Tag: QCJO

It’s the Pot Calling the Kettle Black: US State Dept Human Rights Reports Criticizes Freedom of the Press in Canada

A kettle labeled 'CDA' next to a pot labeled 'US' over an open flame, surrounded by smoke in a natural outdoor setting.
Image: Shutterstock (AI assist)

Earlier this month the US State Department released its annual report on Human Rights in over 190 countries. As usual, there was a country report on Canada. What was less usual was the report’s negative focus criticizing the state of press freedoms in Canada. It seems that as press freedom has declined in the US under Trump 2.0, the MAGA interpretation of how other countries should conduct themselves has ramped up. If there was ever a case of “the pot calling the kettle black”, this is it.

The US Government, through its various departments, issues a number of annual reports, most of them mandated by Congress. Many of them, such as the National Trade Estimates Report on Foreign Trade Barriers or the Special 301 Report on intellectual property (IP), both issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative, are commentaries on the practices of other countries. While these reports can be useful in highlighting trade-distorting measures or areas of weak IP enforcement or legislation, no-one could accuse the US Government of consistency between the practices it identifies and comments on, and many of the practices that the United States itself follows. One good example is in the area of copyright law, where the annual Special 301 Report takes various trading partners of the US to task for numerous transgressions and/or loopholes in copyright protection. But as I pointed out in a blog last year (The USTR “Watch List” Designation You Will Never See), the US hardly has clean hands when it comes to some key copyright issues, such as an unwillingness or inability to institute a site-blocking regime to fight offshore streaming piracy, something that more than 40 other countries have managed to do, and the inadequacy of US law in protecting performance rights of US and non-US artists for music played on terrestrial radio stations, among other issues. The fact that the US is the leading source of online piracy globally with 13.5 billion visits to piracy sites annually does not seem to be enough to get a US site-blocking regime over the goal line in Congress.

The same is true in spades for the trade sector with the advent of the Trump Administration and its practice of unilaterally, arbitrarily and seemingly randomly setting import tariffs (Brazil 50%, Canada 35%, Mexico 30%, China 30%–for now, EU 15%, Japan 15%, Australia 10%, etc,) in defiance of just about every international trade agreement the US has ever signed.

The most recent example of this phenomenon of “say one thing but do another” is the US State Department’s Report on Human Rights in Canada particularly with respect to Section 2 and its hypocritical criticisms of Canada’s “Freedom of the Press”.  A particular bugbear for the State Department is the Online News Act (ONA), legislation that came into force in 2023, based on similar legislation in Australia. (Note that the State Department’s report on Australian human rights does not even mention the similar Australian legislation as an issue). The objective of the ONA, to quote the Canada Gazette, is to seek “to capture the largest and most prominent digital platforms that operate in the markets that have a strategic advantage over news businesses” in order to introduce “a new legislative and regulatory framework that ensures fair revenue sharing between digital platforms and news businesses”. Certain market criteria were applied to scope in the targetted platforms (annual global revenue exceeding $1 billion, must operate a search engine or social media market, minimum 20 million average monthly unique visitors in Canada). As a result, only two entities were subject to the legislation, Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram). As noted, the ONA mirrored similar legislation passed in Australia a couple of years before. It was also very similar to legislation introduced, but not passed, in the US Congress, (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act) and to legislation enacted in California. Basically, it required the large digital platforms to pay for their use of news content, content that the platforms used to attract viewers and thus sell ads.

It would be fair to say that the results of the ONA in Canada were mixed. After much uncertainty, threats and lobbying, Google carved out an exemption for itself by agreeing to contribute (CAD) $100 million annually to a fund to support Canadian journalism (while eliminating contributions it was already making to some chosen journalistic enterprises). META took an alternate route by supposedly exempting itself from the reach of the legislation by blocking all coverage from Canadian news sources, claiming that it derived no commercial benefit from having news coverage on Facebook or Instagram. This seems to reflect a global decision by the company to refuse to acknowledge any value from–or willingness to pay for–news content. META’s earlier deals in Australia are not being renewed. Australia is not amused and is considering various courses of action.  

