OTTAWA — Some Canadians will soon be restricted from accessing news content on Facebook and Instagram, as parent company Meta begins running tests in response to the Liberal government’s online news bill.
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Meta launches tests blocking news for some Canadians on Facebook, Instagram
Some Canadians will soon be restricted from accessing news on Facebook and Instagram, as Meta runs tests in response to Bill C-18
The tests are in response to the Liberal government’s Bill C-18, which is currently in the Senate and could become law by the end of the month. The legislation would force Meta and Google to share revenues with Canadian news publishers by reaching commercial deals (Postmedia, publisher of the National Post, is in favour of the bill.)
Meta’s tests will begin in the coming days and will last for a few weeks. Between one and five per cent of Canadian users will be affected, and those who are affected will be notified. Both the individuals and news outlets will be chosen at random.
In a statement to the National Post, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said he wouldn’t be swayed by a “threat.”
“When a big tech company, whatever the size is, the amount of money and the powerful lawyers they have, they come here and they tell us, if you don’t do this or that, then I’m pulling the plug – that’s a threat and that is unacceptable,” he said. “I never did anything because I was afraid of a threat, and I will never do it.”
Paul Deegan, president of publishers’ group News Media Canada said Meta’s decision to deny “access to trusted sources of news for some of their users, as wildfires rage across Alberta and Nova Scotia and public safety is at stake, is totally irresponsible and is a smack in the face to Canadians.”
“Meta’s unilateral action is more evidence of the power imbalance that exists between dominant platforms and publishers, which is why parliamentarians need to pass the Online News Act before their summer recess,” Deegan said.
Meta has previously said it will pull news off its platforms if Bill C-18 passes in its current form, and Google, which earlier this year ran tests that blocked news for some Canadians on Google search, has said it’s still deciding whether it will do the same once the bill becomes law.
The bill applies to Big Tech companies — Meta and Google, and potentially others — that “make news available.” That covers content publishers and users share on Facebook, or that Google indexes in its search results, for example. Removing news content from appearing on their platforms would mean the companies are no longer making news available, exempting them from the bill.
The premise of the legislation is that because the Big Tech companies benefit by having news content on their platforms, they should share revenues with news publishers—especially given Google and Meta earn 80 per cent of digital ad revenue in Canada. But the companies argue the value actually flows the other way, and that they drive traffic to the publishers’ websites.
Earlier this week, Brian Myles, director of Le Devoir, told the Senate committee studying the bill his newspaper gets 40 per cent of its traffic from Google search and nearly 30 per cent from social media.
“If Google and Facebook decide they will shut down news content on their own platforms, we will suffer a lot. Direct traffic is less than 20 per cent,” Myles said. “The days when a reader would open the newspaper from page one to the last page are gone. People discover content (through) the means of social platforms and search, and this threat is real.”
But the Globe also has other agreements with Google and Facebook in which “we pay quite a lot of money” to the companies “to deliver eyeballs. We depend on audience,” Crawley said.
If Bill C-18 passes, it would make Canada the second country in the world to have such legislation in place. The first was Australia, where Google also ran tests blocking news and Facebook temporarily pulled news off its platform in response to the bill.
Some observers have said the reason the two companies are fighting in Canada is because they’re concerned about the international precedent it could set, given other countries including United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Brazil are working on similar legislation.
Curran denied that claim, saying Bill C-18 is drafted differently than legislation in countries. “It’s much broader in scope.”
“We are focused on the impacts in Canada … we’ve said it over and over again, that if we are forced to compensate publishers in Canada for content that they share voluntarily to our platforms, that’s not something we can work with.”
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MONCTON, N.B. – New Brunswick RCMP say two youths have been arrested after an emergency alert was issued Monday evening about someone carrying a gun in the province’s southeast.
Caledonia Region Mounties say they were first called out to Main Street in the community of Salisbury around 7 p.m. on reports of a shooting.
A 48-year-old man was found at the scene suffering from gunshot wounds and he was rushed to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
Police say in the interest of public safety, they issued an Alert Ready message at 8:15 p.m. for someone driving a silver Ford F-150 pickup truck and reportedly carrying a firearm with dangerous intent in the Salisbury and Moncton area.
Two youths were arrested without incident later in the evening in Salisbury, and the alert was cancelled just after midnight Tuesday.
Police are still looking for the silver pickup truck, covered in mud, with possible Nova Scotia licence plate HDC 958. They now confirm the truck was stolen from Central Blissville.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
MISSISSAUGA, Ont. – Golf Canada has set an impressive stretch goal of having 30 professional golfers at the highest levels of the sport by 2032.
The World Junior Girls Golf Championship is a huge part of that target.
Credit Valley Golf and Country Club will host the international tournament from Sept. 30 to Oct. 5, with 24 teams representing 23 nations — Canada gets two squads — competing. Lindsay McGrath, a 17-year-old golfer from Oakville, Ont., said she’s excited to be representing Canada and continue to develop her game.
“I’m really grateful to be here,” said McGrath on Monday after a news conference in Credit Valley’s clubhouse in Mississauga, Ont. “It’s just such an awesome feeling being here and representing our country, wearing all the logos and being on Team Canada.
“I’ve always wanted to play in this tournament, so it’s really special to me.”
McGrath will be joined by Nobelle Park of Oakville, Ont., and Eileen Park of Red Deer, Alta., on Team Canada 2. All three earned their places through a qualifying tournament last month.
“I love my teammates so much,” said McGrath. “I know Nobelle and Eileen very well. I’m just so excited to be with them. We have such a great relationship.”
Shauna Liu of Maple, Ont., Calgary’s Aphrodite Deng and Clairey Lin make up Team Canada 2. Liu earned her exemption following her win at the 2024 Canadian Junior Girls Championship while Deng earned her exemption as being the low eligible Canadian on the world amateur golf ranking as of Aug. 7.
Deng was No. 175 at the time, she has since improved to No. 171 and is Canada’s lowest-ranked player.
“I think it’s a really great opportunity,” said Liu. “We don’t really get that many opportunities to play with people from across the world, so it’s really great to meet new people and play with them.
“It’s great to see maybe how they play and take parts from their game that we might also implement our own games.”
Golf Canada founded the World Junior Girls Golf Championship in 2014 to fill a void in women’s international competition and help grow its own homegrown talent. The hosts won for the first time last year when Vancouver’s Anna Huang, Toronto’s Vanessa Borovilos and Vancouver’s Vanessa Zhang won team gold and Huang earned individual silver.
Medallists who have gone on to win on the LPGA Tour include Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont., who was fourth in the individual competition at the inaugural tournament. She was on Canada’s bronze-medal team in 2014 with Selena Costabile of Thornhill, Ont., and Calgary’s Jaclyn Lee.
Other notable competitors who went on to become LPGA Tour winners include Angel Yin and Megan Khang of the United States, as well as Yuka Saso of the Philippines, Sweden’s Linn Grant and Atthaya Thitikul of Thailand.
“It’s not if, it’s when they’re going to be on the LPGA Tour,” said Garrett Ball, Golf Canada’s chief operating officer, of how Canada’s golfers in the World Junior Girls Championship can be part of the organization’s goal to have 30 pros in the LPGA and PGA Tours by 2032.
“Events like this, like the She Plays Golf festival that we launched two years ago, and then the CPKC Women’s Open exemptions that we utilize to bring in our national team athletes and get the experience has been important in that pathway.”
The individual winner of the World Junior Girls Golf Championship will earn a berth in next year’s CPKC Women’s Open at nearby Mississaugua Golf and Country Club.
Both clubs, as well as former RBC Canadian Open host site Glen Abbey Golf Club, were devastated by heavy rains through June and July as the Greater Toronto Area had its wettest summer in recorded history.
Jason Hanna, the chief operating officer of Credit Valley Golf and Country Club, said that he has seen the Credit River flood so badly that it affected the course’s playability a handful of times over his nearly two decades with the club.
Staff and members alike came together to clean up the course after the flooding was over, with hundreds of people coming together to make the club playable again.
“You had to show up, bring your own rake, bring your own shovel, bring your own gloves, and then we’d take them down to the golf course, assign them to areas where they would work, and then we would do a big barbecue down at the halfway house,” said Hanna. “We got guys, like, 80 years old, putting in eight-hour days down there, working away.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
NEW YORK (AP) — Fenway Park has the Ted Williams seat. And now Citi Field has the Grimace seat.
The kid-friendly McDonald’s character made another appearance at the ballpark Monday, when the New York Mets unveiled a commemorative purple seat in section 302 to honor “his special connection to Mets fans.”
Wearing his pear-shaped purple costume and a baseball glove on backwards, Grimace threw out a funny-looking first pitch — as best he could with those furry fingers and short arms — before New York beat the Miami Marlins at Citi Field on June 12.
That victory began a seven-game winning streak, and Grimace the Mets’ good-luck charm soon went viral, taking on a life of its own online.
New York is 53-31 since June 12, the best record in the majors during that span. The Mets were tied with rival Atlanta for the last National League playoff spot as they opened their final homestand of the season Monday night against Washington.
The new Grimace seat in the second deck in right field — located in row 6, seat 12 to signify 6/12 on the calendar — was brought into the Shannon Forde press conference room Monday afternoon. The character posed next to the chair and with fans who strolled into the room.
The seat is available for purchase for each of the Mets’ remaining home games.
“It’s been great to see how our fanbase created the Grimace phenomenon following his first pitch in June and in the months since,” Mets senior vice president of partnerships Brenden Mallette said in a news release. “As we explored how to further capture the magic of this moment and celebrate our new celebrity fan, installing a commemorative seat ahead of fan appreciation weekend felt like the perfect way to give something back to the fans in a fun and unique way.”
Up in Boston, the famous Ted Williams seat is painted bright red among rows of green chairs deep in the right-field stands at Fenway Park to mark where a reported 502-foot homer hit by the Hall of Fame slugger landed in June 1946.
So, does this catapult Grimace into Splendid Splinter territory?
“I don’t know if we put him on the same level,” Mets executive vice president and chief marketing officer Andy Goldberg said with a grin.
“It’s just been a fun year, and at the same time, we’ve been playing great ball. Ever since the end of May, we have been crushing it,” he explained. “So I think that added to the mystique.”
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