The link that is very explicitly drawn is the quality of Canadian journalism and the output of Canadian journalism in civic resilience. It has been a priority of the government that these two things be linked. Higher quality of production of information locally will ensure or help civic resilience. I think that concept, that idea, is fundamentally sound. What we want is to get high-quality, easily available information to every citizen to help them make informed decisions. That's where we should start from.
Now, on the question of whether or not Bill C-18 has been successful, there have been two major effects. One is $100 million a year from Google to support Canadian journalism. That means there are more journalists writing stories and more availability. Maybe that's good, but there's been this enormous harm that has been done, which is that news is now not widely available on Facebook and Instagram. I think that decision by Meta to remove news was not written in stone. There is the chain here. There's Bill C-18, and then there's the Meta decision.
I think the Meta decision largely relies on a loophole. The loophole here is that they have interpreted very directly that news outlets cannot post and individuals cannot post news links. They have said that because those two things are not happening, they are not a news distributor. They are a news distributor, though. If you ask Canadians today where they get their news—you can ask them, we have published results on this—they will say they get their news from Facebook and Instagram. That's where they go to get their news.
We have an impossible situation here. We are saying that they are not subject to this law. They are not paying into this fund, because they are not news distributors. At the same time, depending on the platform, 40% to 50% of Canadians are saying they get their news on that platform. It's an inherent contradiction and one that I am deeply concerned about. It speaks to all sorts of challenges here, but I think that absolutely needs to continue to be considered.
The other piece here about Bill C-18 that is really an ongoing question is its applicability to AI platforms. In the AI news audit that I mentioned, if you go to any AI chatbot today and ask about a recent Canadian news event, it will provide you—and our study documents this in what I would say is painful detail—with a proximate substitute to the Canadian journalists' content, and it will do so by fetching the journalists' content, packaging it and providing it to you as its own product.