It's a great question.
My thought process is always “let's incentivize.” We should be incentivizing Canadian businesses and advertisers to spend money on digital media companies that, again, have taken that risk and built business models that are now ready to scale. That's the opportunity before us right now. We have digital media companies that, if we didn't have Bill C-18 and weren't being hindered by the two biggest platforms Canadians utilize, would be scaling at an exponential rate right now, but right now, we're dealing with that roadblock.
What I would love to see, if we are going to utilize funds, is the creation of an incentive program so that if advertisers are working directly with these digital media companies, they get an incentive, whether that's a tax write-off or whatever. When an advertiser wants to spend money on Canadian media, there's a pipeline of all of these people in the middle. That's where it gets siphoned off. That infrastructure in the middle, whether it's ad agencies, DSPs, SSPs or ad exchanges, is all owned by Americans. That's why most of the money ends up south of the border and doesn't end up in the hands of legacy publishers or digital-first publishers. There needs to be an incentive for Canadian organizations to work directly with Canadian-owned digital media companies. That will, in turn, see more of that money stay here in Canada and create more opportunities and jobs and so forth.
There also needs to be a special program for digital media companies that have taken that risk so that they can continue to grow. I look at some of the funds that are out there, like the Canadian periodical fund, for example. A lot of those programs are based on and help solely legacy players that do print. I'm not saying don't do print, but when I look at the numbers, the number of people buying and reading a newspaper continues to dwindle every single day. The organizations creating content for people where they are don't have access to these programs and those funds. They're never part of the conversation. They're always looked at as an afterthought.
What I'm saying is that we now need to be central in this conversation. We need to be key stakeholders in revolutionizing and creating the framework for how our media ecosystem looks in the future.
Again, the intention of Bill C-18 was good. I think everybody here can agree that we need a solid media ecosystem, and that includes all of the players here at this table. Bill C-18 inadvertently impacted new innovators and digital media start-ups more heavily than the traditional players. All we did was safeguard an industry and players that were already struggling. Those that were actually doing well and on the precipice of becoming big national media companies at scale to compete with the likes of those in the U.S. were harmed in the process.