Evidence of meeting #33 for Canadian Heritage in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was journalism.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada
But we have made a lot of investments in women's hockey.
Bloc
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Lisa Hepfner
That would be [Inaudible—Editor] overtime.
Mr. Waugh, you have the floor for five minutes.
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon South, SK
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I'll go to Rod Schween.
Thank you for hosting me when I was in Kamloops a little over a month ago. I appreciated the tour of your facility.
President, Pattison Media, Local Independent Television Stations
Thank you for coming.
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon South, SK
I enjoyed it.
I have lots of memories with Bill O'Donovan and so on, because we used to work together in Saskatchewan.
You closed the Medicine Hat station, as you know, on June 3.
Ms. Bouchard said in her statement that she collaborates with other media.
When CHAT, which had been in Medicine Hat for 70 years, exited the market, did CBC reach out to you as an independent television station that was leaving?
She claims they collaborate with media. Had you had any talks with CBC when you left Medicine Hat?
President, Pattison Media, Local Independent Television Stations
I'll say that we do a lot of work with CBC on the transmission side. We're very good partners with each other. We rent transmission space from them. They rent transmission space from us. We've had a wonderful relationship with them in that regard.
Unfortunately, when we exited Medicine Hat...and I saw some of the coverage from the committee earlier. It was suggested that we couldn't compete with CBC. I'll be very clear that our decision to exit Medicine Hat came before CBC added its bureau in Medicine Hat.
To answer your question directly, no, unfortunately, they have not. We have not had any conversation. I respect the fact that they will come to the market and they will put out a job posting. We have to do the same thing in our markets. We would respond as well, but boy, I would love to have a conversation whereby we could collaborate on bringing journalists to markets like Medicine Hat, because we have great difficulty in that.
Unfortunately, when they came to Medicine Hat, they took one of the remaining journalists we had decided to keep in Medicine Hat, so we could still try to service the market with our local radio station. Instead of helping us in the market, they left us without a journalist. We had to go out and train somebody else. Of course they're going to hire the person we spent time and money investing in, the person who knows the market, knows the people and has the contacts, and we're left to start all over again.
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon South, SK
Mr. Schween, we have not heard this only in Medicine Hat. We've heard it all over.
Ms. Bouchard, you just heard from an independent news operator who said you are poaching people, and you are.
President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada
I didn't hear him say we were “poaching”. No.
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon South, SK
No, don't rephrase it. Mr. Schween said you walked into Medicine Hat and took one of his employees, a person they'd spent months, if not years, training.
President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada
One of his employees applied for the job. The job was filled after the station had closed. The same employee stayed with us for a little while. Then they moved on to another job in another province.
President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada
I'm saying that we offered him an opportunity to stay in Medicine Hat.
President and Chief Executive Officer, CBC/Radio-Canada
He took the opportunity. His own career, his own wishes, led him elsewhere. This is business. This is what happens in human resources these days. People move. They move because they want other experience. We are all faced with the same challenges.
I'm sorry that there was not a conversation at a timely moment for your station that was closing. I think that should have been a good reflex.
I'm trying to build this reflex as I travel across the country and meet with local leadership, because we don't know what we don't know. If we ask questions.... I have had many, many conversations with local operators, and I always start with this: What's going on? What is working for you? What is not working for you? How can we help?
Conservative
Kevin Waugh Conservative Saskatoon South, SK
Yes. Okay. Medicine Hat is a gap. You just heard that the local independent TV pulled out of Medicine Hat, and you didn't reach out to Pattison Media, which I think CBC should have.
Mr. Schween, you heard her comments. How does it help expand media when they walk into a community and poach or whatever—I'm going to say “poach”, although maybe Ms. Bouchard doesn't agree with that word—in a so-called media desert when you have closed the TV station down?
President, Pattison Media, Local Independent Television Stations
I don't think it does, unfortunately. I wouldn't even call Medicine Hat a news desert after we exited the market. We made the decision to close the television station because, quite frankly, we had lost money in that market six out of the previous nine years. We were slated to lose last year, even before closing costs. This would have been seven out of 10 years we were losing money in that market. We made a decision to keep our radio operations going there. We haven't abandoned the Medicine Hat market. We continue to serve the market and many others.
Unfortunately, this is not the only case in which CBC has taken one of our employees. I agree that it's not poaching—the same thing happens with us—but respectfully, they can't say that they're working to have conversations in these markets and help in those situations, because I have many other examples of that, unfortunately. You've heard many other examples of that. I would welcome that conversation; unfortunately, I think they're targeting markets that aren't news deserts, in a lot of cases, and I would encourage them to do so.
Liberal
Liberal
Zoe Royer Liberal Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you very much.
I'm going to pose my first question to Mr. Frame.
Mr. Frame, you mentioned that you represent 350 journalists. You mentioned, in the scenario of an emergency, that predominantly American news would be reported to the Canadian people.
I would like you to imagine yourself in the seat of a parliamentarian for a moment. We know we need to pivot, in terms of supporting a vibrant, local, credible news network across the country, coast to coast to coast.
What are some of the policies you would want to implement? What would be the priority with which you would roll these out? Maybe you could also speak to some of the international legislation that is happening right now, given the state of journalism.
President, Torstar Corporation
Thank you for the question, and thank you for having me.
It's a good question in terms of policies that could be put in place to support the news ecosystem in Canada. I think you asked, more or less, the priority order of what I would do. I would start with the easiest, and it's been alluded to already. I would follow the model set by the government in Queen's Park, as well as by the local government in New York City and in the state of Maryland, and set an example for the country by allocating federal ad spend to Canadian-owned and operated media, showing confidence in and support for those channels and signalling to the private sector that this is a commitment to the country.
From a policy perspective, I would then look more closely at some of the monopoly challenges we're dealing with, specifically around Google. You asked about other jurisdictions and what they're doing. There's been a lot of effort and investigation into the problem of AI Overviews. What happens is—and you've probably all experienced it—you do a search on Google, and instead of providing you with a collection of links to news sites where original journalism has been done, Google reads all those news sites on your behalf, takes the content and summarizes it for you. This creates a block between us, our audience and our business model opportunity. They do this without our permission or endorsement, and they do it in a way we can't compete with, because their monopoly on search means that we're not able to block their bots from crawling our content without putting own businesses at risk.
In places like the U.K. and in the European Union overall, people are looking at this situation very seriously and investigating the opt-in and opt-out potential, in terms of AI Overviews. There is also a very lively discussion in the tech community around the need for bots to disclose their purpose so that when a bot comes to your site, it has to identify, honestly, what it's doing. It can't come and index your content for search but also use it for AI training. There's a lot of work to be done around the policies that support the protection of content as the AI moment continues to grow around us.
I referenced the court decisions in the United States around Google's monopoly over ad technology. The Canadian government could follow that path, investigate the behaviours of Google and their control of the buy side, the sell side and the overall marketplace for ad tech, as well as the proven illegal behaviours to corrupt that market to the unfair advantage of Google.
I would start, simply, with the advertising set-aside policy of the federal government. I would then move into the challenge of AI stealing content and the need for permission and bot disclosures to be required. I would encourage an investigation into the ad tech practices of Google in order to address the monopoly situation we're trying to live with.
Liberal
Zoe Royer Liberal Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
That's amazing.
Very quickly, what is the hallmark of credible journalism versus non-credible journalism in Canada?
President, Torstar Corporation
As the CBC noted, we have publicly posted journalistic standards. We publish corrections when we make an error. We are accountable to our subscribers, our readers and our communities. We also employ an ombud who will adjudicate when there's a complaint about our coverage and independently determine whether we've been on side.
If you were to contrast that with other institutions that have no such accountability and do not correct or claim a responsibility to the truth or to accuracy, you would see a stark line between the two.
We published a story a couple of days ago about AI-generated “slopaganda” being spewed toward Albertans in support of separation.
That kind of irresponsible AI-generated propaganda is the antithesis of what we do in terms of transparent, high-quality journalism.
Liberal
