Summer is nearly at an end. Parliament is about to resume. The Conservatives are about to elect a new leader. And our politics are about to enter a period of sharper definition, with clearer differences between the two main parties. Nowhere is this more true, seemingly, than over the issue of government involvement in the media: broadcast, print and internet-based.
The Liberals built much of the current apparatus of subsidies and regulations, and remain unrepentant advocates of it. Not content with regulating radio and television broadcasters – particularly with a view to what proportion of their content meets the regulator’s definition of “Canadian” – the Trudeau government proposes to extend the same regime to the global internet.
Bill C-11, now before the Senate, would regulate audio and visual streaming services as if they were conventional broadcasters: not only the large distributors, such as Netflix or Spotify, but also social-media sites; not only domestic services, but foreign-based ones; and not only provider-generated content, but
user-created content as well. All would now have to answer to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, just as the broadcasters have for decades.
Will Pierre Poilievre fully commit his party to the principle that the state has no place in the newsrooms of the nation? And if he does, will the media punish him for it?
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Not content, likewise, with subsidizing the CBC – plus the
private broadcasters, plus the magazine industry – the Liberals have lately sought to extend state funding to the newspaper industry as well, with the enthusiastic support of many publishers. The first tranche of aid was provided in 2019 through a five-year, $595-million suite of tax credits known colloquially, and accurately, as the newspaper bailout.
Now the Liberals are proposing to entrench state aid to newspapers through Bill C-18, still before the Commons. Only instead of providing the aid directly out of government coffers, it will be laundered through the major search and social-media platforms, notably Google and Facebook.
Technically the bill would only mandate negotiations on how much the platforms should have to pay to use newspaper content. But who’s kidding whom? Not only would the newspapers be empowered to bargain collectively, as if they were a union, but in the event of an impasse, the issue would fall to the CRTC to decide. One guess whose side it would be likely to take.
That would be troublesome enough, if the platforms were in fact using our content, without paying for it. But as they do not – they merely link to it, to our enormous benefit – the program is revealed for what it is: a crass shakedown. Facebook and Google have money. The publishers want it. So the government will force FacebookGoogle to give the publishers some of it. It’s as simple as that.
Finally, there is the online harms bill, still in the drafting – or indeed redrafting – stage. As originally envisaged, the bill would have given the state vast new powers to regulate or delete content – or even suppress it before it appeared – either directly or via complaints to the Canadian Human Rights Commission. The ensuing flap has apparently caused something of a rethink, but how extensive it has been remains to be seen.
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