THE FREELAND OPTION

Bill Fox

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland knows what it is to be a working journalist. And as Canada’s Minister of Finance, Freeland is uniquely positioned to help the industry that was foundational to her professional development.

The Trudeau government’s attempt to help the news industry has been making news for a while now – most of it bad.

The Online News Act, known as C-18, is a legislative response to a request from legacy media companies that the government help them secure a fair share for the content they create that is then distributed by big tech – Google and Facebook. The bill would require these tech giants to agree to a collective bargaining process that would generate an estimated $329 million plus a year for the media companies. The basic idea is to have big tech companies pay for links to Canadian news stories.

The platforms, in turn, have said thanks, but no thanks. While prepared to negotiate individual contracts with specific news outlets – the Globe and Mail say – the platforms have no intention of paying for content they say is of no real value, or to be locked into a binding arbitration process with no clarity as to what constitutes a “fair share,” or puts a limit on that “share.”

To make the point, Meta – Facebook’s parent – has refused to carry Canadian news content on their platform. Google has threatened to follow suit if the rules and regulations as currently drafted take effect in December. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says, “The fact that these Internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news is a real problem”.

The crisis Canadian journalism finds itself in is real. In Western liberal democracies writ large, what columnist Thomas Friedman describes as “the twin pillars of trust and truth” are under assault. Former prime ministerial advisor Tyler Meredith says, “We are at a moment of tinderbox toxicity.” The Trudeau government’s response – however well intentioned – is fatally flawed both from a practical and a political perspective.

The bill C-18, championed by successive federal Heritage ministers has been derided by Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne as “an utter fiasco, a policy catastrophe on a grand scale.” Coyne concludes ”in its desperate attempt to prop up the media’s past, the government has instead conspired to destroy its future.”

The government’s situation isn’t without its ironies. The legacy media leadership pressed Ottawa for years for help, only to have their columnists denounce the government for responding to their proprietors’ requests. Trudeau and company can’t claim they weren’t warned. Former finance minister Bill Morneau for one was dead set against any media bailout of any kind. Morneau suspected the legacy media would bite the hand that feeds, “editorial independence” being what it is.

A second bill – C-11 – The Copyright Modernization Act – sets out broadcast policy for Canada, extends the powers of the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission to regulate and supervise the broadcast system, and updates the mandate for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. C-11 would make YouTube and streaming platforms such as Netflix and Disney promote Canadian content the way radio stations and television networks are required to now. It too has been the subject of sharp criticism from voices as varied as the Official Opposition Conservatives and X owner Elon Musk.

The core problem with both bills is that they are crafted in the spirit of the old Canadian content rules, rules made ineffective by emerging technologies.

In a 2010 study for the C.D. Howe Institute titled “Scrambled Signals: Canadian Content Policies in a World of Technological Abundance,” co-authors Lawson A.W. Hunter, Edward Iacobucci and Michael J. Trebilcock warned Ottawa’s cultural policy community that traditional instruments such as ownership regulations or exhibition and expenditure quotas are unenforceable in an online world.

“In the unfolding digital world, the regulations traditionally used to foster Canadian content in the broadcasting and telecommunications sector will not be viable,” the report states. “The transition from a “push” network, where entertainment choices were limited to that available at a given time, to a “pull” network, where content is available on demand, will render many current tools obsolete.”

The objective, the authors state, must be to make Canadian content available to those that want it, rather than trying to impose CanCon on all. A bolstered CBC and supporting Canadian content production through direct subsidies to content creators offered a more promising policy framework, the paper concludes.

These specific solutions advanced in Scrambled Signals matter less than the underlying philosophy behind them. C-18 is obsolete, and it won’t even take effect until December 19. As Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used to create them. The difficulty is not so much in developing new ideas, but in escaping from old ones.”

Public Policy Forum president and former editor-in-chief of the Globe and Mail Ed Greenspon says the objective of any federal policy to support domestic news content should be to buy time, “so that news outlets – new and old, large and small – can keep newsrooms functioning through a transition.” The idea, to cite iPolitics founder James Baxter, is to make it easier for challenger media – such as Canadaland, The Logic and The Line – to come in.  Further, programs should ensure any “touch by government is as light and as brief as possible.”

