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Online News Act could see Google, Meta pay combined $234 million to Canadian media – CBC.ca
The federal government has put a price tag on what it would like to see Google and Facebook spend under an act requiring the tech giants to compensate media for news articles.
Federal officials estimate Google would need to offer $172 million and Facebook $62 million in compensation to satisfy criteria they’re proposing for exemptions under the Online News Act.
Draft regulations released by the government Friday outlined for the first time how it proposes to level the playing field between Big Tech and Canada’s journalism sector.
“The goal of it is to make sure that those that benefit the most from the Canadian market fall under the bill,” Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge told The Canadian Press following the proposal’s release.
The government said companies will fall under the act if they have a total global revenue of $1 billion or more in a calendar year, “operate in a search engine or social media market distributing and providing access to news content in Canada,” and have 20 million or more Canadian average monthly unique visitors or average monthly active users.
For now, Google and Meta’s Facebook are the only companies that meet the criteria, though officials say Microsoft’s Bing search engine is the next closest to falling under the act.
“We know how technology evolves or how the market changes sometimes at a rapid pace and we want to make sure that this bill is relevant in five and 10 years,” St-Onge said.
Companies meeting the criteria can receive an exemption from the act if they already contribute to Canadian journalism an amount laid out by a government formula.
The formula is based on a tech company’s global revenues and Canada’s share of their global GDP. The government believes the calculation will deliver a contribution that is within 20 per cent of the earnings of full-time journalists working in a Canadian news organization.
Companies would be able to satisfy the criteria with both monetary and non-monetary compensation. While the draft does not specify which non-monetary contributions would count, officials said training and advertising could wind up meeting the criteria.
The draft regulations will be subject to a further 30-day consultation. Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, which blocked news on its platforms in anticipation of the act coming into effect at the end of the year, immediately expressed its disappointment with the proposal.
Meta says it will continue blocking news
The draft is based around a “fundamentally flawed premise,” said Rachel Curran, head of public policy at Meta Canada.
“As the legislation is based on the incorrect assertion that Meta benefits unfairly from the news content shared on our platforms, today’s proposed regulations will not impact our business decision to end news availability in Canada,” she said in a statement.
Google, which St-Onge has painted as more cooperative than Meta, also has threatened to pull Canadian news from its offerings.
“We’re carefully reviewing the proposed regulations to assess whether they resolve the serious structural issues with C-18 that regrettably were not dealt with during the legislative process,” Google spokesperson Shay Purdy said in response to the draft.
The two companies have long lobbied against the legislation, with Meta claiming news is a tiny fraction of its business and removing it would result in little revenue loss for the social networking giant.
Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker, meanwhile, has said the legislation “exposes us to uncapped financial liability” and claimed it’s being targeted just because it shows links to news, “something that everyone else does for free.”
But St-Onge maintained the legislation is a “reasonable and predictable path forward for both platforms and media newsrooms.
“This is what we have said that we do,” she said. “I think we delivered on finding a way forward that should please everyone.”
The government said it is pushing forward with the act because Google and Meta have a combined 80 per cent share of the $14 billion online ad revenues seen in the country in 2022.
At the same time, news outlets have seen their advertising revenues shrink, forcing layoffs, a loss of media coverage in small and rural communities and 474 closures of Canadian news businesses between 2008 and 2023.
The government says 69 per cent of Canadians access news online but only 11 per cent pay for it.
After Meta made good on its threats to remove Canadian news, the federal government pulled $10 million in annual advertising from Meta’s platforms. News and telecommunications businesses Quebecor, Bell Media, Torstar Corp., Cogeco, and Postmedia Network Canada Corp. replicated the move.
News
'ET Canada' cancelled by Corus Entertainment, blames 'challenging' advertising market – CTV News
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Canadian media company Corus Entertainment has announced it is ending flagship entertainment program Entertainment Tonight (ET) Canada after 18 seasons.
“The costs of producing a daily entertainment newsmagazine show in a challenging advertising environment have led to this decision,” read a statement posted on the company’s website on Wednesday.
“We recognize the impact this decision has on the dedicated team who have worked on the show and we thank them for their meaningful contributions over the years.”
The show’s final episode will air on Oct. 6, with reruns airing in the same time slot on Global TV until Oct. 31, a Corus spokesperson told CBC News.
The cancellation won’t impact Corus’s obligation to produce Canadian content under the rules set out by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the spokesperson said.
ET Canada’s website and social media platforms will also be shut down. The spokesperson declined to comment on how many people had been laid off as a result, but said the program’s hosts were impacted.
