Meta makes billions of dollars while “degrading safety, wellbeing and communities” in Canada, according to Justin Trudeau.
Canada, the prime minister told NowMedia last year, will “continue to stand strong against the damaging impact” of Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
He even said the country is facing “a test moment” and must decide whether to “stand up for journalism” or “bow down” to tech giants.
Those are some of the more generous words Trudeau has had for Meta – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – since the US firm blocked news in Canada in response to the Liberals’ Online News Act.
When news was blocked in 2023, the Liberal government announced an advertising boycott of Meta in retaliation, saying that, because of the company's "irresponsible" behaviour, it would be shifting roughly $10 million a year in advertising to other platforms.
Then-minister Pablo Rodriguez said Ottawa "cannot continue paying advertising dollars to Meta while they refuse to pay their fair share to Canadian news organizations."
Earlier this week, CTV News revealed that the boycott had been abruptly ended, with $100,000 made available on Jan. 23 for the government to advertise the Liberals’ GST/HST tax break.
NowMedia has now learned that another $179,250 has also been set aside for two other advertising campaigns on Meta platforms.
One, the Privy Council Office said, is for a housing campaign by the department of Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada. That campaign has $175,750 to play with.
The other is a Parks Canada student recruitment campaign focused on Quebec City with access to up to $3,500.
In a statement sent to NowMedia, the Privy Council Office said “it is essential that Canadians receive credible information about government programs” and that “a strong democracy relies on Canadians having access to diverse and reliable sources of news and information.”
Social media, the statement adds, “remains a primary source of information for many,” though the federal government also advertises with “Canadian-owned and -operated media.” Despite that, the federal government will “continue … to hold social media companies accountable," the Privy Council Office said.
Its statement goes on: “Advertising on a social media platform does not imply endorsement of a platform’s actions or decisions. Our approach strikes a careful balance: combating disinformation while ensuring Canadians receive accurate, essential information directly from the government.”
Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge – whose job it is to oversee the implementation of the Online News Act – has been contacted for comment, but has not replied.
In an interview with NowMedia last year, St-Onge, when asked about Ottawa’s approach to Meta, said she believed the Liberals should not “compromise on the principle we’re trying to implement.”
“When it comes to social media and tech platforms, right now there is not enough accountability put on the creators of those products and we are discovering that there's more and more harms done in our society,” she said.
Meta, she added, has left its platforms to “disinformation and misinformation [and made] a conscious choice to leave an important source of information in Canadian life, especially when there's wildfires and emergencies, is not something that's socially acceptable.”
She also lamented that she’d seen “so many journalists lose their jobs” as advertising cash “is going to a platform like Meta” instead of media outlets.
“We've seen hundreds of publications close their doors in the last decade, and I have personally seen thousands of colleagues lose their jobs across the country as the revenue stream went more and more to the tech giants,” she said.
“And this is where the government's intervention is important. On one hand it's to create a fairer market and on the other, it's to make sure that we don't lose a pillar of our democracy, an essential counter-power to the work that we are doing as politicians.”
The Liberals have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into Canada’s media sector in recent years, but have been criticized for picking “winners and losers” and backing “legacy players” rather than independent media outlets.
Speaking to NowMedia on Friday, Holly Doan, a veteran journalist and the publisher at Blacklock’s Reporter, said simply that the Liberals “don’t support independent journalism.”
She added: “They don't care about independent media. The government sees independent media as an unknown and may be dangerous.
“What the aim of the subsidies is [is] to prop up the legacy media, but whether those entities are subsidized or not [they] are going to decay and eventually disappear because we can't put our finger in the dike forever and hold back what's happening in media.”
The Conservative Party of Canada has not responded to a request for comment.
NowMedia also asked the party if it remains committed to repealing the Online News Act, but it did not respond to that query either.
Thumbnail photo credit: 123RF/NowMedia
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