The Liberals’ Bill C-18 And Bill C-11 Aim Is To Destroy Independent Media

The early declarations of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government and especially Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez that Bill C-18 shows they care about supporting a  “strong, independent, and free press” was quickly made to look like jokes.

A couple of days ago Meta stated that it would pull the plug on news on Facebook for Canadians with the passage of Bill C-18, which it had been warning about for months as the Liberals pushed ahead with this bill supposedly meant to get Canadian journalists paid by Big Tech companies for their work.

This was all a ridiculous goal as Facebook, Google, and other social media platforms are exactly that, platforms. Facebook and Google already do more than enough in facilitating places for journalists to market their work, claiming that they now need to pay journalists for the stuff they post is silly. Facebook and Google do not ask journalists to post anything so why should they pay for the news posted on their platforms?

From the perspective of a political journalist, I believe that Justin Trudeau and his government want to create an artificial problem with Big Tech social media and news platforms in order to restrict the flow of information.

Think about it, paired with Bill C-11 which proposes that the CRTC needs to be able to curate the sort of news displayed on Big Tech platforms Bill C-18 either gets the news sources the Liberals want at the top of the algorithms paid and if Big Tech pulls the plug on Canadian content as a whole the Liberals still win.

Remember the sources of news the Liberals favour the most are not the truly independent outlets like Rebel News, True North, The National Telegraph, or Canadaland, it will be creators who work for the already subsidized legacy media outlets like Global News and the CBC. 

So if Big Tech companies decide to wash their hands of allowing Canadian news consumption on their platforms it helps kill off the legacy media’s competition.

Oh, and it should also be mentioned the legacy media also got a $329 million cash injection in Bill C-18.

Minister Rodriguez’s shots at Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre for “standing up for tech giants” is a completely pathetic way to cover for the deliberately systemic failures the Liberals are trying to cause in independent media through their meddling with online platforms.

Poilievre is exactly correct. The Liberals are just trying to get in the way of what people see online while pretending to be backing journalists. 

What the Liberals are doing is basically the equivalent of demanding workers in a specific industry all make at least $150,000 a year when the average wage is only $75,000. They say they are “just trying to get you paid what you deserve” but in reality obviously all a salary floor like this would do would be to price the vast majority of workers out of the market, and make is so only workers who the government subsidized the wages of being employed. 

More Canadians need to be educated about what Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government are trying to do to independent media in this country. If the Liberals get their way independent media will be heavily marginalized on the internet and only subsidized government-approved media will be easily accessible online.