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Small and local media outlets are being “shut down” because the Liberal government has picked “winners and losers” in the news industry, Kelowna–Lake Country MP Tracy Gray has warned.
In an interview about the Online News Act, the shadow employment minister also said legacy media outlets are falling into a state of “dependency” on government money.
If the Tories come to power at the next election, she explained, there will be “a lot of things we’re going to have to fix … and this is one of them.”
Gray spoke with NowMedia on World Press Freedom Day – an “ironic” time to discuss the law, she said, given that the press in Canada is unable to post stories marking the day on Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms on the planet.
“This government – it's like they don't consider the ramifications of their decisions,” she said.
“We’ve seen the results of Bill C-18,” she added, pointing to warnings about the legislation that were voiced when it was still at the committee stage.
“We knew from the beginning that the biggest winners were going to be the big legacy media outlets. And that's, in fact, what has happened.”
The law, which came into effect on June 22 last year, was intended to help Canadian news companies obtain cash from American tech giants which, so the argument went, profit from news content while simultaneously monopolizing advertising dollars.
That’s not quite how it worked out, however. Instead, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, declared that it would not be paying cash for the privilege of linking to articles, and simply banned all news from its platforms in Canada.
Google later made a much-criticized deal with the federal government to avert a news blackout on the world’s largest search engine, but journalism remains firmly in the dark on Meta products.
Dozens of newspapers and websites have been forced to close across Canada over the last year, with some, including Kamloops This Week, explicitly blaming the Online News Act for their demise.
Prominent law professor Michael Geist told NowMedia last week that, though he believes Meta would allow news to return to its platforms if the Online News Act were tweaked or jettisoned entirely, he doesn’t expect the “stubborn” feds to back down.
Gray said the government “didn’t listen” to warnings from the likes of Geist when the bill was being debated. But she also said the law can be compared to the carbon tax and other controversial measures the Liberals have introduced.
“You know, there are so many examples of them making things way more difficult for small businesses to the point that they end up closing or being bought out by larger companies,” she said. “Which means that there's less choice and less competition.”
She added that the Liberals “just don’t understand” because so many of the party’s MPs “haven’t been small business owners.”
Before entering politics, Gray launched – and ran – Discover Wines. But many Liberal MPs, she said, “don’t understand the struggle of what you have to do to make payroll.”
“One small policy change can dramatically affect your business to the point that you might have to shut down, and so they don't realize how serious it is,” she added.
“They haven't lived through the pain of starting a small business and being a visionary and being an entrepreneur – many, many of them haven't had that experience. They don't even think about it. The government can come in and save them or create policies that will be good for them without really understanding how they operate.”
NowMedia has requested interviews with Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge on numerous occasions, but without success.
When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office sent out a press release on World Press Freedom Day last Friday stressing his commitment to “local journalism across the country,” NowMedia requested an interview or a statement to answer several questions, including about the Online News Act and the federal government’s journalism tax credit scheme.
We await a response.
Gray, meanwhile, said a future Tory government would “absolutely have to make some changes” to the law, because “it’s not working” and “we’re losing small independent media outlets.”
She also pointed to effects the Meta blackout is having on politicians like her, who are now unable to share articles on local matters via Instagram or Facebook.
But she said she doesn’t want to “speculate” about where the issue comes in the opposition’s list of priorities. “This government is just crushing families and crushing small business,” she explained. “So there's a lot that we're going to have to do.”
“What they've done is they've picked winners and losers,” Gray said.
“When you're looking at a lot of the money that goes to CBC and some of the other legacy media, then you're entrenching the dependency on that on their balance sheets, whereas the small independents are [...] not able to compete with the legacy media, because you're being shut down.”
She said of NowMedia: “You're a small independent media organization, and you're local. And it just doesn't make any sense that this is happening, but also, again, it's what [people were] told was likely going to happen, and that's exactly what Meta did. It’s not a surprise. They said what was going to happen. That's exactly what has happened. So it's not like it was a shock afterwards.”
NowMedia has approached Meta numerous times for comment.
Read some of our other articles about the Online News Act and its effects here:
