Blue Ant Media’s Michael MacMillan
March 9, 2024
The freshly tabled Online Harms Bill C-63 is going to get a lot of media coverage in this session of Parliament. I said last week that it’s two bills in one; it would be more accurate to say three bills (online harms and safety, criminalized hate speech, and discriminatory hate speech governed by the Human Rights Commission).
There is a lot of detail and, allowing for the usual flights of Parliamentary rhetoric and fundraising posts, it will be overwhelming and confusing. Some of that will be deliberate.
My advice to the keenly interested is to start following Emily Laidlaw’s blog posts on C-63 now. Her Part 1 is a set-up that introduces all of the major elements of the Bill. She has some editorialized opinions, but she’s an expert and scrupulous in her summary. You might even bookmark her site.
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There have been disparate developments in the ongoing story of the financial sustainability of Canadian news media.
The narrative of the Online News Act Bill C-18 continues with the CRTC inviting news outlets to step forward and apply for eligibility to receive compensation from the $100 million in annual Google funds. Unless this process goes off without a hitch, I would expect some nasty internecine squabbling among news outlets over the apportionment of the funds even though the money is to be distributed on a per journalist basis.
Meanwhile in Australia, from whence the “bargaining model” for the Canadian Online News Act came, Meta has announced it will not renew its expiring compensation deals with Australian media companies. It will also terminate its news aggregation tab on Facebook. In other words, Meta will dare news publishers and the Australian government to make the same choice made here in Canada: cave to Zuckerberg or see news banned from Meta platforms.
On yet another policy front, a majority of MPs on the Canadian House of Commons finance committee just submitted 359 recommendations to the full House of Commons. Recommendation 213 advocates for policy action to “close the [online] loophole” that still allows digital media to escape federal tax laws requiring Canadian businesses to advertise in Canadian media if they want to claim a business expense:
Introduce tax measures to incent businesses to advertise with private sector Canadian news outlets and bring fairness to the different tax treatment of advertising purchased from foreign websites to ensure media organizations are not deprived of revenues.
This policy idea has been mooted for a couple of decades and it just might make it into the next federal budget.
It does feel at times that Canadian news media is on a hamster wheel of government policy action as the red ink, journalist layoffs and closures of news outlets shows no sign of abating.
On the other hand, there are bright spots that inspire the possibility that mainstream news outlets that cover original news could find a new and sustainable business model, especially where it is most needed in local communities and cities. MediaPolicy interviewed Village Media CEO Jeff Elgie and I think you will find that short piece interesting .
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You will never find in MediaPolicy posts any devotion to the argument that Canadian media companies ought to make their way in the marketplace bereft of government policy intervention. But I do like to spotlight stand-out entrepreneurial examples. Hence, the Elgie interview above. But another example, my recommended read for this week, is a feature on Blue Ant Media’s Michael MacMillan, Canada’s producer/broadcaster extraordinaire.
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