Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you so much for inviting me to speak today. I was a journalist in Canada for 10 years, working in radio, television and online. I used to run cbc.ca. I used to run the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the non-profit that operates Wikipedia. That makes me the only Canadian to

Canadian Heritage committee  No, I have not. I'm a completely independent voice. I used to be on the CBC payroll, until 2007, but since 2007, I have taken no money from anybody tangentially, potentially, definitely or at all involved in Bill C-18.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I can. In my opinion, the debates about whether Bill C-18 literally constitutes a link tax are hairsplitting. They are a bit beside the point. The whole basis of the legislation is the notion that making available material or facilitating access to it is taking value from

Canadian Heritage committee  Right, and I think what it does is that it creates the conditions in which it could be, as you say, applied to other forms of information, other forms of knowledge. I don't know that it would go down a cable television kind of road where consumers would be buying packages. When I

Canadian Heritage committee  I feel like in some ways this bill is the worst of both worlds. I think the minister has said he doesn't want to be in the middle between the news organizations and the platforms, but I think the truth is, if the government has policy objectives, it is in the middle. You can't es

Canadian Heritage committee  —journalism available to Canadians, there are more straightforward ways to do that than trying to do it in this way, where you're intervening in the market, but from a sideways perspective. I'm not sure that was very articulate. I hope it helps.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's appalling. It's terrible. I don't think anybody is arguing differently. The state of journalism in this country.... I lived outside Canada for 11 years, and I returned about a year and a half ago. The Globe and Mail is a brochure now. The institutions, even the ones that st

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, absolutely. I would throw in there, too, the indie publishers and the digital start-ups—all the little guys, whether they're operating at a local level or not. Originally, the indie start-up folks opposed Bill C-18. Then when it became pretty clear that it was likely to g

Canadian Heritage committee  Right. I have had those questions myself. I think it's so important that this kind of legislation be considered in the context of what is actually happening in the news industry and not just in the context of the news industry needing dollars because one thing that has been hap

Canadian Heritage committee  You are asking the wrong person. I'm sorry, but I'm not a sports person. I know nothing about sports arbitration.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'm sorry. I'll try to answer quickly. It's hard to define quality. I think that in previous meetings people talked about standards and practices, and there are ways in which journalism organizations adopt standards and practices. Perhaps that is one way to define quality. I t

Canadian Heritage committee  I do agree that a lot has been brought into the room today that is not germane to Bill C-18, and is not about news organizations and their relationship with news disseminating platforms. I think we all agree, presumably, that there are many reasons to be critical of big tech. Th

Canadian Heritage committee  The people who are doing the creativity and innovation right now don't think so, and I think that their perspectives are probably correct, because they are the folks doing that work. From my perspective, this bill will reward organizations that have deal-making capacity and empl

Canadian Heritage committee  No, I don't think so, for the reasons I said before. I think they just don't have the bargaining power. They don't have the time, and they don't have the energy. They aren't big enough to support that kind of negotiation need. To your second question, obviously, as I have said,

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. I don't know if I can provide them in the time you have, but there is a piece—