Thank you, Mr. Irving.
During the 2021 federal election campaign, the Prime Minister promised within the first hundred days to introduce an act that would require digital platforms earning revenue from publishing news to share part of their earnings with Canadian media. The act was based on the Australian model.
The Australian model is simple, and it doesn't involve taxpayer money. It allows news publishers to negotiate collectively with big-tech platforms and services to receive reasonable compensation for the content our Canadian journalists produce. If negotiations don't lead to a fair settlement, it goes to baseball-style, final-offer arbitration.
In Australia, the initial reaction from Google was to threaten that it would stop making searches available in that country. Meta, or Facebook, actually restricted people in news organizations from posting, sharing or viewing Australian news content on Facebook. The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, fired back. He said, “We will not be intimidated by BigTech seeking to pressure our Parliament as it votes on our important News Media Bargaining Code,” and, “Facebook's actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing.”
The Australian code today is in place, and it's working for publishers large and small. To give you a sense of context, so far, more than 30 agreements have been reached, including Country Press Australia, which represents about 180 smaller, independent and regional titles. Public reports suggest that in total these deals with Meta and Google—