Honourable senators, I will begin again by saying that a model that might work in Europe may not translate well to Canada.

A few months ago, France and Google, after years of legal battles, came up with a formula that will see Google compensate French publishers for sharing their news content. In January 2021, Google announced it had signed a deal with l’Alliance de la presse d’information générale, which represents the interests of 300 political and general information press titles in France.

Under the terms of the deal, royalties would only be paid to news organizations with IPG certification — certification from Service de presse en ligne d’information politique et générale — a status French news sites can gain if they meet certain criteria and quality standards, such as having at least one professional journalist on staff and having a main purpose of creating permanent and continuous content that provides political and general information of interest to a wide and varied audience. But France has a very different cultural tradition than Canada when it comes to media.

In Canada, journalists generally — and vehemently — oppose any kind of professional regulation or quality control for profound historical reasons.

If I ask you who was a doctor, an engineer, or a teacher, you could tell me. You can’t call yourself a lawyer or a plumber until you take a prescribed set of courses, pass a prescribed set of tests and serve an apprenticeship. You can’t call yourself a pharmacist or nurse until you are licensed by a professional college. But journalism is different. You don’t have to go to journalism school to be a journalist. You don’t need a degree or diploma of any kind. There are no qualifications, no exams, no gatekeepers. That’s a fundamental part of our free press culture and no one can stand in the way of anyone who calls themselves a reporter.

In Canada, it’s not easy to define who a professional journalist is, and it is not easy to define what a work of journalism or a journalism organization is. The internet, while it has devoured conventional media’s advertising base, has also given a voice and platform to dozens, no thousands, of websites, podcasts, blogs and digital newsletters that define themselves as journalistic organizations. Gone are the days when we had a set number of established papers that made up our journalistic ecosystem.

It is hard to see how we could parallel the deal Google has made with l’Alliance de la presse d’information générale.

We don’t have a media environment or culture with 300 “official” and recognized authoritative news outlets. And any effort to set up a combine or compact of “professional” and accredited legacy media outlets to receive support, like they’re trying to do in France, would be unlikely to work here — not least because it might be perceived as unfair to new media start-ups.

Here is where we come to the fundamental and most uncomfortable question of all, the one I hate to ask, but the one I feel I must. How far should we go to try to protect or bail out legacy media companies?

At what point is it unfair and anti-competitive to prop up big companies like Postmedia, Torstar, Bell Media and Corus, and to make it harder for start-ups and innovative news platforms to get a foothold? Is there a point at which we have to acknowledge that the era of the big newspaper companies is simply over? When we acknowledge that even if we demand annual compensations from Google, Apple, Facebook and the like, we are still only helping failing companies on life support that cannot compete in the digital era?

I don’t have an easy answer. I spent 30 years as a journalist, 23 of them working for a daily newspaper. My freelance magazine work appeared in all kinds of Canadian publications — Saturday Night, Western Living, Brick, Today’s Parent, Legacy and Eighteen Bridges. I still write a regular column for Alberta Views — though I do it for free — a column that was just nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Canadian journalism is part of my heart and soul. I believe passionately that we need Canadian journalists to tell Canadian stories, and that we need Canadian foreign correspondents bringing the stories of the world to us from a Canadian perspective. I believe we have a healthier democracy and society when we have a shared body of knowledge about what’s going on in our own communities, and a shared, fact-based understanding of the challenges facing us in our towns, cities, provinces and nation.

I worry about what it means for political sovereignty and freedom of speech that we have turned giant American commercial platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple into the curators of our news. Their algorithms decide what we see and what we don’t, reshaping our vision of our own country through American corporate eyes.

Canadian journalism matters. Canadian journalists matter.

I’m not sure that creating substantive subsidies for big media corporations is the best way to revitalize and reinvent Canadian reporting and writing. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking for ways to prop up a dying business model, but for ways that we can stimulate and support bold new experiments and innovations in journalism delivery and start-ups designed for our digital universe.

However, honourable friends and colleagues, we would miss newspapers. Newspapers really worked. For decades, for generations, they were forums where the whole community came together. They were an agora; a marketplace of ideas where citizens met to debate public policy and share information. They gave us a shared community literacy about the places we lived.

