If I could, I'd direct it to talking about probably the biggest economic driver—and I'm not going to call it a silver bullet—that could really make an impact for all of us around this table by increasing the amount of Canadian advertising directed to Canadian media. That's a very simple message in a report that came out in 2016, and it has been updated repeatedly.
In the Income Tax Act, to solve this problem when it first occurred close to 40 years ago, there was a restriction on the deductibility of Canadian advertising by Canadian companies when they advertised on foreign media. Thirty years ago, in 1996, we decided to exempt the Internet, as it was simply known, from that requirement because there was almost no advertising on it. Today, three dollars out of every four dollars, three-quarters of the entire advertising market—home radio, newsprint, television, online—goes to the online intermediaries Google and Meta.
If this simple tax exclusion were removed from digital media in section 19 of the Income Tax Act, it would repatriate slowly and at the choice of Canadian businesses, but it would repatriate billions of dollars into the ecosystem. That needs to be taken care of. This would provide the funding to look at all the things we've talked about: increased local journalism, investigative journalism and new media outlets, such as that of Mr. Griffiths.