The conviction that media matters is based on a premise that for others is a conceit – that the news business isn’t just any industry, that journalism is foundational to public discourse, and therefore as journalism goes, so goes democracy.

That premise is now a debatable point among political strategists. Ian Brodie, a former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, believes “earned media is dead, earned media is irrelevant” – earned media being the term for coverage generated in the political press.

Social media has made it easier than ever for political actors to make news. But as communications scholar James Carey observed news and truth are not the same thing. Hamas made news when it claimed Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza killing 500 people. This “news” didn’t stand up to any scrutiny and constituted a “blood libel” for many. Former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a lot of “news.” The relationship of Trump’s self-generated news to “truth” is another matter.

What Trump – or any other political actor – can’t make with a tweet or a TikTok video is journalism. Any government policy or program impacting legacy or emerging media by definition must help and even accelerate journalism’s transition up the value chain.

Legendary Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham famously said the best guarantee of first-class journalism is a strong bottom line. The current crisis is linked directly to the fact that for legacy media, the bottom has literally and figuratively fallen out of the line. As predicted by Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan 60 years ago, advertising – the midwife of a free press – has moved to more efficient and effective forums, specifically social media platforms such as Facebook and Google. And it isn’t coming back.

Any future business model for media will have to be largely subscription based. If news consumers are to pay a larger share of the cost of journalism, the editorial products on offer are going to have to improve and meet the test of the marketplace.

A recent edition of The Economist put a startling question to readers on the magazine’s cover: “Are free markets history?” (In fairness, the Economist describes itself as a newspaper.) Long a champion of free trade and a modest role for government, the Economist asserts these classical liberal values are not only unpopular, but increasingly absent from political debate. The editorial states the presumption of open markets and limited government has been replaced by “homeland economics” – the state as “bulwark against life’s misfortunes.”

There is a lot of “homeland economics” in Bills C-18 and C-11; a lot of bodies deciding who is “trusted” as a news source, who is eligible for the government programs. Perhaps the best illustration of this philosophical underpinning is that a relief package initially designed to assist legacy print publications has been expanded to include broadcast media outlets. The bills will force third parties – multinational companies – to pay for products they may not want or need. And to further underscore the ‘homeland economics” nature of Ottawa’s media support plan, the lion’s share of the estimated $329 millions generated will go to broadcast companies, with the CBC – Canada’s public broadcaster – getting the single largest slice of the pie. That the bigger piece of the C-18 pie would go to Bell or Rogers struck even supporters of the initiative as ridiculous; that the largest single slice would go to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – the public broadcaster – absurd. And if that wasn’t bad enough, critics say the bill doesn’t include a specific and direct prohibition of paying executive bonuses or paying down debt.

Bill C-18 played right into the hands of the Opposition Conservatives. Embracing a strategy developed by Team Trump, the Conservatives work to minimize the impact of any media criticism by convincing their base the legacy media is a media by and for elites and therefore not to be trusted. Party leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, dismisses the Canadian Press as a propaganda arm of the Liberal Party. And he has promised as prime minister to defund the CBC. Being able to describe legacy media as bought and paid for by the Trudeau government provides the backdrop for the Conservative media attacks.

Carleton University professor emeritus Christopher Dornan notes, “There is a long history of government support for the news media in Canada, starting even before Confederation when government postal subsidies permitted newspapers to circulate cheaply.”

A course correction for government efforts to ensure public discourse in this country includes Canadian voices is in order. Self-described “Liberals” like Freeland should consider going back to their “liberal” roots, with a program offering based on classic liberalism; individualistic, in that it asserts the primacy of the person against a collective, egalitarian in that it affords all the same basic status to all, universalist in that all are treated equally and meliorist in that it affords an opportunity for improvement.

But first, there is the small matter of C-18, which will become law December 19.

In an op-ed carried in the Globe and Mail, Taylor Owen and Supriya Dwivedi of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University noted both the government and the companies it is seeking to regulate have backed themselves into a corner. The authors encourage all sides to think of C-18 as transitory, that the government should propose a sunset clause, and seek funding for a venture capital fund for news start-ups. All good suggestions.

One of the longstanding realities of government relations is that what you lose on the legislation, you can sometimes regain in the regulations. The stand-off between the Liberal government and the social media platforms is at this stage. Any agreement that forestalls a Google decision to drop links to news organizations will be considered a win by the government.

