Advertising double standards won’t save that newspaper.

The Liberal’s most recent political stunt won’t stop a news ban or save Canadian journalism. But they already know that.

Yesterday, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a pipe dream desperately conceived in the boardrooms of a few barely solvent Canadian print media companies, the Canadian federal Liberals trotted out a nervous-sounding Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez to announce that it would stop spending tax dollars on purchasing advertising on Google and Meta platforms.

Anyone watching Rodriguez flail around during this exercise was left wondering, what the heck was the government trying to accomplish by doing this?

By way of background, the pipe dream in question was the measures included in the federal Liberal's controversial Bill C-18. After its passage two weeks ago, the bill created a legal requirement for big digital platform companies like Google and Meta to pay what amounts to a link tax to Canadian media companies anytime they post content on their platform. 

And the salvage effort came weeks after Facebook and Google followed through with a course of action they had been promising for months. If the bill passed without significant amendments (which it did), then the platforms would block links to Canadian news media so that they wouldn't be required to pay the tax (which they are now going to do), effectively creating a ban on the distribution of Canadian news content.

But the Liberal announcement about pulling advertising was a political stunt. That's because the amount of money spent annually by the Canadian federal government isn't even a rounding error on Google and Meta's balance sheet – killing the government's relatively meagre ad spend would never make those companies beg for mercy. Worse, upon questioning, the Liberals admitted that while they would be pulling federal government ads on these platforms, they wouldn't pull their political party’s ads. The hypocrisy of that double standard was rightly panned in a scathing missive by the editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, Paul Samyn.

What the Liberals were banking on with yesterday's media blitz was that Canadians wouldn't scrutinize the situation closely enough to realize that the upcoming news bans are entirely the manufacture of extremely bad government legislation that was born from abysmal corporate governance. 

Said in a different way, yesterday’s announcement was purely designed by the Liberals to muddy who the bad guy in the situation is. But while companies like Google and Meta have work to do on things like privacy, data ownership, and algorithmic transparency, Bill C-18 addresses none of those issues. The Liberals are taking a big gamble that Canadians won't figure out that the emerging media killing, news banning clusterfudge was what their bill created instead.

If yesterday's stunt was all the best that the Liberals could muster, it should be clear to all involved now that any potential cash from this link tax is highly unlikely to materialize. (I wrote a piece earlier this week that outlines why this is the case). The problem is that several parties may have been banking on it and probably lack a backup plan. Case in point: in a Substack article on Saturday, journalists Matt Gurney and Jen Gerson single out Postmedia – the company that owns many Canadian newspapers – as now essentially being non-viable without direct government cash support.

On that front, what the hell were Postmedia board members thinking, exactly? 

How were those people allowed to direct operations such that, as the Gerson/Gurney piece suggested, they became dependent on unconfirmed direct subsidies and revenues from a new tax that might never materialize? And how did they think that corporate behemoths like Google and Facebook would ever agree to pay a tax that amounted to a massive, uncapped liability in a small market like Canada? And how did they thinking that Meta and Google would agree to all this while still providing what amounts to millions of dollars of free advertising to the same companies that they were going to have to pay this new tax to? 

Utter lunacy.

This commentary isn't meant to be a knock on the hard-working, underpaid, and now mainly laid-off corps of Canadian journalists who have been the real victims of the operational bungling of their c-suite overlords. There is a clear need for support for Canadian investigative journalism. But that's not what these executives are asking for help with – for example, most of Postmedia's content is opinion based, which anyone with a Substack app can see is a market that's becoming rapidly crowded. Any opinion writer with any talent and profile has already realized this, too. 

Supporting investigative journalism isn't what the federal Liberals are after here, either.

If that were the case, the federal Liberals would have spent the last week since Facebook and Google called their bluff regrouping and thinking about how to reset or repeal C-18. Instead, they pulled their "pull government ads but not Liberal political ads" stunt. 

The Liberals will inevitably accept that Google and Facebook will not back off their stance without changes to Bill C-18. What happens after that largely depends on how much political capital the Liberals are still willing to spend on companies like Postmedia. 

Altering bill C-18 in a way that allows platforms to cap their liability or financially contribute to journalism differently, as was done in Australia, would require an embarrassing political climbdown and likely result in a demotion for Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez. Trying to convince Canadians to cough up an untold amount of direct subsidy to prop up a business model that is light on real journalism and heavy on bad management seems equally as politically untenable. 

A better path involves admitting that C-18 was a mistake and returning to the drawing board entirely. This path could allow news content creators with profitable business models in today's milieu to thrive and for Canadians to have sustainable access to quality news coverage. 

Here's hoping the Liberals prioritize the best interest of Canadians instead of the failures of a few corporate buddies.