By Harinder Mahil

The Canadian government deserves our full support in its fight with Google and Meta. Over the last few years, these two giants have crippled media organizations in Canada.

Hundreds of newspapers have been shut down in Canada over the last two years and many others are on the brink of doing so. Two years ago, Postmedia left many communities across Canada without a source of local news, shutting down every community paper it owns in Manitoba and gutting the media landscape in Ontario as it closed newspapers and laid off workers.

The federal Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez announced this week that the Canadian government will stop buying ads on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram because of its dispute over the Online News Act.  This was in response to Meta and Alphabet’s announcement that they would end news access on their platforms in Canada.

Rodriguez made the announcement alongside NDP House leader Peter Julian and Bloc Quebecois heritage critic Martin Champoux.

“We’re standing here together, with my colleagues from all major parties, except one, representing two thirds of all the MPs in the House, to stand up for a free, independent, non-partisan, fact-based and thriving press,” Rodriguez said.

The Online News Act, passed into law in last month, would compel tech companies like Meta and Google to pay online news publishers.

In my opinion, Meta and Google are serial offenders. News organizations around the world are in crisis in the face of these greedy organizations.The difference is that other countries stood up to them a lot earlier. Australia and France took action to protect their media organizations more than two years ago.

These two tach giants use content that is created by news organizations, and they don’t pay a cent for it. Their actions have been one of the main causes of carnage in the Canadian media landscape.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made the dire situation even worse – forcing newspapers that were already struggling over the edge.

Canadians are starving for accurate, trustworthy information about their governments and their communities, and are consuming more local news than ever before.

Heritage minister Rodriguez said that the Canadian government wants the two platforms to contribute to domestic journalism.

I applaud the government of Canada for taking this decisive action as the two tech giants Meta and Google are largely to blame. They have pillaged the Canadian digital advertising market over the past decade. Between them, they have scooped up the vast majority of the revenue in Canada’s $10-billion-plus online advertising market — advertising that had been the chief source of revenue for Canadian media organizations. 

Canada should continue to stand firm and ensure that, if social media platforms want to use media, they should pay their fair share for it. 

Harinder Mahil is a human rights activist and is secretary of the Dr. Hari Sharma Foundation.