The people the legislation is intended to help, News Media Canada, the umbrella group that represents, among others, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, La Presse and Postmedia. CEO Paul Deegan described Google’s recent submission to government as “a welcome, clear, constructive good faith articulation of legitimate concerns. “We are in agreement with many of the issues they have raised.” The News Media Canada statement was ridiculed and scorned by C-18 critics. Former CRTC commissioner Peter Menzies took to X to state, “And just like that, News Media Canada surrenders and begs for whatever crumbs it can salvage from this catastrophe.”

The conciliatory stance of NMC may not be enough. Google spokespersons are on the record as saying the core issues may not be resolvable by regulation, that legislative changes may still be necessary.

Arguably, the best option for the Trudeau government on C-18 is to rescind it. But that climb down may be too steep for a government falling out of favour with the voting public.

Much of the criticism of the government legislation is predicated on the assertion news organizations need the social media platforms more than the platforms need news. Start-ups in particular insist access to the platforms is essential. They insist having Google block news must be avoided at all costs. Intriguingly, the threatened boycott by social media companies may matter less than those engaged in the C-18 debate suspect.

Those who have worked with the platforms over the years have concluded the platforms have consistently misled journalism organizations by inflating metrics and promising tools and compensation schemes that don’t function. Greenspon said “Facebook has never been a reliable news industry partner. “At times it has embraced news.” At other times it has rewritten its algorithms with zero notice and decimated the traffic of its so called news partners.” Wilf Dinnick, in The Line, describes the treatment of legacy media by Meta and Google as “one of the most effective bait-and-switches in business history.”

A recent story in the New York Times concluded: “If it wasn’t clear before, it’s clear now: The major online platforms are breaking up with news.”  Instagram’s Adam Mosseri is on record as saying hosting news is more trouble than it is worth. X’s owner Elon Musk has expressed his disdain for the mainstream media and argues “citizen” journalism is the future.

More fundamentally, the traffic many assume social media platforms generate for news organizations is disappearing. A study by Similarweb cited by the New York Times reported that in September 2020 top sites got 11.5 per cent of their web traffic in the U.S. from social networks. By September 2023, that number was down to 6.5 per cent. National Public Radio in the US left “X”, as it is now known, 6 months ago and the effect in terms of traffic has been negligible. The Reuters Institute of Politics reports Canadians’ use of social media to view news is down 10% year-over-year.

Meta and Google are businesses and not public services. In a timely reminder to her journalistic colleagues, Samantha Melbourneweaver, the assistant managing editor for audience at Los Angeles Times said, “Google exists for Google’s needs, rather than for ours.”

For form’s sake, the “negotiations” with Google in particular should be pursued. But not with any expectation of real progress. Whatever their job descriptions state, representatives of the platform companies are in the geopolitics business. Their only job is to ensure legislation in any political jurisdiction does not set a precedent that can have an impact elsewhere. Other jurisdictions are in the process of enacting similar legislation as Owen and Dwivedi note, including the State of California, the U.S. Senate, Britain, Indonesia and Brazil among them. The companies are using the debate in Canada as a warning shot to others. The platforms’ representatives will offer the federal government everything short of real help. Government negotiations should work to ensure future statements are articulated in language conciliatory enough to create the public perception a way has been found around the impasse. And by way of signalling a way out of the impasse, Google’s corporate spokesperson has “welcomed” the possibility that further changes could come through the Liberals’ fall economic statement or the next federal budget.

Which is where Chrystia Freeland comes in.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting argues “the future of Canadian journalism cannot be built on a foundation of fear and intimidation.” The market power of Big Tech is self evident. Friends describes them as “ruthless and hyper-competitive global tech giants.” These powerful multinationals are only going to engage in meaningful negotiations with powerful multilateral bodies. Any federal initiative to foster Canadian journalistic content must therefore focus on programs and policies that can be enacted by Ottawa unilaterally. Forget the platforms, their public statements are the policy equivalent of “thoughts and prayers.”

The package should focus on content creators focused on basic and local reporting – whether “local” is defined geographically or by subject matter. The initiatives should reward market performance, technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

Boosting existing federal programs would provide a running start.

