Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre reads from an unparliamentary prop.
April 1, 2023
Yesterday ISED Minister François-Philippe Champagne made the least surprising federal announcement of 2023 by approving the Rogers-Shaw merger.
There is no fresh comment that this page could add to what has already been said by others or offered previously on MediaPolicy.ca regarding Rogers’ purchase of Shaw’s $21 billion in telco assets and $5 billion in broadcasting properties.
By coincidence, this week we wrote about the CRTC’s approval of start-up OneSoccer TV’s demand to be carried on the now-approved Rogers-Shaw cable platform, reaching 47% of the English Canadian cable market.
It was a victory for TV minnows. The merger played no small part in the Commission rethinking its 2015 policy on channel carriage that deferred to the cable providers.
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The House of Commons passed most but not all of the Senate amendments to Bill C-11 and sent the legislation back to the upper chamber. The Liberals imposed closure on debate with the support of the NDP but not the Bloc or Greens who support the legislation otherwise.
In the House, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre flashed a copy of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 as a cheeky (and unparliamentary) prop to make his point. He falsely claimed (in French) that the Bill censors what Canadians can say or hear online and that the censorship would be administered by ‘woke people in Ottawa.’
Since we all can take a joke, here’s to guessing what book titles the Liberals might display in the House next time Mr.Poilievre speaks.
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There is a story coming out of Silicon Valley that serves as a kind of epilogue to the imbroglio over the Canadian Heritage Committee’s document subpoenas to Google and Facebook.
Federal Court Judge James Donato ordered legal costs against Google —and retained the option of imposing default judgment against Google— for destroying evidence in four anti-trust suits brought by thirty-seven US state Attorney-Generals. The documents in question were internal chat records between Google employees which should have been retained in response to legal notices sent by the plaintiffs to preserve evidence.
Here at home, the Newsmedia Canada alliance of publishers is publicly pushing the Canadian Competition Bureau to investigate Google’s market power in digital advertising.
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A Delaware judge has sent Dominion Voting’s libel lawsuit against Fox News to trial beginning April 17th.
The order knocks out several of Fox’s legal defences including an argument that platforming false and unrebutted allegations of vote-rigging in the 2020 Presidential election was just ‘opinion’ protected under the US 1st amendment.
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