have deals with publishers. These deals, with a select group of publishers chosen by the platforms, are for undisclosed sums of money and hidden behind NDAs. We simply have no idea whether publishers have been pressured or incentivized in their reporting in any way. I understand that some publishers who already have deals would rather stick to the devil they know, but the interest of public policy should be to make these deals more equitable and accountable to the Canadian public.
Second, it's very clear that no one policy will fix journalism. The effect that the Internet has had on the businesses and practices of journalism is wide-ranging and complex. This policy mechanism addresses one aspect of this challenge: the bargaining imbalance between publishers and platforms. A very asymmetry, I would argue, is demonstrated by the inequity of these current deals. However, analysis of the role of this policy must be done alongside other policies that support Canadian journalism. Most importantly, in my view, is the journalism labour tax credit.
Third, while many—including myself in the past—have suggested an alternative, centralized fund model, I think we need to acknowledge that it, too, has some fundamental challenges. It would require government to either create a dedicated tax on platforms—a link tax, if you will—or put general revenue into a fund of its creation and design. The former could be in breach of USMCA, and both are far more intrusive government interventions in journalism than the bargaining code.
Fourth, while this bill has been widely characterized as the Australian model, it is in fact, in my view, fundamentally different. The addition of specified exemption criteria is the central policy mechanism in this bill. The list of those terms, how platforms demonstrate they have met them, and how they are evaluated and audited are all absolutely critical to this policy working in the public interest. This bill also adds meaningful public accountability and transparency tools that the Australian bill lacked.
This brings me to my last point. The fact that this bill has improved materially on the Australian model has significantly increased the likelihood that other countries—such as the U.K., Germany, South Africa and maybe even the U.S.—will very soon adopt a similar model. It is this likelihood, not of Canadian implementation but of its global spread, that I think has shaped the character of the platforms’ response to this bill.
Google has every right to lobby for their interests, but their strategy in this case has sought to divide news organizations, parliamentarians and Canadians. I hate that journalist friends from small and large organizations alike are being pitted against one another. Facebook’s threat to turn off access to reliable information is, to me, revealing about their place in our democratic society. I hope that it is being treated with the seriousness it warrants at the highest levels of the Canadian and U.S. governments.
With all of this said, this bill is not perfect and it involves difficult trade-offs. I would suggest the committee ask four questions about it.
First, how can this bill make the terms of deals as maximally transparent as legally possible? I know there are real limits to what can be shared publicly, but the regulator should report as much as possible and as regularly as possible.
Second, how can the bill be maximally inclusive while ensuring the journalistic integrity of recipients? Making the bill more restrictive, as Google has proposed, would exclude smaller publishers. Making the requirements too lenient could lead to the inclusion of non-journalistic sites.
Third, how can this bill ensure that platforms are incentivized to promote journalistic content and penalize harmful content, and not the inverse? Clarity around non-discrimination is a fairly easy fix.
Finally, I think it is reasonable to ask whether this bill is suitably flexible and amenable to future and certain changes in the economics both of the platforms and of the news industry. No journalism policy, in my view, should be designed to be permanent, but should instead aspire to be no longer necessary.
I'm happy to share more detailed amendments in the spirit of these four questions. Thank you for your time.