The creation of registered journalism organizations making them eligible for gifts from registered charities, exempting them from paying income taxes, and allowing them to issue donation receipts was and is constructive.

The existing Digital Subscription Tax Credit of $75 is too low and wouldn’t cover a subscription to the Globe and Mail. Allow citizens to claim tax deductions for news content subscriptions equal to deductions available for contributions to political parties. The tax credit cap at the federal level is $650. The credit for contributions at the provincial level in Ontario is $1,552. The increase would allow news consumers to subscribe to multiple publications, podcasts, or digital journalism organizations.

The Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit should also be increased from 25 per cent to 35 per cent for each eligible newsroom employee, but should be tweaked for start-ups by allowing part-time or freelance journalists to be included in the calculation.

And the different tax treatment on advertising purchased from foreign websites needs to end. The Income Tax Act should be amended to close the advertising loophole that treats Google and Meta differently than the New York Times. The tax system can be used to support a free press in other more substantive ways. Rather than looking to third parties like Facebook or Google for funding, the federal government could provide the program funds from the Consolidated Revenue Fund.

Even critics of C-18, including University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist agree Canada should be taxing the platform companies more effectively. The issue is how.

In the 2021 budget, Freeland proposed a “digital services tax” targeting large companies that operate online marketplaces, social media platforms, and companies that earn revenue for online advertising services, companies like Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb and Google. The tax would bring in an estimated $3.4 billion dollars.

The Americans objected strenuously.

A suggestion was made a multilateral approach might be preferable. Canada agreed. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member countries negotiated an agreement that would set rules for taxing multinational digital companies and establish a minimum global corporate tax. The agreement would replace unilateral digital services tax proposals such as the one set out in the 2021 federal budget. Freeland had earlier said Canada could proceed with its bill January 2024 and apply terms retroactively. The U.S. ambassador to Canada David Cohen warned such a move might trigger retaliation.

A showdown looms.

The OECD, at the urging of the U.S. asked for another year. Canada should agree. But Freeland should make it clear if the multilateral agreement isn’t in place by the summer of 2024, Canada will proceed with its own bill, and it will be applied retroactively.

Revenues from a digital services tax – whether domestic or international – could then support a free press, but a free press that is decidedly different from the models we’ve seen in the past. The way journalists tell stories is always changing and evolving. What Canada – and other liberal democracies – need is a new form of journalism.

As has been the case in cultural industries for some time, journalism will have to move to what Bernard Miège described as a Post-Fordist model. Tax credits and other budgetary measures should target small, independent content creators and not the distributors. Legacy media companies such as Postmedia should only benefit from government programs for activities directly related to journalistic content creation.

These tax measures are all easy to implement, helpful, but far from transformational.

And transformational is what Canadian content needs in an online world.

Freeland and her cabinet colleagues might follow the dictum of Georges-Jacques Danton, a leading figure of the French Revolution who declared, “il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.”

Three major initiatives present themselves.

First Canada has a public broadcaster – the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio Canada. Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre has promised to defund the CBC if he and his Conservative Party emerge victorious in the next federal election.

The Trudeau Liberals could move in exactly the opposite direction and provide the budgetary top up necessary to allow the CBC to be advertising free. The Liberals promised to do so in the 2015 election campaign. If Trudeau and company were ever serious, it is past time to deliver on that promise.

There have been suggestions if Ottawa made such a move, the CBC’s editorial product could be declared a “Creative Commons” – a standardized way to grant the public permission to use content attribution free. The idea warrants further discussion, but need not be part of this first step.

If, as Scrambled Signals suggests, federal policy should be focused on making Canadian content available, rather than making slices of it mandatory, the public broadcaster is the natural place to make it available.

As flippant as it sounds, the CBC could drop the Family Feud knockoffs and build on Historica Canada’s wildly successful Heritage Minutes. The most recent features Saskatchewan baseball icon Mary “Bonnie” Baker. A two-time all-star catcher in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, Baker’s story is compelling. At least Hollywood thought so. They made a movie based around Baker, called “A League of Their Own.” You may have seen it. Starred Geena Davis, Madonna, and Rosie O’Donnell among others.

