Canadian Heritage Committee on March 10th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 26 of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage.

I would ask all in-person participants to please read the guidelines written on the updated cards on your table. These measures are in place to help prevent feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all participants, especially our interpreters. There is a QR code on the card that links to a short awareness video if you need more information.

Pursuant to the routine motion adopted by this committee, I can confirm that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of this meeting.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before you speak. All comments should be through the chair.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, September 22, 2025, the committee is meeting to study the state of the journalism and media sectors. It's quite a broad study.

With us today, we have Travis Dhanraj, former journalist. From the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec, we have Angelica Carrero, executive director. Welcome. From Freshet News, we have Janis Cleugh and Mario Bartel. From Friends of Canadian Media, we have Raj Shoan and Randy Kitt. From HonestReporting Canada, we have Mike Fegelman, Amanda Eskenasi and Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss. Please forgive me if I've butchered your names. We also have Paul Deegan from News Media Canada. It's good to see you again, sir.

Everyone, or your organizations, will have five minutes for an opening statement, and then we'll open up the floor to members for questions.

We'll start with Mr. Dhanraj.

You have the floor for five minutes, sir.

[Travis Dhanraj, Former Journalist, As an Individual]

Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

As a kid growing up in Alberta, I wasn't like most of my friends. Every night, I watched The National with Knowlton Nash. He represented a public broadcaster that belonged to Canadians—not to power and not to a party, but to the public. That is the CBC I believed in.

Many Canadians know the story about one of my tweets. In April 2024, I publicly stated that Canada Tonight had requested an interview with then CBC president Catherine Tait, and the request was declined. Those were facts. Shortly after, I was removed from the air.

On May 7, 2024, Tait told this very committee she was “not aware of any repercussions”, yet 24 hours earlier, ATIP records showed that her vice-president, Barb Williams, briefed her directly about my situation. That matters because trust matters.

The tweet was not the beginning. It was the breaking point. For months prior, tensions had been building, not over performance, but over control. While I was publicly held up as a bold, diverse host, my ability to lead the very program carrying my face and name was quietly being stripped away.

CBC's stated commitment to diversity contrasted with the realities of tokenism. Still, I pushed forward, creating a nightly panel to showcase real diversity, including of thought. I questioned unequal pay and why, for example, one contributor who was indigenous always needed to be paid, while others weren't. When a prominent Black journalist requested compensation after appearing and doing the exact same job, I was told to reconsider booking him moving forward.

I attempted to end this discriminatory practice. Instead, the panel was cancelled. When it came to politics, interviews were blocked under guardrails, governed by an internal document never made public titled “Parameters for Political Guests”. Political access was centralized and booking decisions were controlled elsewhere. It did not happen once. It became a pattern. It became the standard.

Power & Politics, hosted by David Cochrane, was given gatekeeping authority over which politicians could appear on Canada Tonight. When I questioned that control and who was in control, I was viewed as disruptive.

At the same time, I raised concerns about a toxic environment. After I sat down with Speaker Greg Fergus for a conversation on Black History Month, chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton circulated internal communications questioning my program, copying senior leadership, insinuating that she or Mr. Cochrane should have done the interview. It was an intimidation tactic, which management ignored. I, and others, raised concerns about bullying behaviour by senior figures, including Mr. Cochrane, but while he remained on air, I faced discipline and marginalization.

The transcripts of these meetings show that the issue was not about my journalism, but about reputational risk to the corporation. I received a written warning carrying the threat of termination. I was placed under confidentiality restrictions that prevented me from correcting public and internal narratives. The CBC silenced and intimidated me simply for trying to do my job and fulfill my public service role to Canadians.

This is not about left or right. It's not about one tweet or one career. It's about systemic control, tokenism, selective enforcement and a toxic culture where intimidation went unchecked.

When I refused to waive my rights under the Canadian Human Rights Act in a proposed confidentiality agreement—a gag order, essentially—my role was not renewed. My union, tasked with protecting my rights as an employee, told me explicitly, “It's very much a normal thing that we use.”

After 25 years in journalism, my career ended. The dream I had as a kid of working at the CBC was shattered, along with my trust in it.

Inside the newsroom, the message was unmistakable and did not need to be spoken. I raised concerns. I challenged centralized control and bias. I fought for real diversity and equal standards. I tried to do my job as a journalist. Within months, I was pulled off the air, disciplined, restricted from speaking, stripped of my prime time program and eventually out altogether.