Now that so many local papers have been cannibalized and stripped down for parts, I’m not sure we can ever recreate that model again, even if we somehow convinced social media platforms to share some of their enormous wealth and to dilute some of their enormous competitive advantage.

How grateful I am to my honourable friend Senator Carignan for bringing this debate to the floor of the Senate and for thereby calling attention to the growing gap in Canada’s culture and the resulting threat to the well-being of Canadian society and Canadian democracy. How doubly grateful I am to have been allowed to be the critic of this bill, and to have had this platform, this bully pulpit and all this time to deliver my own message.

I must tell you that a reporter’s ability to write to deadline has paid off today. I have what you might call “breaking news.” While we were on dinner break, Senator Miville-Dechêne, who is, like me, une ancienne journaliste, sent me a hot-off-the-digital-presses story from the Canadian Press — she says it’s from this morning and we just missed it, but we’ll pretend it’s hot off the digital presses because that’s what I wrote — announcing a deal between Facebook and an interesting cross-section of Canadian media sites.

This morning Facebook announced a plan to pay 14 publishers, including Canada’s National Observer, Le Soleil, Le Devoir, the Tyee and FP Newspapers, which publishes the Winnipeg Free Press, an undisclosed sum to link to their articles on COVID-19 and climate change, as well as certain other unspecified topics.

Facebook has also made deals under their News Innovation Test program with a group of alternate news sites, exactly the kind of upstart, regional and local websites I was talking about. Among them are The Sprawl, The Coast, The Narwhal, Village Media, the SaltWire Network, Discourse Media, Narcity, blogTO and the Daily Hive. Facebook won’t say how much the news sites will receive, only that this plan would not include payment for news links already posted on Facebook by publishers.

Perhaps I need to walk back some of my criticisms. However, I think the real value of a bill such as Bill S-225 may simply be that it helps bring digital giants to the table. It shows we are serious about tackling this problem. Maybe Bill S-225 isn’t the answer to this problem, but it’s a goad and provocation, and maybe we need to be goaded and provoked.

Despite some of the concerns I’ve raised today, I am desperately glad we have this bill before us. I urge us to send it to committee as soon as practically possible, so we can discuss and debate it in depth there, with expert witnesses to help us hash things out.

Thank you to you, my honourable Senate colleagues, for listening to me, at some length, today. Thank you to all my friends in the trenches of Canadian journalism. Thank you to every reporter, columnist, photographer, news anchor, editor and producer working against impossible odds to bring Canadians the stories they need to hear. Thank you, most of all, to all my Edmonton Journal family. It was an honour and a privilege to be able to tell Edmonton’s stories for so long. I hope I can be the voice you need to tell journalism’s story here and now.

Thank you, hiy hiy.

That is an excellent question. I think that the smaller the paper and the more intimate the community, the greater the likelihood that will happen. I think for really small town weeklies, that is the only place people can go to get local news. It is, frankly, the only place advertisers can go to advertise exactly to the people who live in their small town. It is really the medium-sized papers that are in the biggest squeeze, in cities like Fredericton or Regina or Whitehorse. The smaller the community, the more dependent people are on that hyperlocal news. It’s the medium-sized papers that don’t have the clout of the really big players in Toronto and Montreal that are in the most trouble.

I don’t think you were naive — or to the extent we all thought that. I think we all thought that would be the salvation, but we have had a complete paradigm shift in the same way that the monks never went back to illuminating their manuscripts — we’re not going to go back to having robust, hand-delivered papers coming fresh to your door every morning.

To a certain extent Facebook, Apple and Google know that they have a public relations problem. After seeing the experience of Australia, which forced them to the table and called their bluff, I think they are recalculating, and based on what is happening in the European Union too.

We need to be careful here because we will never replace the revenues that the digital platforms have taken from conventional media. There is simply not that volume of revenue to be shared. The other concern, which is a subtler one perhaps, is that we are still then in this symbiotic, parasitic relationship with the big platforms. We still have Facebook curating the news that Canadians see and mining our information while they do so. These deals are double-edged swords.