Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s poll numbers tell a universally bad news story, but he has had some good news elsewhere.
The best news is the $100 million deal Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge struck with Google.
That deal was necessary because the clock was ticking toward the crucial date of December 19, when Liberals’ law C-18, the online news act, would come into effect.
C-18 requires the tech platforms it calls “digital news intermediaries” to compensate companies which produce Canadian news for their content shared on the intermediaries’ platforms .
The biggest and most powerful platforms are Google and Facebook.
From the outset, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, refused to even consider cooperating with the new legislation.
Instead, Facebook and the other platform Meta controls, Instagram, decided to block all news originating in Canada.
When you try to share a story from rabble.ca, the CBC, Le Devoir, or any other Canadian publication on Facebook, you get this message:
“In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be shared on Facebook.”
Google was a bit more flexible
For its part, Google was not overjoyed with C-18, far from it. When Parliament passed the law in June 2023, Google said:
“The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called ‘link tax’) creates uncertainty for our products and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating Canadians’ access to news from Canadian publishers.”
The tech giant added that it had “informed the Government that when the law takes effect, in December 2023, we will have to remove links to Canadian news from our Search, News and Discover products in Canada.”
In effect, Google gave the Canadian government an ultimatum: Come up with some kind of arrangement we can accept or we will block all Canadian news when C-18 comes into effect.
In this negotiation, it seems the tech mega-giant held most of the cards. The Canadian government evidently felt more pressure to compromise than did Google.
C-18 requires digital news intermediaries, such as Google, to make compensation deals with individual Canadian media companies. For smaller, independent producers of Canadian content the law provides for some kind of collective, which would bargain on their behalf.
The law also states that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) should oversee the process.
But the Google folks were never interested in dealing with a whole series of negotiations. It wanted a single deal with the entire Canadian media industry – and that’s exactly what the Trudeau government gave them.
The concept of a collective has now been extended to everybody who produces news in Canada, small and large.
As well, monetarily, the $100 million is far below what the federal government had earlier estimated Google would pay, which was $172 million.
Still, the deal is something of a win for the Liberal government. It lifts the sword of Damocles hanging over Canadian news.
Facebook’s blocking of news from Canada is not good. But there are still many other ways to access Canadian news sites.
If, however, the search engine almost everybody uses were to make it impossible to search for Canadian news that would be a disaster for the industry.
In effect, the Liberal government had to break the rules of its own legislation in order to negotiate this special arrangement with Google.
The Canadian Heritage minister cut the CRTC out of the process, and, out of public view, cut a deal with Google, giving the company pretty much everything it demanded.
There are as yet few details about the deal’s implementation. Those will come with regulations the government will publish before December 19.
Big players will get $$. What about the little guys?
The Google money will be allocated on the basis of full-time journalist jobs, which one expert calculated should come to between $6,000 and $7,000 per journalist.
On Thursday, Minister St-Onge told the House of Commons Canadian Heritage Committee that Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada, employs about a third of the journalists in this country.
The provisions of C-18 allow CBC/Radio-Canada to benefit from the Google agreement, and it is likely the Crown corporation will get the largest chunk of the $100 million.
That displeases the federal Conservatives, Bloc Québécois, and the Legault government in Quebec.
They point out that CBC/Radio-Canada currently receives more than $1 billion in public funds. If Google’s $100 million were to be allocated on a proportional basis, the crown corporations would stand to get about $33 million.
Canada’s handful of large media conglomerates will also get big payouts. Those include Bell Media and Quebecor, which just recently engaged in massive lay-offs of their journalistic staff.
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said the purpose of the Google money is to act as an incentive for media companies to hire more journalistic staff. They cannot use the money for other purposes, the Minister said, such as to pay shareholders.
St-Onge did not mention seven-figure executive salaries in the media industry, but, as the $100 million gets doled out, the government might want to keep an eye on those.
So far, no media company has indicated it will use this new money to hire back any of the journalists they recently let go.
What this new deal means for small and independent media organizations is not yet clear. What is almost certain is that the collective will be controlled by the big players.
The devil here is, quite literally, in the details. The federal Treasury Board has to provide those crucial details in short order, sometime during the next two and a half weeks.
US affirms Trudeau on India. Conservative says: “Speak white!”
Mitigated victory as it is, the Trudeau Liberals have been doing a victory dance over the $100 million deal.
They were also more than relieved when, on November 26, the US Justice Department declared an Indian government official directed an unsuccessful plot to murder a Sikh separatist on US soil.
The assassination target is a dual US-Canadian citizen. The US government has, so far, charged one person, Nikhil Gupta, with this crime.
Two months ago, Prime Minister Trudeau rose in the House of Commons to say there were credible allegations connecting Indian government officials to murder, in Surrey BC, of Sikh separatist leader, Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
READ MORE: Parliament returns with rhetoric and a bombshell allegation
The Indian government pushed back hard against that allegation, and some Canadian Conservatives have, quietly, expressed their doubts.
Now Trudeau seems to have been vindicated.
And, finally, partisan squabbling over C-18, the online news act, has given the Liberals an altogether unexpected, if small, victory in the battle for public opinion in Quebec.
At the House committee on Thursday, Pascale St-Onge’s main Conservative inquisitor was Alberta MP Rachael Thomas.
When Thomas led off the questioning, St-Onge answered in her native language, French. Later, when Liberal Committee members posed rather more friendly, soft-ball questions to St-Onge in English, the Minister answered in English.
Rachel Thomas took note of this, and when her turn came round again, asked St-Onge if she might consider answering in English.
The Minister, and other Committee members, pointed out that witnesses had the absolute, untrammeled right to address the committee in either official language.
St-Onge added that when dealing with complex policy issues she was more comfortable using her mother tongue.
The kerfuffle that ensued will not help Pierre Poilievre and his Conservatives gain support in Quebec. Quebec media prominently featured the little sideshow contretemps about language.
Radio-Canada’s radio news led with the story. And they did not even bother with the context – namely, that St-Onge had used English to answer friendly questions from fellow Liberals.
Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet probably summed up reaction in Quebec when he said the incident reminded him of the old Anglo-Canadian attitude toward the French fact, which could be summed up in the words: “Speak white!”
A number of MPs, from different parties, pointed out that, to their knowledge, no member of any parliamentary committee has ever before asked any witness not to use the official language of their choice.
Toward the end of Thursday Thomas issued a written apology, but the damage had been done.
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