The funding from Google was welcomed by Canadian media outlets, many of them small. As in the US, most news media enterprises in Canada, whether print, digital or broadcast, are struggling as digital platforms have taken over the ad markets that previously supported news media and news journalism. Consumers have gone online for news yet are reluctant to pay for it. The Google funding, plus taxpayer-funded Local Journalism Initiative Funds and tax credits allocated to “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations” (QCJO), have helped prevent more areas of the country from becoming news deserts. According to CBC, eligible media outlets employing a qualified journalist will receive between approximately $14,000 and $17,000 annually per journalist from the Google funding, with smaller and digital outlets being on the higher end of the scale. You would think that these efforts to preserve independent journalism would be considered a good thing and might even be applauded by the US State Department in its report on Canadian press freedoms. You would be wrong.

The State Department’s most current (2024) criticism of Freedom of the Press in Canada contains four essential points;

  1. The Government of Canada used a variety of mechanisms to fund public and private sector media in the country.
  2. The Online News Act empowered the CRTC to set mandatory guidelines between digital platforms and news businesses.
  3. The Federal Court upheld the government’s decision to deny tax credits to an “independent news organization” (Rebel News–not specifically named in the State Department report) because it failed to meet the program’s criteria as a qualified journalism organization.
  4. The “Changing Narratives Fund” component of the Local Journalism Initiative, designed to support “diverse communities” (defined as including Indigenous, Black, racialized, ethno-religious minority, people with disabilities and 2SLGBTQI+ communities) discriminated against journalists who fell outside these “favored” categories. 

Let’s look at these allegations in turn. The Government of Canada, as is the case with many governments including, until recently, the US Government (which fully or partially funded media organizations including National Public Broadcasting, PBS, and Voice of America), provides various support measures for Canadian media and publishing, such as the Canadian Periodical Fund, the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) and the Journalism Tax Credit. To ensure that only bona fide organizations qualify for the tax credit, there are transparent criteria to become a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO). An independent advisory board composed of journalism experts drawn from current and retired faculty members from post-secondary journalism schools across Canada, as well as some in the journalism industry, makes recommendations as to who qualifies . As for the LJI, it is also adjudicated by an independent panel of experts.

With respect to government support programs, the State Department alleges that “News organizations faced direct and indirect pressure to conform their political speech in order to gain or maintain access to these funds, leading to self-censorship”. How did they reach that conclusion. Who knows? Not the slightest evidence is put forward to support this dubious proposition.

As for the Online News Act, the report states that “The law empowered the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to set mandatory bargaining guidelines between platforms and news businesses and to otherwise enforce and set regulatory guidance for the act, including codes of conduct and eligibility of news businesses to participate, powers which could be used to discriminate against political speech or disfavored independent media outlets.” Huh? The only funding that emerged from the ONA was Google’s $100 million. The CRTC has no role in its distribution. It is administered by a non-profit organization, the Canadian Journalism Collective, established for this purpose by a group of independent publishers and broadcasters, and selected by Google to manage distribution of the funds. As for META, which stonewalled the ONA process and eventually picked up its ball and went home, blocking distribution of Canadian news on its platforms to avoid paying a nickel to support news gathering in Canada, the State Department manages to blame Canada for the resulting news blackout, which it equates with “censorship”;

Rather than participate in government-mandated bargaining, some American digital platforms announced that they would no longer make news content available to Canadian users, leading to substantial censorship of news content including local news content.

This is a quibble, but censorship is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news etc that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security“. What META did by blocking all Canadian news was certainly unacceptable but it definitely wasn’t censorship.

