Thank you so much, Madam Chair.
I just want to make two brief points.
Number one, I agree with Mr. Bittle's comments about getting around any revenue threshold. For example, many advertisers that work with these platforms are also multinational companies. In a private deal, they can easily say, “Instead of paying me $25 million for your ads in Canada, pay me $1 million for ads in Canada and add that $24 million to the U.S. ads.” They will pay the same amount of money. They will have the same number of ads in both Canada and the United States, but they would shift the numbers around so that it's no longer revenue generated in Canada.
That is a simple solution that anybody could use to get around a provision that puts in a revenue threshold, simply moving the monies to another jurisdiction and raising the price of ads in that jurisdiction and lowering them in Canada. As somebody who practised in a multinational technology company, I give you one example of many, many contractual ways that companies can use to get around the revenue threshold.
The second thing I want to raise is that I find it to be really disappointing when highly intelligent people claim something could exist that is so far from the truth and so much of a stretch of the imagination: that is, that user-generated content is somehow going to be part of this bill. The bill says that, in order for there to have to be a trigger of negotiations, there must be “a significant bargaining power imbalance between an operator and news businesses”.
Let's take, for example, Postmedia, a large news business with outlets around the world and hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, in revenue. You're going to have the criteria as follows: “the size of the intermediary or the operator; whether the market for the intermediary gives the operator a strategic advantage over news businesses; and whether the intermediary occupies a prominent market position”.
To make the claim that somehow some individual blogger is going to be covered by having a strategic advantage over Postmedia or any news business is so far from the truth and such an incredible stretch by any measure of the imagination that it can only amount to misinformation to make the claim that user-generated content is covered by this bill. I hope I don't hear that argument again at this committee, because it is beneath the intelligence of all of us, I think, to make that claim.
Thank you.