The network said it has no plans for another entertainment news show.
An hour-long, magazine-style show that focused on entertainment, celebrity, film and TV news, ET Canada began airing in 2005 on Global TV, which is owned by Corus Entertainment.
The program has been hosted by Canadian media personality Cheryl Hickey since its launch, with regular appearances by entertainment reporters, including Sangita Patel — a co-host since 2022 — plus Carlos Bustamante, Keshia Chanté and Morgan Hoffman.
The cancellation leaves ETalk, CTV’s weeknight show, as Canada’s lone major entertainment news program.
Andrea Grau, founder and CEO of entertainment publicity firm Touchwood PR, said ET Canada offered a Canadian perspective that made it stand out in the U.S.-dominated entertainment landscape.
“There was this great Entertainment Tonight brand that was going on in the U.S. — we all watched. And the idea of a Canadian arm of it was very special because it could give a different slant,” she said.
ET Canada’s demise comes during a major shift in the industry, she said, as publicists struggle to find entertainment outlets that can shine a spotlight on emerging Canadian artists and projects.
“Even though we share a language with the U.S. and we share pop culture, we are still Canadian and we have a different perspective,” Grau said, noting that ET Canada’s hosts were a mainstay on the U.S. press circuit.
“You see those relationships that have been built over the years of having Sangita [Patel] standing on a red carpet interviewing someone, or Cheryl Hickey interviewing someone. They’re recognizable to [celebrities] after all of these years, too,” she said. “They’ve created such a strong brand.”
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The number of babies born in Canada dropped to a 17-year-low last year amid the COVID-19 pandemic and a declining fertility rate, data shows.
A Statistics Canada report released Tuesday showed there were 351,679 births registered across the country in 2022, which was a five per cent decrease from the previous year. This was Canada’s sharpest drop recorded since 2005.
Before 2022, the lowest number of births recorded was in 2005, with 345,044 babies born nationwide.
While the number of births in all provinces and territories declined last year, Nova Scotia was the notable outlier with a 12.8 per cent increase in live births.
The biggest decrease was in Nunavut, with the number of births dropping 11.8 per cent compared with 2021.
Canada, like many other developed countries, has been seeing declining birth trends over the past several years, but the COVID-19 pandemic has affected many people’s plans to have kids, said Kate Choi, an associate professor of sociology at Western University.
“Although the fertility decline was indeed part of a larger trend of fertility decreases that have been occurring in Canada, the magnitude of the decrease is larger than what we would have anticipated in the absence of COVID-19,” she told Global News in an interview.
The high cost of living has magnified the size of the drop in births, Choi said.
“It’s very expensive to have children and right now, when everything is expensive, it’s very hard for young adults to be able to have the type of lifestyle that allows them to have children, which is contributing to delayed and forgone fertility,” she added.
It’s a concerning trend for Canada, according to Choi, who said decreasing birth rates have the potential to exacerbate population aging issues.
Canada is considered a low-fertility country and its fertility rate has been declining over the past decade.
The latest Statistics Canada data from 2021 reported a fertility rate of 1.44 children per woman that year — marking a slight increase following a steady decline since 2009.
The fertility rate is an estimate of the average number of live births a female can be expected to have in her lifetime, according to StatCan.
As some couples delay their plans to have kids for a variety of reasons, egg freezing and other fertility treatments are on the rise in Canada.
Lifestyle changes and work decisions are contributing factors, with a shift toward smaller families, said Mark Rosenberg, an expert in geography and professor emeritus at Queen’s University.
“I think mainly the factors we should focus on are first and foremost women’s decisions around the labour force and delaying birth until they’re in their 30s,” he told Global News in an interview.
There is also an increasing number of younger people living in single-person households, Rosenberg added.
Despite the drop in births, Canada’s population has been growing at a “record-setting pace,” surpassing the milestone of 40 million people earlier this year, due to a focus on increasing immigration.
Meanwhile, the StatCan report Tuesday also showed a rise in the proportion of babies who were born with a low birth weight — less than 2,500 grams.
Seven per cent of all babies had a low birth weight in 2022 compared with 6.6 per cent the year before.
Babies with a low birth weight are at an increased risk of complications, such as inhibited growth and development and even death, according to StatCan.
“When we see higher rates of low birth weight babies or higher rates of babies that are born who are overweight, those are issues that we should be concerned about because they reflect on people’s health,” Rosenberg said.
— with files from Global News’ Katherine Ward
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