Leader, as you know, I like to talk about how people fall for the government’s big promises. That’s what I’ll be talking about again today.

Back when he was the Minister of Canadian Heritage and a more optimistic guy, Steven Guilbeault promised that the Trudeau government would recover $8 billion in taxes from web giants to help Canadian media and journalists. An act was passed about 10 months ago, the Online News Act. Meta retaliated by blocking Canadian news. In spite of all that, Meta continues to dominate, thanks in part to Liberal Party of Canada ads. Since the Online News Act was passed, the country’s media outlets have been laying people off or closing their doors. How much longer will the Trudeau government watch the media suffer before it recognizes that its Online News Act was a huge mistake? Where is the money the media were promised?

With the Online News Act, the Liberal government has really hurt the Canadian media, even causing many to shut down. These are not my words, leader, but the words of René J. Roy, the co-founder of Wreckhouse Press in the Maritimes, who also said that the media lost 60% of their penetration when Facebook decided to stop posting news. No country has won the taxation battle against Facebook. Am I to understand that your Prime Minister is willing to sacrifice more of our media, probably thinking that his time is up and someone else will have to fix what he broke?