Culture is big business in Canada and government policy should reflect that fact. Literally hundreds of thousands of people work in the sector, twice as many as work in agriculture, forestry and fisheries combined. Federal programs should focus on the writers and producers prepared to tell Canada’s stories and the actors and performing artists that give them voice. If Canadian governments have money to fund job creating battery factories in Southwestern Ontario – and they should – investments in Canadian culture content, and independent journalism that is an integral component of that culture – is equally worthy of support.

The government’s reluctance to give up Canadian content quotas is understandable on one level, but counterproductive.

The existing Digital Exemption complicates the issue. Introduced in 1999, the “exemption order” meant Internet delivered content would not be treated as a broadcaster, would be subject to no taxes and would be exempt from foreign ownership restrictions. There would be no requirement for streaming services to feature Canadian content or to contribute financially to Canadian content producers.

C-11 would make YouTube and streaming platforms such as Netflix promote Canadian content the way radio stations and TV stations are required to do. They won’t. Given the free pass the Digital Exemption affords streaming services, the government should drop exhibition quotas for both streaming services and private broadcasters.

A further concern with C-11 grew from what critics described as an “ambiguity of wording” that could lead to the heavy regulatory hand of the CRTC over individuals posting amateur videos. The government subsequently issued a directive to the CRTC “not to impose regulatory requirements on online undertakings in respect of the programs of social media creators including podcasts.”

Eliminating content requirements would make the directive redundant.

The second opportunity is more challenging, and will be hugely controversial.

Some context.

Media sociologists have established that much of the journalistic content that shapes public discourse is derivative, that 90 per cent of what we read, see or hear is based on original reporting by only 10 per cent of content producers. This foundation material is known as the “iron core” of public discourse; the factual accounts of events as varied as monthly unemployment levels, inflation rates, housing starts, consumer price indexes, statistics on street crime, and economic performance measures.

Newspapers, historically, provided much of this “iron core” and newspapers are literally disappearing, creating larger and larger news deserts. Columnists such as Paul Wells have made a laudatory, and successful transition to the online word of subscriptions. But as Wells himself declared, “I’m out here selling elections, and it’s going well, but I’ve got nothing for you about today’s fire or the latest feud at City Hall and that’s important too.”

In a post on X, the self-identified “Scribulatora” suggested “The only thing that’s going to save this country (and many others, but it’s Canada I care about) is if the government finds a way to package/disseminate the *information* that forms a reasonable path to “the truth” …

“And the only way that governments can really do that is to provide a constant stream of real information in a format that is accessible, non-partisan, easily shared and available on demand.”

Owen and Dwivedi, in their Globe piece, also make the point “reliable, factually accurate information is a core requirement for democracy.”

For some time, observers have argued the media’s future will be determined by its success in moving up the journalistic value chain. The days of reporter as first witnessed are long past.

Journalism’s value is in the pursuit of truth, and truth is a cumulative process. Journalists provide context, help news consumers appreciate meaning. We collectively need to understand what impact current unemployment levels have on a broad range of political issues – from housing, to immigration, to the rate of inflation. But do we need a human to write the base data story about the statistic itself, or can we leave that task to a machine.

Artificial Intelligence is in the process of revolutionizing the workplace. The Globe and Mail’s Sean Silcoff recently reported a number of Canadian businesses say costs are down and profits are up, thanks to generative AI. The public debate around AI can fixate on the potential dangers. But that concern needs to be leavened with some consideration of the potential rewards. By way of example, AI has accelerated the initial trial and error part of drug research.

The choice around AI in the workplace is straightforward enough – adopt, adapt, or ban.

Francois Phillips Champagne, the minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development has released a “voluntary code of conduct” for AI. Legislation will follow. Geist says the government needs to get the legislation right, rather than get something on the books fast.

The debates around C-18 and C-11 and other looming legislation underscored the fact any legislative impact on Internet based activity is tricky business. As the State of California has discovered, you can require car seats for kids, but an online safety law for kids is problematic, free speech don’t you know.

The immediate risk, in terms of AI, is the large scale generation of misinformation, a real threat to democracy and to political conversation. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Alex Gomez, a member of the team of researchers who created a key technology that powers AI tools such as chat bots, said: “these [AI] models can create media that is extremely convincing, very compelling, and virtually indistinguishable from human-created text or images or media.” Gomez believes “We need to figure out how we’re going to give the public the ability to distinguish between these different types of media.”

