JOHNSON – Will Bill C-18 make us more ignorant of what’s happening in our own country?

BILL C-18 IS BASICALLY the Trudeau government’s project to save the Canadian news media, but the bill is so ill-conceived and proving to be so counterproductive in practice, that it is actually throwing the future of the free press in Canada into doubt.

The background is that it’s very difficult to make money in the Canadian news industry. Canada has plenty of newspapers and news magazines and news TV channels, but they are generally all chronically losing money.

There’s quite a lot of reasons why they are finding it hard to turn a profit. Canada is a relatively small media market, so it’s easy to think that a lot of Canadians are just not that interested in Canadian news. It is also fair to argue that the quality of a lot of Canadian journalism is quite low when compared to the quality of journalism you can get in the States.

There are also a lot of barriers to foreign ownership of news media in Canada, which has probably prevented a lot of international capital from keeping the industry afloat. There are a lot of other reasons that are probably also causing some of these hardships as well, but for whatever reason the simple fact is, yes … it is very difficult to make money if you’re in the business of Canadian news in the year 2023.

It seems like the only thing we’ve really seen approximating a strategy on the industry side has been greater and greater mergers. The big story in the Canadian media right now is about the two largest surviving Canadian newspaper conglomerates proposing to merge; Postmedia Network Canada Corp. and Nordstar Capital LP, the owner of Metroland Media Group and the Toronto Star.

These Enterprises independently are suffering financially so this makes a lot of sense.
In the context of this dire climate the Trudeau Administration comes along and decides that government is the helping hand that the failing news industry needs.

This alone raises all sorts of philosophical concerns of its own because the news media’s job is to report on government, so we don’t necessarily want these two parties in bed together.

But … never mind that … regardless, the government and the Canadian news media got together and started aggressively pushing a narrative in which the failure of the Canadian news media needed a new fall guy; big American tech companies.

Specifically, these social media companies are apparently ‘stealing Canadian news’. When you go into social media feeds like Twitter or Facebook or even just Google search pages, and you start scrolling, you’ll often see links to news stories that your friends or family are sharing and this supposedly is the Great Theft, masterminded by the evil, sinister tech companies. The charge being that they are allowing people to take content from Canadian news websites and distribute it on their platforms.

Then the poor little waifs known as Canadian media companies say that this theft is causing them millions and millions of dollars in lost revenue and this is the reason why they can’t make any money.

That’s the background … now A Hot Take.

The basis for this claim really does not make any sense at all, because the purpose of sharing any news link is to get users of that social media page to go and visit the actual Canadian news service website that that link is from.

There is no theft of revenue here, if anything these American tech companies are pointing Canadians to Canadian news site links, and those sites are getting more hits than if Canadians naturally migrated to their websites to read their news.

ALL of these Canadian media companies obviously know this, as they themselves all have active social media accounts that do nothing all day but post links to their own content on Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites.

Despite the lack of logic, this is the argument that is now enshrined in Canadian law via Bill C-18. Bill C-18 mandates that big tech companies negotiate fair compensation with the Canadian media companies … based on the premise that the Canadian media companies are deserving some sort of compensation … even if these social media companies are not even actually selling the news to us.

Bill C-18 gives the Canadian government the power to impose some sort of deal, if the two parties cannot negotiate one themselves.

These social tech companies do not accept the core premise of this bill, which is the idea that they owe the Canadian media companies some sort of fair compensation for the fact that links to media company content is freely provided on their platforms. They argue that they don’t even host the news article … they just provide a link to the Canadian media company that owns the story.

Canadian media companies claim that the big social media platforms are hogging all of the ad revenue that the internet has to offer. This revenue is in the billions of dollars.

What Canadian media companies are trying to do is basically steal a share of that and manipulate the Canadian government via Canadian legislation to justify it.

Even though the tech companies lobbied very hard against this legislation … it passed anyway and was signed into law just a few days ago.

Now Facebook and Google have switched to playing hardball. The other day, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, announced that they are no longer going to allow the sharing of links to Canadian news publications on their platforms.

Then Google also announced that they are not going to allow the sharing of links to Canadian news websites on their search engine, so basically calling the government’s bluff on this, saying if you are going to claim that sharing links is a form of theft, well then fine … we’ll just not share the links.

The government was obviously operating on the basis that when push game to shove the tech companies would capitulate with the arbitration system that they created, but the reality is that Canada is a small enough market, and the sharing of links to Canadian news websites is a small enough proportion of what Canadians do online, that the tech companies are willing to sacrifice it.

They did the math and realized that this is an extortive racket that the Canadian government is trying to impose on them for basically doing nothing but pointing people to media websites … that aren’t capable of marketing themselves profitably.

The way in which that user experience will be worse for Canadians is very consequential in a broad democratic sense. The quality of Canadian news that is provided by these big Canadian news companies is not perfect, but it’s still the dominant way that most of us learn about what’s going on in this country.

The passive way that a lot of us use social media probably does in fact expose us to a lot of stories that we might not otherwise read. We see things that friends or family members are sharing and we click on the links and therefore we might read something that we might not have read on our own volition.

Where we are now, is we have to purposely go to our preferred Canadian news website and peruse through the myriad of provincial, national and international stories, hoping we find something that interests us. Who’s going to do that?

Then … assuming you find something … you can’t share it with friends or family.

Living in a country where you cannot share links to news articles on social media, would just make the country broadly more ignorant about what’s happening in it.

This has direct consequences for how people vote, consider and decide upon many cultural and sociological realities of living in a diverse country like Canada. It is the conversation, and the free flow of information that empowers the populous and therefore keeps democracy alive and active.

Sure, occasionally it may gather together truck convoys and the like, but this is the risk we pay for entrenching the democratic ideal in our information sharing.

For me there is a bigger story here than just the Trudeau government operating on the assumption that tech companies will ultimately crack and pay up.

The Trudeau Administration is a government that loves to regulate and really seems to have a lot of interest in regulating media in particular. It is fair to suggest, this is something that you want to tinker with very delicately in a democratic society.

Unfortunately, this government instead tends to go in guns-a-blazing and they don’t really seem to have thought through the consequences of their actions and what they will mean for the state of Canada’s democratic health.

Bill C-11, the online streaming act that forces streaming services to favor and support Canadian content via the CRTC, is another previous example of this government making it very difficult to promote Canada as a democracy in the technology age.

In Bill C-18’s case there’s also the question, is Canada a country that you want to do business in anymore? There has always been this dream that Canada is going to be some sort of great tech hub or a great technical innovation hub.

Right now, the Canadian government has this whole initiative that we are going to poach the best and brightest from Silicone Valley’s America, and they’re going to move to Canada and do their magic here … but why would you want to do that when the government is so hostile to success and innovation?

Canada’s great pitch in reality seems to be that our government will have your back if your industry is failing, even if that means sacrificing a lot of democratic virtues along the way.

Canada is a supposed good player in the democratic world. We promote ourselves as a good example for other countries, and we are not supposed to model irresponsible behavior the way we are doing right now with C-18.

There may be solutions out there to save the news business, but this … this ain’t it.

David Johnson is a Kamloops resident, community volunteer and self described maven of all things Canadian.