QUESTION PERIOD — Canadian Heritage
Online News Act
October 17, 2023
My question is for the Government Representative in the Senate.
I see that measures taken by our government to force web giants to negotiate have been unsuccessful. Even worse, some media outlets are being financially impacted and losing visibility.
What will it take for the government to acknowledge that it is going down the wrong path with the Online News Act?
Thank you for the question.
The goal of Bill C-18 is to force web giants to sit down with our small and large media companies to come to a fair and equitable agreement for the benefit of Canadians.
Obviously, web giants are afraid of the precedent this has created in Canada and Australia. They are flexing their economic muscles to try to bully us into not going forward with this bill. However, the Government of Canada is staying the course in supporting this bill, which is good for Canada.
Can you explain the logic behind the government’s fight against these web giants, when the Prime Minister himself uses them to announce changes in his family situation instead of using a local, Canadian news channel? In a way, he is proving the effectiveness of web giants in the system.
The idea behind the bill is not to go backward and get rid of commonly used tools such as social media. It is instead to ensure that our traditional media and our local journalists, which Canadian democracy relies on, receive fair support compared to the media giants who benefit from it.
