Catching Up on MediaPolicy – CBC President unveils a new vision – Anti-porn bill is back in the Senate – did C-18 give Google a get-out-of-jail card on content scraping?

October 18, 2025

Last fall, when the CBC seemed destined to fall at the hands of an incoming Conservative government, MediaPolicy published a number of posts on “what is to be done” if the CBC received a stay of execution.

One post (MediaPolicy’s most popular ever) was a guest column from ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg welcoming the new CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard with some advice for a re-engineered public broadcaster.

One federal election later and we are now getting a clearer picture of what a rethought CBC might look like.

This week Bouchard disclosed an advance copy of her five year plan to Canadian Press which published reports in English and French. The latter story is more in-depth, based on an interview with Bouchard.

Combing through the obligatory recitals for something new, Bouchard’s vision has some promising ideas.

The Plan document makes the familiar aspirational points about connecting Canadians with each other and fostering dialogue. 

More concretely, her Plan commits to increasing CBC’s presence in local communities, “aiming to fund additional overage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”

Keeping that promise no doubt depends on the Carney government following through on its election promise for $150 million in additional funding.

Then there is the CBC’s platform problem. There are too many of them. But the CBC needs to be on them if it’s going to reach the nation’s audience —-multi regional, multi generational, multi lingual and so on. That’s a resource challenge for Bouchard.

Bouchard says CBC has to follow that national audience, youth in particular on digital platforms. The public broadcaster’s analog-to-digital transformation has been underway for years now —over time, television and radio funding has been cannibalized to support digital, especially the CBC News website. Its YouTube audience has grown quickly and TikTok is a must-do opportunity. Bouchard says the logic of the transition necessarily means cutting costs on other platforms, “stopping or transforming certain activities,” though she doesn’t say where or how much.

As for the CBC’s uneasy relationship with private sector media, always frayed because of CBC’s competition for advertising dollars on television and digital, Bouchard wants to focus on where the CBC can collaborate with local media and independent journalists, but also with the content creators and influencers who are popular with youth.

Bouchard also says the CBC should be “a pollinator, a helper to the [journalism] industry.” She told CP that “when we have services to share or offer, we should offer them on terms that are affordable for these media outlets. We have premises, we have space. We can consider facilitating access to [our] assets at zero cost or at a reduced cost that promotes budgetary balance for our colleagues.”

Finally, she grabs hold of the elephant’s leash: the widespread perception that the CBC isn’t ideologically ecumenical in its editorial curation; that it’s insufficiently conservative by content and temperament.

There will be no pleasing the CBC’s harshest critics, but Bouchard says the CBC wants to make a big effort to win over those who don’t tune in or else “undervalue” (what a euphemism!) the public broadcaster’s content. A step in the right direction is devoting more resources to the West and in rural Canada.

But that doesn’t just require money, it requires a migration of corporate culture.

The five-year Plan is officially unveiled on October 28th.

***

There is no sign of the federal government retabling its online harms bill in Parliament. It died on the order table at the last election.

Instead, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne’s has revived her Bill S-209 which zeroes in on harmful pornography being made available to kids. The debate rages in the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs committee and MediaPolicy reported on it this week.

***

The much-slagged Online News Act Bill C-18 took another hit this week from The Hub publisher Rudyard Griffiths who told the Parliamentary Heritage Committee that C-18 protects Google from potential copyright lawsuits for ingesting and repurposing Canadian news content in its AI tools, Overview and Mode, embedded in its search engine. 

The bill, Griffiths told MPs, “requires all news organizations [accepting money under C-18] must make all of their content available to Google. If you are a recipient of funding through the Online News Act, you are unable to prevent Google from scraping behind your paywall, scraping subscriber-only content to serve up in their [large language model]” 

Sections 2 and 26 of the Act grant a copyright waiver for news content that Google “makes available” on Search by “ranking and indexing” so long as Google reaches a compensation agreement with news publishers. 

The Conservatives’ slagger-in-chief of the Online News Act, MP Rachel Thomas, jumped on Griffiths’ claim and posed it as rhetorical question to subsequent witnesses appearing before the Heritage’s committee that is investigating the impact of AI on Canadian media and cultural industries. 

As Canadian news outlets have yet to sue Google for ingesting their news content and repurposing it in Overview and Mode, this remains a hypothetical issue for now. If it got before a judge, the court would have to decide if “ranking and indexing” is what an AI tool does, as opposed to ingesting, summarizing and rewriting from multiple sources. The fact that Mode and Overview are embedded in Search, as opposed to a separate AI app, could be important too.

This idea that that Google might have snagged a windfall immunity from copyright challenges to its content-scraping for AI tools arose previously when Google struck its agreement in June 2024 with the Canadian Journalism Collective for the distribution of Google’s $100 million compensation for Canadian news content, a year after the Overview prototype was launched in the United States.

Taking its cue from section 26 of the Act, Google inserted a clause into its agreement with CJC:

7(h) The Collective will not initiate or participate in, and will include a similar requirement of the Members in the Members Agreement, from initiating or participating in, (i) any bargaining process or (ii) proceeding before the Commission, a mediator, an arbitration panel, or a court of competent jurisdiction, in each case related to (A) any bargaining process in connection with Google, any of its Affiliates, or any Intermediaries pursuant to the Act or the Regulations, or (B) infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act. The Collective will enforce such provision in the Members Agreements to the fullest extent and in a timely manner.

When the Google-CJC agreement was submitted to the CRTC for approval, the Commission appeared to say that the copyright waiver didn’t apply to AI tools so there was no need for action “at this time”: 

Some interveners, including the CP group, Village Media, The Logic, and Unifor, raised issues with clause 7(h) in the Agreement, which forbids news businesses from pursuing Google for “infringement of copyright in relation to making available news content of Members by Intermediaries in the manner permitted by the Act.” The interventions raised concerns that this would limit their ability to enforce their copyright against Google for uses beyond making news content available on Google Search. In particular, interveners were concerned about potential use on DNIs other than Google Search, or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Google argues that the provision is drafted specifically to reflect the use considered under the Act, namely the making available of news content on the DNI covered by the Agreement.

Section 26 of the Act protects an operator from copyright liability in certain circumstances where its DNI makes news content available. Clause 7(h) of the Agreement extends a similar protection to Google in respect of the making available by Google Search of the news content of news businesses in the collective. (Original Footnote: Clause 7(h) refers to news content made available by “Intermediaries” of Google. Under the Agreement “Intermediaries” is defined as DNIs operated by Google to which the Act applies, which is only Google Search). To the extent that this clause reflects protections from liability set out in the Act, the Commission notes that there is no need for any further action at this time. As a result, the Commission makes no order with respect to clause 7(h) of the Agreement.

So far there’s no copyright lawsuit, so there’s no issue. That might change.

While you’re thinking about news organizations and AI scraping, you might find interesting copyright expert Hugh Stephens’ latest post about the debate that is unfolding at the Heritage committee.

***

If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page; 

or sign up for a free subscription to MediaPolicy.ca on Substack;

or follow @howardalaw on X or Howard Law on LinkedIn.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

This blog post is copyrighted by Howard Law, all rights reserved. 2025.