If you were still working there, would you feel safe raising similar concerns? This is how silence becomes culture. It's how whistle-blowers are intimidated.

Public institutions do not weaken from scrutiny; they weaken when they avoid it. The CBC that I believed in was strong enough to withstand accountability. If it is to endure as a public broadcaster worthy of Canadians' trust and over $1.4 billion of their money, it must be strong enough to withstand it again. Accountability is not destruction; it is survival.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Next we go to Angelica Carrero, with the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

[Angelica Carrero, Executive Director, Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec]

Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a few comments as part of your study on the journalism and media sectors in Canada and Quebec. I would also like to commend the committee for its work, which resulted in fair and timely recommendations in its third report.

As part of the executive team at the Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec, or ARCQ, I have the privilege of seeing the work done by these stations. We have 37 radio stations across the province, from Montreal to Matagami to the Îles de la Madeleine, for example. Most of them are French-language stations, but some are bilingual or English-language, such as the station in Blanc‑Sablon. They cover a vast territory, sometimes with only modest annual budgets. The work they do is creative, relentless and sometimes nothing short of miraculous. These are also media outlets that have been around for many years and have stood the test of time, despite the challenges.

The vast majority of stations employ at least one journalist, sometimes two or even four, for a total of about 50 journalists working to provide reliable news coverage of community issues that is grounded in everyday reality. Community radio stations have long enjoyed the public's trust. This was confirmed by a study conducted by the ARCQ in 2024.

Furthermore, it is not enough to simply claim to be doing local or community journalism; you have to actually do it. The physical presence of journalists at community stations must be distinguished from cases where news is generated by non-human means, or where broadcasts merely relay information from a larger nearby urban centre.

In addition to the physical presence of journalists and all their volunteers—and there are many volunteers—it is the mission and purpose of community radio stations that make them excellent ambassadors for local news. Their mission is to serve the community in which they are rooted. In fact, it is the community that creates and manages the radio station; therefore, the station has the community's interests at heart. It's important to remember that these are non-profit media outlets and that they play an essential role in protecting press freedom and defending the public's right to quality information. Indeed, their content is diverse, non-partisan, comprehensive and reliable.

I would venture to say that we are, therefore, providing the kind of community-based journalism that the committee sets out in its second recommendation, and it is certainly true that it needs a great deal of support. Indeed, as I mentioned at the beginning, community radio stations operate on meagre revenues that are dwindling year after year. When it is suggested that they're heavily subsidized, it's truly lamentable, since the only provincial subsidy they receive barely covers the standard salary of a single employee. These are subsidies that are difficult to bring up to date, even after many years.

At the federal level, there is indeed the LJI, or the Local Journalism Initiative, which we greatly appreciate, along with some project-based funding available to those who meet the eligibility criteria, but that's not enough. Fortunately, we're stepping up our efforts to move forward with the CRI, or the Community Radio Initiative, which could be managed by the Community Radio Fund of Canada, or CRFC, in an effort to increase the funding available to all community radio stations across the country.

We're asking the government for annual operating funding of approximately $30 million, so that each station receives about $85,000, an amount that is still quite modest compared to the funding provided to or required by other broadcasters. This assistance would nevertheless help ensure the financial viability of community stations. Otherwise, radio stations must rely on their advertising revenue to try to make up for this shortfall. However, as several experts have already pointed out, this advertising revenue has clearly shifted to foreign platforms, which gobble up almost all of it. This is nothing new. It is Canadian government money being used to grow the financial assets of large American multinationals. All of this runs counter to this same government's much-promoted policy of buying local.

I'd also like to highlight the joint work we're doing with our two sister associations, NCRA, the National Campus and Community Radio Association, and ARCC, the Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada, to request a clear directive on local advertising placement so that a specific portion of the amounts is systematically directed to community advertising. Together, our three associations represent independent, not-for-profit community radio stations across Canada. We believe that this directive would encourage governments to place more of the money that is already set aside with local media outlets. It's a redistribution of existing money; it's not a new request. Above all, we believe that local advertising would have a much greater and lasting impact on citizens.

As the Government of Canada continues to invest in public communications to raise awareness of its programs and services, it is increasingly important to ensure that messages are delivered through channels that actually reach the audiences they are intended to reach, rather than by digital giants that have no roots or support in Canada. Advertising that doesn't take into account geographic, linguistic or digital barriers risks leaving some communities confused and uninformed. In short, the idea is that community radio stations help the government fulfill its mission to inform all Canadians and to have a greater impact on them.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Next we have Janis Cleugh and Mario Bartel from Freshet News.

