Trudeau government has put media in 'worst possible position' with Bill C-18, Okanagan MP says

The federal government has put news companies in the “worst possible position” and is now “actually harming local media,” Dan Albas has warned.

He said the Online News Act – also known as Bill C-18 – should be “outright repealed.”

The Central Okanagan–Similkameen–Nicola MP spoke to NowMedia about the legislation after we published an editorial highlighting the difficulties faced by media outlets caught in the middle of a long-running dispute between Meta and Ottawa.

Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram, blocked news on its platforms in August 2023 in response to the Online News Act.

The federal government said the law would bolster the finances of newsrooms across Canada by making social media giants pay their fair share for news posted to their platforms.

But Meta has refused to budge from its core position, which is that it would never pay for news because its users aren’t interested in it.

In the meantime, Meta’s ban on news has caused outlets in the country to lose the equivalent of about five million views a day, according to a recent study.

Dozens of newspapers and websites have been forced to close across Canada over the last year, with some, including Kamloops This Week, explicitly blaming the Online News Act for their demise.

“The government has staked a position and is not listening to any critics, whether they be political, or whether they be media critics, or even the industry itself,” he said, adding that many media companies have told him they’ve seen a “remarkable drop in revenue” because of their inability to post on Facebook.

Albas, who is a member of the opposition Conservative Party, said he believes that “once the [Liberal Party minority government] got the NDP’s support … they stopped listening to anyone.”

He added: “And here we are, where they’ve created an awful mess and the very industry that they said this was all about saving – in this case, journalism and media in Canada – are the ones that are actually victims of their policy.”

NowMedia has requested an interview with Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, who is responsible for the Online News Act, but her press team said she is unavailable.

Albas, meanwhile, also attacked the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit, a scheme that allows qualifying organizations to claim as much as 35 per cent of their employees’ pay, up to a maximum salary of $85,000.

To qualify, however, applicants must win the approval of a government-appointed panel of individuals who, according to the panel’s chair, provide “expert assessment” of journalists’ work.

The chair is an academic who worked as a journalist for a short time in the 1980s and 1990s.

Albas said the idea of a committee that decides who is or is not producing worthwhile journalism is a “dangerous concept.”

“Right now, there’s not a fair playing field,” he said. “You have a special committee that CRA has set up that is unaccountable that chooses who they consider to be legitimate journalists – that’s not fair.

“And yet on the other hand, you have it where the government is giving millions of dollars to those individuals while making it tougher for people who believe that they can do good journalism without subsidies if they had access to markets like Facebook.”

Another consequence of the tax credit, Albas said, is that it is making people “skeptical of journalism that they believe is government-funded.”

He also praised the “great journalism” done in the Okanagan during the 2023 wildfire season, but said journalists “did not have the tools” to inform people “because of the Trudeau government’s C-18.”

But his central claim is that the federal government doesn’t listen to criticism, whether it’s coming from opposition politicians, experts or business leaders.

“The government made a political decision that it wanted to pick a fight with large media giants, but they’ve said after it’s passed they’re going to make changes in the regulations that allow big players like Google to sign on,” he said.

“So if they can change the regulations for Google, why can’t they make changes so that smaller publishers like KelownaNow, like InfoTel, like The Line, who have raised concerns about the impacts of C-18 ... why aren’t they listening to those voices? Why are they only making accommodations for Google?”

He added: “They’re not acknowledging their own policy failure. They’re not acknowledging that by picking this fight, and by doing this legislation and only soliciting the NDP’s support, they’ve actually put media in the worst possible position, where it’s not only discredited by some, but by the fact that it is now causing bankruptcies.”

Albas said “livelihoods are on the line” and that it might be the case, “unfortunately,” that journalists “have to lose their jobs before people understand that it’s policies like C-18 that are causing these issues.”

“They said that they would take on the web giants like Google and Facebook,” he explained, “and instead they’re actually harming local media that are trying to do local journalism. That is the very thing that they said they didn’t want to do.”