I’ve long said the Online News Act needs to be scrapped. Now, I’m learning that at least one Liberal MP agrees with me now.
During the last federal government, there was a long running push to ram through the Online News Act. The goals for the Act’s delusional supporters was to make the two biggest platforms pay news outlet, pull in new badly needed revenues for journalism outlets, and doing this while not costing taxpayers a dime. For them, what could possibly go wrong?
Throughout the legislative process when this was a bill, I, along with many other experts, argued that the link tax was a disaster waiting to happen. Not only will platforms probably ditch news links, but the damage unleashed in the news sector would be severe in the process as they get cut off from a huge chunk of their audience. Not only that, the legislation allows the government to override the market and pick winners and losers in the overall journalism market and it is a violation of CUSMA/USMCA on top of it all.
People such as myself tried to actively warn lawmakers about all of this and tried to explain how things work in the real online world. A great example of this is my submission to the Canadian senate back in 2023 explaining all of this. In response, lobbyists and some senators attacked people such as myself for apparently being part of some grand conspiracy by “Big Tech” to ‘get “Big Tech” out of paying their fair share’. It was a purely nonsensical argument that completely ignored the very real fundamental problems of this law.
With head firmly in the sand, the government rammed this legislation through completely ignoring the obvious consequences of their actions. The supporters argued that corporations like Meta will now have no choice but to shell out big bucks at this point. The link tax law and the extremely stupid ideas being pushed by supporters received a collective facepalm from the internet community at large. As I’ve said in many other stories, reality doesn’t care what your personal beliefs are and it will do exactly what it does. The Online News Act is a fantastic example of this.
In response to the legislation, Meta followed through with their warnings and dropped news links in Canada on Facebook and Instagram, causing an estimated loss to the industry of $230 million per year. The damage was significant and Google was gearing up to do the same thing. Basically, the entire Canadian news landscape was largely facing an extinction level event. Panicked over the consequences of their actions, the Canadian government went running to Google begging them not to drop news links. The Canadian government folded to Google and handed everything the company asked for in this whole debate and called it a deal.
Supporters, desperately trying to call anything in this disaster movie a “win”, called the $100 million a victory for the industry and said that Meta was likely going to be so overwhelmingly jealous of all of this that they would quickly line up and negotiate a deal as well with the Canadian government ‘within weeks’. That, obviously, never happened and was just yet another delusion on the part of supporters.
What did happen, however, was everything us experts warned about. Bankruptcies ripped across the news sector, the government proceeded to, by extension, pick winners and losers, the federal government put numerous large media companies on a short list of bail outs (costing tax payers a pretty penny in the process and making the outlets wholly dependent on government handouts), and the Act is now a target for the Trump administration as they look to find weaknesses in Canada’s trade with the US.
In short, the nightmare scenario that people like ourselves were warning about happened. So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across an article about a Liberal MP from Kelowna BC agreeing with us and saying that the Online News Act needs to be scrapped. From Kelowna Now:
Personally, new Kelowna Liberal MP Stephen Fuhr believes the Online News Act (Bill C-18) probably needs to be scrapped.
And with Fuhr’s appointment today to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s federal cabinet as secretary of state for defence procurement, Fuhr potentially has the ear of the prime minister to start the ball rolling on having Bill C-18 repealed.
KelownaNow spoke with Fuhr shortly after being named a junior minister to offer congratulations and revisit the Bill C-18 crisis.
KelownaNow and many other news organizations want Bill C-18 axed because it badly backfired.
The only caveat here is that the MP said that he’ll have other priorities first, but he said he intends on raising this issue with the government.
The fact that even a Liberal MP is acknowledging that this whole sorry saga was a disaster is pretty big in my view. I don’t recall that ever happening during the last government. Instead, every Liberal MP, to my knowledge, basically walked in lock-step with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and said that the Online News Act is the best bill ever and that any criticism of this is just unwarranted complaints from “Big Tech”. I don’t know how long this will last necessarily, but this does suggest that Liberal MPs see the problems with this law.
I’m not going to pretend here and say that this is the tipping point for finally ditching this mistake of a law, but I will argue that it’s a positive sign at minimum. One can hope that if one MP finally sees the reality of the situation, then others might acknowledge the reality of the internet as well. One can only hope anyway.
