The battle over Bill C-18, Ottawa’s Online News Act, has made for strange bedfellows.
That was apparent this week as the country’s private broadcasters and newspapers teamed up with their public sector rival, CBC/Radio-Canada, to ask the Competition Bureau to investigate Meta’s move to block Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram – a move they call “an obvious violation of the abuse of dominance provision” in the Competition Act.
Meta’s hardball tactics in response to C-18, which would force tech giants to compensate Canadian news outlets for linking to their content, has managed to unite domestic industry players that are usually at each other’s throats.
Whether they like it or not – and most do not – Canadian media outlets depend on users of Facebook and Instagram to click on the links that send eyeballs (and advertising dollars) their way. Meta’s move to progressively block access to Canadian news on its platforms “threatens the [Canadian news] industry and, by extension, creates a major challenge to our democracy,” the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, CBC/Radio-Canada and News Media Canada said in a letter dated Monday to Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell.
What to know about Bill C-18, the new law that will affect how you get news in Canada
Internet freedom fighters accuse the news industry of wanting to have its cake and eat it, too. The industry pushed hard for C-18, after complaining for years that Meta and Google had been reproducing their news content for free. Yet, it is now crying foul as Meta ceases to engage in the very activity the industry claimed had been causing them so much harm.
Such criticisms are disingenuous since the sheer dominance of Meta and Google means access to their platforms is critical to the ability of Canadian news outlets to reach an online audience, while at the same time constituting a threat to their financial capacity to produce quality content as advertising revenues are sucked up by foreign tech giants. The industry’s demand for a share of the revenue Meta generates from their content is justified.
Still, it is surprising to see the country’s print and digital newspaper outlets, represented by News Media Canada, align themselves with private broadcasters and the CBC in appealing to the Competition Bureau. Surprising because the CBC and private broadcasters are arguably as much of a threat to the survival of many Canadian newspapers as Meta and Google.
Broadcasters would be the biggest winners under C-18 if Meta and Google complied with the law by negotiating with news outlets to compensate them for using their content. The Parliamentary Budget Officer has estimated that fully three-quarters of the $329-million in annual compensation Meta and Google would be required to pay would go to the CBC, Bell, Rogers, Quebecor and other broadcasters.
The CBC receives more than $1.2-billion a year from Canadian taxpayers, via the federal government, and raises almost $650-million more in advertising and subscriber fees. Its investments in online news and streaming exceed in scale anything the Canadian newspaper industry as a whole could ever match. The millions of additional dollars the CBC would reap under C-18 would likely go right back into expanding the public broadcaster’s digital footprint to the detriment of local and national newspapers.
Unfortunately, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has elevated the CBC to sacred cow status, repeatedly ignoring calls to redefine the public broadcaster’s mandate. That is unlikely to change as long as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre uses funding for the CBC (he’s against it) as a wedge issue to mobilize his hard-right base.
Meanwhile, BCE (which owns CTV, and Noovo in Quebec), Rogers (CityTV) and Quebecor (TVA) complain that competition from CBC/Radio-Canada for scarce advertising dollars is hurting their conventional television networks. Yet, they can hardly plead poverty. Their wireless businesses generate billions of dollars in profits and enable them to cross-promote their networks’ news content on customers’ phones.
BCE’s Bell Media division is now asking the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to eliminate local news requirements entirely and reduce Canadian programming expenditures by one-third, citing hefty operating losses on the local news operations of CTV’s affiliated stations. Yet, Bell fails to mention that it earns juicy profits from its specialty news channels that offset losses on local news. Bell also suggests in its CRTC application that the requirement to broadcast six hours per week of “locally reflective news” in major English-language markets crowds out national and international news that viewers might prefer. As if.
The Trudeau government has managed to unite Canada’s media industry behind C-18. But the new law, even if Meta and Google eventually comply with it, cannot ensure the survival of what’s left of the Canadian newspaper industry.
Not as long as the CBC and private broadcasters reap most of C-18′s benefits. Ottawa eventually needs to fix that, or there may soon be no Canadian newspapers left.