As for the State Department championing Rebel News (an alt-right website often compared to Breitbart News in the US) in the website’s attempt to qualify for the journalism tax credit, is the US State Department implying that the Canadian court system does not support freedom of the press? These are the facts. Rebel News appealed the denial of QCJO status to the Federal Court. It lost for good reasons. The Federal Court upheld the decision of the Canada Revenue Agency to deny the outlet’s application for QCJO tax credits because it failed to meet the key criteria of producing original news content. On a review of 483 articles published by Rebel News, less than one percent was deemed original, the rest being either opinion or republished material. (These are the very same tax credits that earlier in the Report were criticized for leading to self censorship of news organizations, so according to the State Department, it’s bad if you take them and it’s bad if you can’t get them.).

As for the Changing Narratives Fund, it is an additional $10 million (i.e. new money) in funding over 3 years provided to the Local Journalism Initiative. It is hard to understand how that undermines press freedom in Canada.

Let’s look at the equivalent State Department Report on Canadian human rights in 2023, which had this to say about press freedoms;

“An independent media, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of expression, including for media members. Independent media were active and expressed a wide variety of views without restriction”.

Gee, how could it all go so wrong in just a year? The tax credits and local journalism funding have been around for quite a while. The ONA brought in around $100 million in new funding to journalism. There is room for valid criticism of the role of the press and press freedoms in Canada (the RCMP have been pretty heavy-handed with journalists at protest sites for example) but what really changed was the arrival of the MAGA crowd in Washington.

But if the criticisms of Canada’s press freedoms reek of the Trump Administration’s domestic US agenda, it is the hypocrisy of attacking the freedom of the press in Canada that really sticks in my throat given the current declining state of press freedoms in the US. Apart from the fact that– according to the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index— the US places 57th out of 180 countries (Canada ranks 21, UK 20, New Zealand 16, Australia 29), there is plenty of evidence that press freedoms in the US are on a steep decline, despite the courage of some US media outlets in fighting back. I personally don’t give the Press Freedom Index that much credibility (it strains credulity to place the US below Panama, Moldova, North Macedonia and a few others), but it is more difficult to dismiss the views of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists who report that 100 days into Donald Trump’s administration, press freedoms in the US are no longer “a given”. The Committee’s Special Report, “Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy”, states clearly that;

“The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been marked by a flurry of executive actions that have created a chilling effect and have the potential to curtail media freedoms. These measures threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swaths of America’s population.”

Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, cravenly settled by Paramount, is one prominent example. There are many others. The White House banned Associated Press reporters from the press pool after the outlet refused to follow an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Wall Street Journal was banned from the press pool covering Trump’s recent trip to Scotland over its coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein affair, which Trump didn’t like. As Donald Trump has weaponized the US government against any elements of the US media he doesn’t like, at any given moment in time, the US reputation as the “gold standard” for press freedom and investigative reporting is dropping like a stone. Now it appears that the US State Department has been enlisted to do the Administration’s dirty work, and to peddle its view of how the world should be run, through its Human Rights Report.

I don’t really blame the authors of the report. If they hadn’t already been fired for not being doctrinally correct, they were just doing what they were told to do—push the Trump agenda by whatever means available. In picking on freedom of the press in Canada, they come across as particularly hypocritical and biased, undermining whatever reputational impact the State Department’s Report on Human Rights used to have.

If this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, (with very little substantiating evidence to back up the accusation) then I don’t know what is. Maybe it’s just a lot of hypocritical hot air.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved

Does the Trudeau Government Really Support Canadian Media? Saying One Thing but Doing Another (It’s Time to Walk the Talk)

Image: http://www.shutterstock.com

A couple of weeks ago I provided my interpretation of the results of the recent Federal Court case, Blacklock’s Reporter v Attorney General of Canada. My main objective was to call out the twisting of that decision by those claiming the result means that fair dealing trumps the protection provided under the Copyright Act to TPMs (Technological Protection Measures, aka “digital locks”). In other words, debunking the assertion that as a result of this decision, it is legal for a user to bypass or circumvent an access control TPM in order purportedly to exercise their rights under fair dealing. As I explained, the court did not so rule for the simple reason that it concluded that the user, a Parks Canada employee, did not circumvent the TPM because she had obtained access licitly through purchase of a subscription. The issue at bar was that the password thus obtained was then shared with a couple of dozen or so other employees of Parks Canada and other Canadian government departments for “research”, an identified fair dealing purpose.

