To your question on Bill C-18, I think what the government at the time may not have understood was that Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram were driving huge referral traffic back to legacy publishers and digital publishers. That, in turn, allowed traffic to increase natively, which then allowed publishers—again, whether they were traditional or digital—to sell off that traffic to garner advertising revenue. Everybody lost that traffic. The $100 million, when I look at it in the grand scheme of things, is a drop in the bucket of what it put at risk.
On the digital innovation side, it stopped a whole industry that was booming. I know of digital publishers that are smaller in scale than my organization that have gone out of business or are at risk of going out of business, despite the $100 million from Google. At the end of the day, that money is tied to how many people you employ, not to your impact.
What does that then foster? It fosters organizations that probably weren't on the right trajectory in terms of impact, but now have bloated operations and are still not reaching the number of Canadians they should be reaching, whereas the organizations that were building business models actually reaching those Canadians are not offered any incentive to continue doing that.
It all goes back to what type of country we are trying to foster and what type of business ecosystem we are trying to foster. I'm not here to say we should forget the legacy players and push them to the wayside. It's none of that. What I am saying is that we can't protect an industry that is dying at the expense of a group of organizations in a new industry that is being fostered. That is what we have essentially done over the last three years.
We've protected the old guard at the expense of a new generation of media companies and organizers that took a risk, put their livelihoods on the line, started employing Canadians in different regions across this country and brought diversity of thought to people's screens. It may not have been the big screen—it was a smaller screen—but it was the screen Canadians were consuming content on. We've hindered and stifled that growth.
Is that money good? I look at it as a stopgap. It's holding organizations together that have to do that hard work to essentially reinvent themselves. We may lose some of those organizations. On the flip side, there were organizations that could have potentially grown bigger to replace those organizations or complement the loss that those organizations were dealing with.