Collectively, you have five minutes. I'm not sure how you want to share that. Go ahead.

[Mario Bartel, Co-Founder, Freshet News]

Thank you for the opportunity to speak at this committee.

My name is Mario Bartel.

[Janis Cleugh, Co-Founder, Freshet News]

My name is Janis Cleugh. Along with Theresa McManus and Cornelia Naylor, we are the co-founders of Freshet News, the first non-profit news co-operative in western Canada that's union-supported.

We are veteran community news reporters, editors and paginators with more than 100 years of combined experience, covering New Westminster, Burnaby and the Tri-Cities in British Columbia—approximately 600,000 people outside of the city of Vancouver.

Last April, Glacier Media, now called Lodestar Media, closed our three online publications—the New Westminster Record, Burnaby Now and Tri-City News—in the middle of a federal election. It meant that we couldn't cover the all-candidates meetings, that our candidates couldn't get their messaging out and that our readers were lost about who to vote for. This is dangerous for democracy.

[Mario Bartel]

When I originally landed at Tri-City News in 1991, virtually every community in the Lower Mainland was served by at least two local papers. Consolidation and closures winnowed that down to one in most communities by 2015.

In August 2023, the same month our Meta social media shut down, Glacier Media stopped printing our newspapers altogether. The company said that online was the only way forward. It wasn't.

Less than two years later, five rapidly growing cities and two villages immediately east of Vancouver were left with little or no local news source. That meant decisions made at city halls and school boards got no independent coverage. There were no stories about young athletes and emerging artists, and no coverage of local events, festivals and parades.

[Janis Cleugh]

What may have been no longer economically viable to Glacier Media was untenable to the journalists who had dedicated their careers to sharing those stories. After all, we live in those communities, too.

The four of us got together with a co-op developer. With the support of our union, Unifor Local 2000, we put together a plan to keep our communities informed.

We spent the summer and early fall of 2025 learning about co-op structures and governance, fundraising and doing community outreach. People told us they didn't know what was happening in their hometowns anymore.

[Mario Bartel]

On October 15, we launched Freshet News online, a single title covering all of our communities. It's named for the annual spring runoff from the northern snows that wash down the Fraser River past our cities. It symbolizes renewal, a fresh start.

Two months later, we revived a print edition. We're monthly for now, but we plan to increase to twice a month in April, with our ultimate goal to return to weekly publication.

We're four journalists who never had to give much thought to the business side of our craft, the ads that ran between our stories and the distribution network that got those stories to readers.

[Janis Cleugh]

The learning curve has been steep, but our journalism skill set has made us adept to changing gears when needed.

The communities are responding. Our website traffic grows every week, as do subscriptions to our weekly email newsletter. Advertisers are eager to get into our newspaper, and readers are scooping up the newspapers—20,000 of them—from our distribution points at city halls, community and cultural recreation hubs, grocery stores, coffee shops, barbershops and senior residences. We even get calls to replenish.

[Mario Bartel]

We truly feel that our model of non-profit, locally rooted journalism that's accountable to the communities we serve is a way forward as corporate media gives up, but what we're doing is not new. In fact, across the United States, as corporate media abandons communities due to lack of profits, reporter-led news organizations and collectives are filling the gap.

Still, supports are lacking for journalism start-ups in Canada. We've come this far mostly on a volunteer basis as we continue looking for jobs. Our severance and EI benefits have dried up. Our fundraising at community events and through an online crowdfunding platform is composed of mostly small individual donations of $10, $25 and $100 at a time. We don't have charitable status, so we can't issue tax receipts that might shake loose transformative big-money support.

Foundation funding frequently looks for a proven history, something that's difficult for a start-up to provide. Grant opportunities are often like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The few that are journalism-specific, like the local journalism initiative, are already oversubscribed and don't provide funding for such critical supports as hiring ad reps who can bring in ad revenue, or cover costs like software subscriptions, insurance, printing and distribution.

[Janis Cleugh]

Make no mistake: Many of the media industry's wounds are self-inflicted, with too much growth too quickly back when times were flush, too much consolidation, too many resources expended chasing bad ideas and too many owners who are investors rather than people who believe in the mission of news.

Those owners would have us believe that the news business is dead, but from our experience over the past few months, since we started Freshet News, it's been quite the opposite. People want to be connected to each other and their communities free from algorithms. Businesses want to share their stories with local customers. Journalists want to be able to write and keep sharing their stories.

