July 23, 2023
As the grudge match between Canada and California continues this summer, some opponents of Bill C-18 explicitly call for the natural death of Canadian mainstream news outlets while others at least have a proposal.
Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi added their voices to the debate this weekend, calling for the government to cap Google’s liability for compensating news outlets, pay Meta’s share for them, and then “sunset” Bill C-18. They have other suggestions to provide public support for news and competition investigations against Big Tech’s advertising monopolies.
For our part, MediaPolicy.ca remains in the ‘fight on’ camp. We are going to have to settle once and for all whether we are governed by Ottawa or Silicon Valley. There is a pipeline of more media and data regulation of the Big Tech footprint in our country. Bills C-18 and C-11 are just the beginning. The government will be tabling an Online Harms Bill in the fall which, even though it promises to rely heavily upon social media platforms regulating themselves, will be yet another encounter between Canada and California. Then there is AI. And the Digital Services Tax. And perhaps real controls on the scraping of personal data.
We seem to be in the summer lull of the Big Tech C-18 news throttle, although that could change very quickly with the recall of Parliament in September. While it is possible Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez is close to a deal with Google, its spokesperson wasn’t very encouraging in a recent Washington Post article that provided an update to American readers.
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While some may wish a natural death for privately owned mainstream media, others wish the same for the CBC.
This is not a reference to Pierre Poilievre and his promise to defund the public broadcaster. It is a reference to Andrew Coyne continuing to call for ‘refunding’ —as mendacious a term as you will find— the CBC by eliminating the Parliamentary grant and imposing a paid subscription model.
The next question would be how the pay-for-content CBC differed from any other news outlet and why aren’t we privatizing it.
A recent Angus Reid opinion poll drew attention for its conclusions on the wince-inducing levels of support for defunding the CBC.
While not minimizing the results, they ought to be benchmarked against an almost identical poll from Mainstreet in September 2022. Over the intervening nine months there has been a noticeable move from the ‘Agree’ column to ‘Disagree’ with defunding:
The high level of ‘defund’ support from Conservative Party-leaning respondents did not change much, except that the “don’t know” replies were fewer. Possible conclusion: repeat messaging from Conservative HQ is effective in securing donor and voter base support for this wedge issue.
The NDP-leaning respondents did not change much either, presumably because the CBC is a sacrament to those voters so they were always strongly opposed to defunding.
The Liberal-leaning results shifted. There are less “don’t knows” and perceptible movement of ‘defunding supporters’ to ‘defunding opponents.’
On the assumption that there is nothing the CBC has done in the last nine months to change public opinion on defunding, it is possible the reason for change among Liberal-leaning respondents is that they now see the CBC as a Conservative wedge issue and are responding in kind.
Then there are the Bloc-leaning respondents and this is where the action is. There is a very noticeable move from defunding-support to defunding-opposition. The overall Québec results show a similar shift.
Here is a more fulsome snapshot of the two polls:
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Paul Wells has a follow up report on the crisis at Canada’s only retail book-store chain, Indigo. It won’t cheer you up. He calls for unspecified federal government intervention on the basis that Ottawa is responsible for creating the situation several years ago by permitting Indigo to swallow Chapters.
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Finally, the recommended read for the week is a video. The Zeds may have TikTok, but we boomers have William Shatner. Beam me up.
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