The judge concluded that the terms of the subscription were sufficiently ambiguous to permit the interpretation that sharing the password was not an infringement, and thus did not constitute circumvention. He was also unwilling to conclude that a password constitutes a TPM, absent expert testimony. He then went on to assess whether the use fell within the four corners of fair dealing, concluding that it did both in terms of purpose and form of use. As controversial as this decision may have been in terms of determining that sharing a licitly-obtained password granted for a single subscription was not an infringement because the end use was fair, as well as failing to accept that a password authorized by the copyright owner that controls access to content is not a TPM, the decision nonetheless did not legitimize the circumvention of a TPM on the basis of fair dealing. Thus, I concluded the Court had upheld the principle that fair dealing does not trump a TPM, or, put another way, the Court did not overturn that principle.  

Then, noted copyright lawyer Barry Sookman weighed into the debate, posting his views on the decision, “Understanding subscription licenses, fair dealing and legal protection for TPMs in Canada: A critical commentary of the Blacklock’s Reporter Parks Canada decision”. Sookman’s legal deep dive into the case is a much more detailed analysis than my own although he also concludes that, among other things, the decision did not rule that fair dealing trumps the Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention prohibition regarding TPMs. He also disputes the Court’s fair dealing analysis, concluding that since access was not licitly obtained, there can be no fair dealing. According to his analysis, it was not obtained legally because there was breach of contract. Based on his review of contract law and precedents, Sookman concludes (unlike the decision reached by the judge in the case), that Blacklock’s Terms of Service were binding on Parks Canada. You can read his arguments for yourself.

One sure way to know how persuasive these points are would be for Blacklock’s to appeal the case, although this seems unlikely unless a source of funding appears. As Blacklock’s noted in a posting shortly after the decision was announced,

“We are a small business like a million others. We have spent eight years and $538,665 fighting the Attorney General and Federal Court to uphold property rights. FC 829 should be appealed to the Supreme Court, but large corporations and trade associations relying on electronic commerce cannot leave it to Blacklock’s alone to litigate the definition of “password” in Canada in the digital age. Parties interested in joining an appeal with financing should contact counsel: Scott Miller, c/o MBM Intellectual Property Law. 275 Slater Street, 14th Floor, Ottawa K1P 5H9.”

Will anyone step forward? The Attorney General for Canada has deep taxpayer-funded pockets. Blacklock’s does not. This is David v Goliath.

Sookman’s analysis suggests there are solid grounds for an appeal, but to me the most important element of his blog post relates to policy direction rather than legal arguments. He concluded his analysis by noting the discrepancy between the Government of Canada’s aggressive pursuit of Blacklock’s and its professed support for Canadian journalism. The government, through the Attorney General of Canada (AGC, i.e. the Department of Justice), not only very aggressively defended the suits Blacklock’s brought against government departments but went beyond a defence, seeking a declaration from the Court that a password is not a TPM and that its use does not constitute circumvention, in effect seeking to gut the TPM provisions of the Act. (The Court declined to make such a declaration). Moreover, when Blacklock’s tried to discontinue the action, the government continued to pursue the case, instituting a motion seeking declaratory relief that the Agency did not breach Blacklock’s Terms of Service or infringe copyright based on a fair dealing defence.

This is the same government that constantly speaks of the need to maintain a viable media sector and which has undertaken several initiatives with the declared intent of doing so. Perhaps the most visible, and possibly most controversial, is the Online News Act, Bill C-18, that sought to impose an obligation on large US-based social media platforms, to wit Google and Meta (Facebook/Instagram), to negotiate good faith content sharing agreements with Canadian media for the platforms’ use of news content, failing which the government would impose binding arbitration. Most people are familiar with the decidedly mixed outcome of that exercise, with Meta “complying” with the legislation by blocking links to Canadian news content on its sites while Google agreed to contribute $100 million annually to media in Canada, to be disbursed through a hastily formed entity, the Canadian Journalism Collective. The funding subsumes Google’s earlier voluntary licensing agreements with some media companies. The Collective is expected to dole out about $17,000 annually per working journalist from this fund. Meanwhile news links remain blocked on Facebook and Instagram.