Putting community back into community news is the way forward.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you. That was a very effective use of sharing your time. As a former community reporter, I really appreciate your efforts. Thank you for all you're doing.

Next, from Friends of Canadian Media, we have Raj Shoan and Randy Kitt.

I expect an equally engaging back-and-forth between the two of you.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

You have the floor for five minutes.

[Raj Shoan, Executive Director, Friends of Canadian Media]

Thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

Friends of Canadian Media is a non-partisan, public interest organization dedicated to ensuring that Canadians have access to strong, independent Canadian journalism and storytelling. We advocate for citizens, not for corporations, because a healthy media system is essential to a healthy democracy.

Let me begin plainly: The state of journalism in Canada is poor, and in most communities it is deteriorating further. Over the past decade and a half, hundreds of local news outlets have closed across the country. Millions of Canadians now live in communities with little or no local news coverage. Newsrooms have shrunk. Journalists have been laid off. Entire beats have disappeared.

This is not simply an industry transition; it's a democratic deficit. Local journalism scrutinizes municipal councils. It covers courts. It informs citizens about public health, education and emergencies. When journalism disappears, civic participation declines, polarization increases and misinformation fills the vacuum.

Governments have taken important steps, including with the journalism labour tax credit, the local journalism initiative, the Online News Act, the Online Streaming Act and support for CBC. These measures matter. They demonstrate recognition that journalism is not just another sector; it's democratic infrastructure. However, the structural disruption facing Canadian journalism remains profound. The economic model that sustained local news has been destabilized by global digital platforms that capture advertising revenue while investing minimally in Canadian news production.

That brings me to five areas where federal leadership is essential.

First, the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act are critical to creating a sustainable funding framework for local news. These laws must not be weakened, traded away or hollowed out through exemptions or side deals. Regulatory certainty and enforcement are essential.

Second, eligibility for the journalism labour tax credit should be expanded to include broadcasters. Broadcast newsrooms, particularly in local television and radio, face financial pressures similar to those in print. They too are pillars of local accountability.

Third, Parliament should close the loophole in section 19 of the Income Tax Act that allows a full deductibility of advertising on foreign digital platforms. Canadian advertising dollars should not receive preferential tax treatment when they're directed to foreign platforms rather than Canadian outlets.

Fourth, the federal government should commit to directing at least 25% of its advertising budget to trusted domestic news organizations, both publishers and broadcasters big and small. This would strengthen local journalism while ensuring that Canadians receive critical public information through reliable channels.

Fifth, Canadian news creators must be protected from having their content used by artificial intelligence companies without permission or compensation. Copyright protections, licensing frameworks and transparency requirements must ensure that journalism is not harvested without value flowing back to those who produce it.

Finally, a vibrant CBC is part of a strong ecosystem alongside successful private and independent media. As the national public broadcaster, it plays a foundational role in connecting regions, serving official language minority communities and maintaining news capacity where commercial models are under strain.

I will now turn to my colleague Randy Kitt.

[Randy Kitt, Director of Media, Unifor, Friends of Canadian Media]

Thank you, Raj.

Unifor represents approximately 9,000 media workers across Canada. In the last several years alone, hundreds of journalists and media employees have lost their jobs. When newsrooms shrink, the consequences are immediate. There are fewer reporters at city hall, fewer investigative projects, fewer rural correspondents and more reliance on centralized news content, yet the demand for reliable information has never been greater, as Freshet News can tell you.

We are living through a period of geopolitical instability, rising misinformation and increasing public cynicism. Journalism is one of the few professions capable of grounding public debate in verified fact. Failing to stabilize Canadian journalism means surrendering not just jobs but our sovereignty—losing the local accountability, shared facts and democratic resilience that safeguard our nation's independence.

Journalism is essential to a functioning democracy. The Canadian government should treat it like a national park. It's something that must be nurtured, protected and properly funded for future generations.

[Raj Shoan]

A strong journalism sector is not a luxury. It's infrastructure for democracy, and it's imperative that we sustain it.

We thank the committee for undertaking the study and stand ready to assist.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you very much.

We'll now turn to HonestReporting Canada. I have Mike Fegelman in the room.

Do you have colleagues online? Are you all joining in the five-minute opening?

[Mike Fegelman, Executive Director, HonestReporting Canada]

They will be joining in the Q and A component.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Very good. You have the floor now for five minutes.