The federal government needs to lead that process in Canada, in conjunction with and in co-operation with research institutes, leading universities, and entrepreneurs in the sector.

A federally funded research initiative could explore ways AI could transform the way governments communicate with citizens. Government departments and agencies typically have largish costly communications shops that end users tend to consider largely ineffective. Could co-piloting technologies be developed to turn government data into the information building blocks that could address the “iron core” problem at least in part? Microsoft’s open AI has developed the concept of co-pilots, a ChatGPT-like assistant. Instead of asking workers to write reports, is there a way ChatGPT could do the writing for them?

The challenge around the integrity and neutrality of such content is self-evident – Propaganda Canada a likely sobriquet. And there are inherent challenges around text. But a pilot could address the content providence arguments, and see if these issues are resolvable, if there is in fact a way to provide core information that is free of partisan or institutional bias that could provide the building blocks of public discourse.

Toronto Metropolitan University professor Angela Misri raises an important and fundamental concern when she asks: “Do we, as an industry, want to become fact checkers for AI generated content?” But the fact is, journalism has long been fact checking government press releases. And for an officially bilingual country like Canada, using AI to produce products in English and French simultaneously is self-evident.

There is a precondition to any test of the government’s ability to use AI and co-piloting to improve institutional communications. The federal government will have to move to the cloud.

A recent report from Auditor General Karen Hogan warned aging computer systems that deliver billions of dollars in direct benefits to Canadians – such as Old Age Security – are decades old and are at risk of failure. And to underscore the urgency of the need for an upgrade, the AG’s office first identified aging information technology as an issue 24 years ago.

The federal government recently adopted a “cloud first” strategy. The long-term objective, recommended by the Information Technology Association of Canada, is to move 80 per cent of government data to the cloud.

Finally, there is the overarching issue of infrastructure.

Hugh Segal, a former senator argued, “There is a role for government in our lives” … “to provide the infrastructure that ensures genuine opportunity of outcomes.”

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine is quoted as saying “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on.”

The threat by Meta and Google to drop Canadian news links is at the heart of the debate around C-18. Similarly, the attempt with C-11 to force streaming services to provide Canadian content is seen as likely to trigger a similar response, which would constitute a direct threat to the burgeoning podcast industry. But as author and journalist David Moscrop stated “the fact that massive tech companies can block people from easily accessing news is a massive problem.”

This particular massive problem requires a substantive made-in-Canada response.

Canarie, an overlooked Canadian success story, might provide an answer.

Canarie developed the National Research and Education Network, that connects researchers, educators and innovators to each other and to data, technology and colleagues around the world. Domestically, the network stretches more than 40,000 kilometres from Inuvialuktun in the Far North to St. John’s in Newfoundland. One million Canadians are already connected to it.

Canarie is a publicly funded, not for profit organization based on collaboration and “focused on delivering a range of relevant and impactful digital infrastructure tools and services.”

Its slogan – “Built by the Community for the Community” – speaks to a potential solution. Because journalism is an alliance with civil society – the community – and not just with institutions.

Canarie could be charged with developing a “Canadian” platform that would stitch the country together in the same way an earlier technology – railways – did a century and a half ago.

The platform could provide the “commons” that is foundational to public discourse. The costs will be prohibitive. And a consensus is emerging in Ottawa that the spring 2024 budget will have to show more spending discipline than has been the case in the recent past. The Trudeau government has spent tens of billions of dollars on nice-to-haves, significantly reducing Ottawa’s ability to finance must-haves or should-haves – at least for the foreseeable future.

The Herle Burly podcast host David Herle put the question: “Should news be a public utility or a business?” Herle’s question reflects his preoccupation with the fact basic reporting constitutes an ever-shrinking element of public discourse. As the Public Policy Forum’s study “Shattered Mirror” states: “Sources of opinion are proliferating, but sources of facts on which those opinions are based are shrinking.”

The traditional model of journalism that was central to public discourse in general, and political discourse in particular, followed what communications theorist James Carey described as a ‘transmission model.” Getting ideas and information from one place to another for purposes of control.

