Thank you for the question, MP Thomas.
If this amendment were to be adopted, it would in essence require platforms, as you indicate, to come to an agreement with all eligible news businesses prior to getting an exemption. It would be a major departure from the way the bill is currently structured. The bill right now is intended to put in place a bargaining framework, and through the exemption criteria indicate that a certain threshold must be met in order for DNIs to get an exemption.
The intention behind that was to put in place an incentive for DNIs to want to get an exemption. That was very much modelled on the Australian experience, where the goal is not to actually rely on the back end of this bill in terms of mandatory bargaining and final offer arbitration. In that context, in the context of a bargaining framework, it is understood that there could be news businesses that do not have an agreement in place with a DNI, because the exemption criteria could be met.
One observation is that if you go the route of requiring an agreement with every single news business in order to have an exemption, it is unclear to us whether any DNI would actually pursue an exemption at that point, because it's not clear whether there's really an incentive structure to do so: Why not simply rely on the mandatory bargaining framework at the back of the bill?