[Mike Fegelman]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Good morning. My name is Mike Fegelman, and I'm the executive director of HonestReporting Canada. We're a non-profit organization that ensures fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel. We started more than 20 years ago, but the overt media bias we have experienced and seen over the last two and a half years has made that era look quaint by comparison.

Just hours after thousands of Palestinian terrorists invaded Israel on October 7, carrying out an orgy of murder, rape, torture and kidnappings, our taxpayer-funded broadcaster leaped into action.

In a letter to editorial staff, George Achi, CBC's former director of journalistic standards and practices, warned journalists not to use the word “terrorist” when referring to Hamas and not to admit that 2005 was the end of Israel's permanent presence in Gaza, which it was. Even when Canadian officials refer to Hamas as terrorists, Achi wrote that reporters “should add context to ensure the audience understands this is opinion, not fact.” Hamas is, of course, a listed terrorist organization.

It soon became clear that for the CBC and for wide swaths of the Canadian media landscape, their role was not to report the facts to Canadians, but to use their immense influence in society to promote a narrow ideological agenda.

Present day news outlets parrot talking points from pro-Palestinian activists and overwhelmingly feature guests with a predictable anti-Israel world view, presenting them as credible while choosing not to include opposing voices. When anti-Israel groups sneeze, it achieves wall-to-wall news coverage. When Amnesty International accuses Israel of committing a genocide, going so far as to make up a new definition in order to do so, or when a discredited group of non-experts makes such claims, they get widespread coverage.

When scholars documented Hamas's fabricated death toll or penned a comprehensive report demonstrating that no genocide took place, they were ignored by our media. The unfounded claims of genocide and starvation were promoted ad nauseam by our media. As it became clear that those allegations were false, reporters didn't apologize; they simply moved on. Now, like a cat chasing a laser dot on the wall, the worst offenders in anti-Israel media bias in Canada—whether the CBC, The Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star or others—take their cues not from what's newsworthy, but from what complaints are being made by pro-Palestinian activists.

When reporters document the worrying rise of Islamic radicalism in Canada, the presence of Iranian regime officials in our nation or the impact of Qatari dark money in Canadian universities, they are treated as personae non gratae. When a Canadian mosque recently honoured Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and glorified him as a martyr, our journalists ignored this brazen support for terrorism.

Our journalists have a solemn duty to hold the powerful to account, not to act as their water carriers, but that's what they've done, promoting hard line anti-Israel disinformation and acting as unpaid publicists for an immense web of extremist actors in Canada.

This media coverage directly contributes to a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes. When Israel is painted as a genocidal and pariah state and opponents are widely silenced, a target is drawn on the backs of Canadian Jews. The incessant demonization of Israel—and, by extension, of Jews—has led to an unprecedented attack on the Jewish community, with terrorist rallies now a regular occurrence on Canadian streets and with Jewish schools and synagogues, as we saw this past week, shot at, all while far too many elected leaders and law enforcement ignore this cancer in our midst.

Over the past two years, our media has promoted ideology over facts. In the case of the CBC, it did so at the taxpayer's expense. I'm happy to recount numerous examples of Canadian media bias that we have confronted. When our media act as stenographers for a regressive and hateful world view, it's not reporting the news; it is creating it. When our leaders stay silent, they let it happen.

Our elected leaders must take the lead to remedy the situation. In my written testimony and submission to this committee, I've offered three concrete courses of action that you can take to directly counter these critical issues, and I would be happy to elucidate them today for anyone interested.

I have brought with me here today two colleagues, Dr. Haran Shani-Narkiss, CEO of Innohives, and Amanda Eskenasi, director of education at HR Canada Charitable Organization. They conducted a comprehensive review of the CBC's coverage of the Israel-Hamas war and have provided real scientific evidence of asymmetric coverage. It isn't an opinion that the CBC is one-sided; we now have scientific, irrefutable proof.

Canadian taxpayers fund public broadcasters to provide accurate, impartial and reliable information. When media outlets choose ideology over facts, they fail in this fundamental duty, leaving Canadians misinformed on issues of national security, terrorism and international conflict. This is not merely a concern for one community. It affects every Canadian's right to understand the world as it truly is.

Restoring trust in our media is not a partisan issue, but a national imperative. Parliament must act now to ensure that our media serve Canadians with facts, fairness and integrity, because an informed public depends on it and our democracy requires it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Lisa Hepfner]

Thank you.

Finally, we have Paul Deegan with News Media Canada.

Welcome, sir. You have five minutes, starting now.