Another government attempt to obtain additional funds comes through a second recently passed piece of legislation, the Online Streaming Act, Bill C-11. The CRTC has taken early action to require an initial “downpayment” from foreign streaming services operating in Canada, part of which will go to support the Independent Local News Fund. Then there are tax credits such as the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit for a QCJO (Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization).

There has been some pushback against financial support for media from governments, streamers, and social media organizations, primarily from a few prominent journalists worried about compromising the independence of the Fourth Estate. See Andrew Coyne’s recent comments (“Please stop helping us: the newspaper bailout is a comprehensive policy failure”) in the Globe and Mail. Although many in the media industry do not agree with his perspective, Coyne has a point. The media, newspapers like the Globe and Mail and National Post, specialized journals like Blacklock’s, recreational publications like the Walrus or Maclean’s, or various other online publications, should be able to stand on their own feet and earn revenue from the valuable content they provide. If that content is not worth paying for in the eyes of consumers, why produce it? But a business model that is based primarily on getting paid by consumers for the content they consume is not viable if media products are free for the taking by anyone claiming “fair dealing”. That is nothing but a licence for piracy.

If you click on the link to the Coyne opinion piece above, unless you have a digital subscription to the Globe, you will run into their paywall. You will be invited to register for a few free articles, but more specifically you will be encouraged to subscribe, with a very attractive initial offering (at the moment, $7.96 a month, before tax) that after a set period of time will revert to the more normal subscription price of about $32 a month. That is how the Globe can afford to pay Coyne and run its business. You can even use the Globe content that you access through your paid subscription for fair dealing purposes, for example by making a copy of a reasonable amount of that content for research, private study etc. However, it you were an employee of a large organization, (like a federal government agency or department for example), and a number of employees of your organization needed access to the Globe to stay current on issues, to track what the public is reading, or to anticipate questions that ministers might be asked, etc., one would normally expect that rather than having just one subscription for members of that organization, there would be an institutional subscription that reflects the true usage of the content. For example, Parks Canada has almost 6000 employees. The federal government in Canada has almost 300,000. A smaller organization, like the Department of Canadian Heritage, (that is spearheading policy initiatives to “save” journalism in Canada) has almost 2000 employees. Some specialized agencies (Copyright Board of Canada, for example) have just a handful. (The Copyright Board has 25). One would expect that an institutional subscription would be tailored to the number of users.

One would not expect that a large government department would purchase exactly one (1!) subscription and freely share it among any employees who might need access to the content, using fair dealing as the pretext. But that is what happened to Blacklock’s Reporter. That is what Department of Justice lawyers, representing Parks Canada, (an agency of the Government of Canada, the same government that is touting its support for professional journalism because of the important role it plays in our democracy) argued was their right to do. Rather than siccing the legal dogs from the Justice Department (representing the Attorney General of Canada) on a news organization like Blacklock’s that investigates and reports on what is going on in Ottawa, the Government of Canada should walk the talk of its policy to support responsible journalism in Canada and pay fairly for the content it uses rather than hiding behind a specious expansive interpretation of fair dealing. The actions of the government are reminiscent of the tactics used by educational institutions in Canada to avoid compensating authors and publishers for widespread copying of content for use in teaching under the guise of “educational fair dealing”.

Not only has the Attorney General taken a hard line on this case, it has also tried to blacken Blacklock’s reputation by accusing it of entrapment and being a copyright troll. Blacklock’s had to resort to Access to Information requests to learn how many government employees had accessed the single subscription they had authorized. The judge in the Blacklock’s case explicitly dismissed these allegations, noting that Blacklock’s had no intent to deceive.

