Canada’s Bill C-18 Is an Inadvertent Blow to Censorship

Google Canada's Jason J. Kee, Public Policy Manager, appears via videoconference as a witness at a Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 6, 2023. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press)

Commentary

The Liberal government’s recently passed Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18, requires that tech giants like Google and Meta negotiate deals with Canadian media companies like Bell, Postmedia, and Torstar for the right to link to their Canadian content.

To Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s dismay, the tech giants are refusing to play ball. Saying they don’t value the right to link because links benefit the publishers but not them, they decided to neuter the law by vowing to block access to Canadian news content on their platforms when the law comes into effect.

“That argument that the internet giants are putting forward is not just flawed, it’s dangerous to our democracy and to our economy,” Trudeau said. “Putting aside the jobs and communities that are supported by local journalism, by professional journalists, understanding what’s going on in the world around us, is an essential service.”

If the goal is truly “understanding what’s going on in the world around us,” Bill C-18 has struck a blow against the censors. The mainstream media and big tech have long been the chief censors in society, banning content they view as undesirable. YouTube, owned by Google, recently banned a podcast discussion between Jordan Peterson and Robert Kennedy Jr, who is Joe Biden’s main rival for the Democratic nomination for president, because it considered Kennedy’s views on vaccines to be unacceptable.

YouTube isn’t alone in this. Virtually all of the mainstream media has long banned criticism of vaccines, just as it banned criticism of the conventional wisdom on COVID, whether it involved alternate therapies such as hydroxychloroquine or the efficacies of masking or lockdowns or social distancing.

The enforcement of the government orthodoxy extends to numerous other areas: climate change, the war in Ukraine, gender issues, and the 2022 truckers’ protest among them. Those who defy the orthodoxy face cancellation—Donald Trump was even banned from Twitter.

In all these areas and more, the public’s chief sources of information—the mainstream media and social media—actively prevent the public from hearing the views of those who dissent from the conventional wisdom, and thus from “understanding what’s going on in the world around us.” If Bill C-18 diminishes the distortions caused by sharing of links to the censoring media, the public understanding of these contentious issues won’t suffer, even if media companies that get fewer clicks do.

Media analysts such as internet policy expert Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, say that blocking news content will “disproportionately hurt smaller and independent media outlets and leave the field to poorer quality sources.” That statement is only partially true, because many small outlets were never going to be eligible to receive big-tech payments—Bill C-18’s “Code of Ethics” provision bars payments to media organizations that don’t hew to the government narrative on issues such as COVID and the truckers. The only small and independent media organizations that stood to gain referrals from Bill C-18 were those onside with contentious government narratives.

The big-tech refusal to play ball with Bill C-18 won’t hurt the media outlets that dare speak truth to power. Neither can these be fairly labelled as “poorer quality sources.” If anything, big tech’s refusal is disproportionately harming the media outlets that subscribe to the government narratives, thus levelling the playing field for small, independent non-censoring media outlets.

Bill C-18 has struck a blow against the censors, both in government and media.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.