[Paul Deegan, President and Chief Executive Officer, News Media Canada]

Good morning.

News Media Canada represents about 550 news titles across Canada, from independent weekly community newspapers to large urban and national dailies.

Since I last appeared before this committee, the advertising market in Canada has continued to remain very challenging. Simply put, too many ad dollars are being scooped up by Google. Last year, a U.S. Federal Court judge ruled that Google, which operates in all three areas of the market—the buying, the selling and the ad exchange itself—illegally monopolized the ad tech market through anti-competitive conduct.

News publishers fully embrace and support the responsible and ethical use of artificial intelligence. At the same time, despite deploying bot blockers, we are seeing the theft of our intellectual property on an industrial scale. Companies like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI—which is familiar to all of you because of their employees' failure to alert authorities prior to the Tumbler Ridge incident—Perplexity and even Canada's Cohere are ingesting, repackaging and distributing copyright-protected content directly from published news articles.

These companies aren't just providing snippets that one would find through a traditional search. They're providing very detailed summaries and passing them off as their own creation. They're depriving news publishers of audience, subscriptions and advertising, and are thus capturing the value journalism depends on for its survival.

Moreover, Google, which is dominant in search, has embedded AI-generated summaries directly into its search interface without providing publishers with an effective opt-out mechanism. If publishers want to block Google's AI crawler, they find themselves de-indexed or unable to attract traffic to their sites.

News is an essential input to the knowledge economy. It helps people, businesses and investors make better, more informed real-time decisions. It's also a necessary input for the output of AI companies, but the value transfer cannot be asymmetrical. The user needs to pay the creator. The content theft by AI companies must stop, and government can help.

First, Public Services and Procurement Canada and Treasury Board can work together to ensure that those on the government's list of artificial intelligence suppliers—there are a hundred and some odd companies on that list—sign a supplier agreement that states they will use our material ethically, with a commitment to the principles of transparency, consent and attribution with respect to all copyright-protected source content.

Second, the industry minister can ask the Competition Bureau to look into the state of competition with respect to search and AI. Googlebot should be split into two crawlers, one for AI and one for search. That would help level the playing field between publishers and Google and between other AI companies and Google. Those companies have no incentive to sign commercial agreements with publishers when Google's AI services are getting the content for free.

Third, the Copyright Act should not be amended to include a text and data mining exception or be weakened in any way. Rights holders must be protected, with no exceptions.

On the positive side, the Online News Act, while imperfect, is working for Canadian news publishers. Prior to the act, and in an effort to thwart it, Google and Meta did content licensing deals with a number of news publishers. Most of our members, however, were left out in the cold without a cent. Today, whether you're a large publisher or a smaller independent, you're getting about $16,400 per year, per full-time journalist. For example, the World-Spectator from Moosomin, Saskatchewan, received almost $80,000 last year. Prior to the Online News Act, most of our members never saw a dime in content licensing from these big American tech firms.

Between the Online News Act and the Canadian journalism labour tax credit, which rewards those who maintain and grow journalism jobs, there's finally a level of predictability for business planning, which is translating into a level of stability in many newsrooms, where we are seeing investment after years of cost-cutting. Both of these measures should be maintained.

Let me turn briefly to government advertising. Despite the government's stated buy Canadian policy, changing its agency of record and spending tens of millions of dollars each year, news publishers are not seeing any meaningful federal government ad dollars, yet when a bank, a retailer or a car company runs a national or regional campaign, news publishers do okay. That's because their chief marketing officers know that we are a great way to reach and engage Canadians.

Why are we only seeing micro pennies on the dollar when it comes to federal campaigns? It's simple: The government's agency of record is doing what is easiest and most profitable for them, and that's programmatic advertising through American big tech firms.

We hope the committee will recommend an advertising set-aside, which you heard about earlier. An ad set-aside done right.... On the publishing side, for example, we reach 86% of Canadians who engage with newspaper content each week.

It's time for the government to think more like a marketer who cares about reach and efficacy. We can help you reach engaged audiences better than anyone. For advertisers, whether they are governments or the private sector, credible journalism strengthens trust while delivering better business results in a brand-safe environment. There's absolutely no reason the federal government shouldn't use Canadian news brands to inform Canadians.

We live in an era of disinformation and misinformation, which are amplified by algorithms. Facts matter. High-quality information produced by real people who do the work of gathering and verifying facts, as well as legal review, is paramount.

Thank you. I look forward to our discussion.