As Barry Sookman concluded in his blog post, 

“It is high time the Government decides whether it wants to win its suits with Blacklock’s at all costs and in the process create precedents which undermine news services and other cultural industries in Canada or do the right thing and support Canadian news publishing. A good start would be revisiting its legal argument and if this case is appealed, think about what it is really trying to accomplish.”

There are lots of precedents where the Justice legal dogs have been called off for policy reasons, among them the $20 billion settlement on First Nations child welfare. The Canadian Human Rights Commission ruled that the federal government had chronically underfunded child welfare services on Reserves and ordered restitution. The federal government appealed the Commission’s order for payment and challenged the tribunal’s orders in the Federal Court. The Justice lawyers were prepared to fight to the bitter end. But then political realities intruded and common sense prevailed, the appeal was paused and negotiations leading to the settlement were undertaken. The government’s legal stance was way out of synch with its stated policy positions.

The same is true in this case and it is high time the Government of Canada stopped saying one thing but doing another. It’s time to walk the talk in Ottawa.

© Hugh Stephens 2024. All Rights Reserved.

As Journalism Withers, “Garbage” News Takes Over: An Unexpected Result of the Facebook/Instagram News Blackout in Canada

Image: Shutterstock (with AI assist: Note AI misspelling)

The sad, slow decline of professional journalism continues. The most recent manifestation of this in Canada is the announcement that the Saltwire Group, publishers of The Chronicle Herald of Halifax and a number of other daily and weekly papers in Atlantic Canada, is on the ropes with $90 million in debt. The Chronicle Herald has been around for 150 years! Post Media has made a buyout offer of $1 million (less than the cost of the average home in Vancouver). This will keep some of the papers publishing, no doubt with significant staff cutbacks and, reportedly, ending of union contracts and termination of company pension plans. But there seems to be little choice; accept the nasty medicine or expire. Post Media will most likely keep a minimal local newsroom and fill the papers with repurposed content from its flagship daily National Post. Local news will suffer. This is a story that is being replicated all over North America.

Meanwhile small, local online news outlets have been hit by Facebook’s blackout of news for Canadian readers as a result of the passage of the Online News Act, Bill C-18. In the case of New Brunswick’s River Valley Sun, according to the CBC, the free-to-readers, ad-supported, all-digital Sun depended on Facebook to reach its audience as well as to obtain local news that could be added to the online journal. The owner is quoted as saying, “…we started basically from scratch, and because Facebook was free it was wonderful”.

That is the flip side of the narrative accusing Facebook of using uncompensated news content, developed at great expense by professional journalists working for media companies, to attract and hold users’ interest thus keeping them on Meta’s sites (Facebook, Instagram) longer to be able to expose them to more ads. Not so wonderful. That is what C-18 was supposed to rectify, along the lines of the News Media Bargaining Code instituted earlier in Australia, requiring the big social media platforms (in this case Google and Meta) to make a contribution to news gathering if they used news content. Failure to do so would result in compulsory and binding arbitration. While Google ducked and weaved, it eventually agreed to put $100 million into a pot to be doled out to various news organizations by the Canadian Journalism Collective as long as it was given an exemption from the legislation, whereas Meta went to the wall and took down news links rather than contribute. The River Valley Sun is collateral damage, although it could possibly tap into the Google funding if it employs any fulltime journalists (a minimum of two is required).

The Online News Act did result in bringing some additional funding to news outlets, large and small, somewhat along the lines of Australia’s initiative through its News Media Bargaining Code (which was not actually invoked because the two platforms ended up striking content deals with most Australian media). However, it is clear that Meta has had buyer’s remorse about its Australian deals because they are busy unwinding those commitments in Oz. It remains to be seen how Australia will deal with this. There have been some suggestions that the Australian government may be looking at options to force Meta to carry news, and then subject them to the Code. Will Meta get a pass—in which case Google could rightly ask why it should comply—or will news also end up being blocked on Facebook and Instagram for Australian users as well as Canadian?