The transmission model has been overtaken by technology. The “gatekeepers” that controlled the flow of information, and in so doing controlled the parameters of political conversation, have been stripped of much of their power. And for that reason, advertising, the midwife of a “free press” has moved to the platforms.

Ottawa’s bills, mistakenly, focus on legacy media and the relationship they have with the dominant platforms such as Facebook and Google.

In seeking to impose a “final offer arbitration” process in C-18 or content quotas in C-11, the government’s legislation was doomed from the beginning.

As is the transmission model of journalism. Carey said, “The ways journalists tell stories is always changing. Some of those old story forms come into being to solve problems. In our time, they may be exhausted. We may need some new forms of journalism to solve our problems.”

Canadian content aspirations would be better served if journalism moved to Carey’s preferred “ritual model” – a conversation where we, collectively, would construct a Canadian reality.

Advances in technology – instead of being seen as threats – should be embraced as opportunities to expand people’s powers to “learn and exchange ideas and experiences,” Carey says.

Government information, which taxpayers have already paid for, could provide information building blocks through generative AI products.

Journalists, in turn, could embrace a new form of journalism to deal with new problems, a journalism Alex S. Jones suggests accepts its first obligation is to the truth, its first loyalty is to citizens and its essence is the discipline of verification.

Frederick Siebert, in articulating his “social responsibility” theory of the press, said, “Let all with something to say be free to express themselves. The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favour of one side or the other.”

French philosopher Albert Camus said a free press can of course be bad, but most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.

Instead of using tax dollars to prop up failing newspaper chains controlled by a U.S. hedge funds, use market-based incentives of tax credits to fund individual content creators.

And instead of being wholly dependent on multinational social media platforms, complement the offering with a made-in-Canada pipeline where the Canadian conversation – whether it involves forest fires, local school board issues, or events at city hall – can be accessed by all.

Meta and Google insisted they are just a pipeline. They aren’t. A Nieman Lab report concluded “X and Meta once aspired to be go-to platforms for reliable real-time information. Both have abandoned that goal. “We’ve moved from social media to algorithmic media. “And in the algorithm driven streaming economy, audience attention is shallow and promiscuous. The need to create avenues for democratic discussion beyond the control of algorithms is self-evident.” Author David Mosco quipped: “I’m starting to think we shouldn’t have turned over our democracies to a handful of tech bros.”

PPF’s Ed Greenspon says, “Ultimately news outlets need to get beyond their dependence on an uncommitted and often arbitrary partner.” Former Harper communications director Andrew MacDougall adds, “If the news wants to survive, it needs to get off the platforms where its product is overwhelmed by a tidal wave of other content.”

At an absolute minimum, Freeland should find a way to fund a feasibility study with Canarie to determine how best to further develop Canada’s Internet pipeline to accommodate news and current affairs content.

Build it. And they will come.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Bill Fox - Bill Fox has spent his professional life working each point of the press, politics, public policy triangle. Fox is the author of Trump, Trudeau, Tweets, Truth: A Conversation, published by McGill-Queen's University Press in the spring, 2022. His previous work, Spinwars, Politics and New Media was published by Key Porter Books in 1999. Most recently a public affairs consultant with Stikeman Elliott LLP, Fox has served as Executive Vice-President, Communications and Corporate Development, at Bell Canada Enterprises, as Senior Vice-President, Public Affairs, at Bombardier Inc. and CN. Fox is a former Ottawa and Washington Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star and appeared frequently on radio and television as a commentator on public affairs, including a stint as a member of CTV’s Pundits Panel. He has served as press secretary and director of communications to the Prime Minister of Canada. Fox holds a Doctorate in Communication, with a specialty in media effects theory, from Carleton University in Ottawa and a Master’s degree in journalism. He has also studied at l’Université de Paris (Sorbonne). In the spring of 2015, Fox was elected Senior Fellow, Massey College, at the University of Toronto. He was subsequently named Practitioner-in-Residence at the Riddell Graduate Program in Political Management at Carleton University. Previously, Fox has been a Fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Senior Fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Centre at Columbia. Fox has served as a director on the boards of a number of business, cultural and communications organizations including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the Toronto International Film Festival, the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) and la Place de la francophonie, the organization responsible for the French language cultural program at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, BC. In 2020, Fox was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.

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