If that happens, consumers will have to find other ways to get access to news that is normally shared on the Facebook platform. Going to the actual websites of news organizations is one good way to do this. What a novel idea! However, many younger consumers won’t do this; if news is on a social media feed, they might read it, but they will not proactively search for it. Facebook also remains an important go-to source for breaking local news related to weather and climate-change events such as flooding and fires. Hosts of Facebook pages distributing information on the local impact of natural disasters have had to resort to workarounds such as posting photos of news articles on Meta or copy-pasting articles into their Facebook page. (Ironically, such actions could possibly constitute violations of copyright whereas posting a link is not). But workarounds are not going to help news outlets like the River Valley Sun.

Perhaps the journal should take a leaf out of the book of Just Bins, a waste recycling firm in Regina, SK, a garbage collection company that seems to have picked up news distribution as a sideline, benefiting from the free online exposure. It does not distribute mainstream media; it creates its own news content that it features on its website, even employing its own drone footage. Because it is not a news site, it is not blocked by Facebook. It has edgily reported on traffic accidents, problems at City Hall, homelessness, and even suicides. In fact, it was voted best online news source in a recent poll taken for the annual “Best of Regina” awards. Not that it takes its journalism role all that seriously—and that is part of the problem—since fact-checking, journalistic ethics and balanced reporting seem to have been put out with the recycling bins. Just Bins has taken the old adage of “garbage in-garbage out” to new heights. This is yet another byproduct of the Facebook ban, a further kick in the shins for reputable journalism. If the River Valley Sun could just sell pizza on the side, maybe they could slip through the Facebook net and post online as Just Bins is doing.

Just Bins is not the only quasi-news source that has managed to squeeze through the Meta news blockage. This week Howard Law’s media blog MediaPolicy.ca reports on the Meta news ban (“The leaky Meta news ban is roiling Canadian journalism”) and highlights a study conducted by researchers at McGill University on the impact of the ban a year after it went into effect. The McGill study notes that many Canadians continue to use Meta as a source of “news” despite the ban. Three-quarters of the Canadian public is apparently unaware of the ban, yet Canadian news outlets have lost 85% of their engagement on Facebook and Instagram and almost one third of local news outlets are now inactive on social media. How this apparent contradiction is possible is explained in part by workarounds such as those referred to above, but also because Meta allows sites that declare themselves to be non-news outlets to continue to post content. Mediapolicy.ca discusses the case of Narcity.com, a “chain of local news and lifestyle websites” that has recently been reinstated on Meta. Narcity was denied government tax credits as a “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization” (QCJO) because of insufficient first-hand reporting. With this rejection in hand, it then applied to Meta to be reinstated on its platform on the basis that if it didn’t qualify for QCJO credits, it must not be a news provider under the Online News Act, C-18. It’s a clever argument, one that possibly the River Valley Sun could take advantage of.

One can argue that Canada’s attempt to require Google and Meta to enter into good faith negotiations with news providers to license content was either a valiant and imaginative attempt to come to grips with the painful decline of journalism, riding to some extent on what at the time appeared to be the successful coattails of Australia’s initiative, or a colossal miscalculation and poor timing as the platforms decided to draw a line in the sand in case media interests in the US decided to follow suit. Google and Meta will do everything possible to avoid going down that road. If sending a signal to US media interests requires them to call the bluff of the Canadian government, they will do so.

In the end, the results are mixed. Legitimate media in Canada, big and small, will get some help from Google’s contribution, although the amount Google is providing through the Canadian Journalism Collective has to be offset against pre-existing voluntary agreements that both Google and Meta had with some journalistic outlets. The Meta subsidies are now gone, and the previous Google contributions have been folded into the $100 million that Google has agreed to put on the table. Meanwhile, in Regina, Just Bins has found the garbage loophole, serving up its version of trashy journalism and news on Meta, going where bona fide journalists cannot. Sad.

© Hugh Stephens, 2024. All Rights Reserved.