If diversity is our strength, then why are diaspora news outlets being silenced?

Liberal Bill C-18 will negatively impact Canadian pluralism. And given the state of global affairs, this is bad news.

There's a dangerously naïve sentiment among some that Canada’s pluralism is immune from erosion.

But in reality, Canadians from virtually every nation on the earth, of every political persuasion and religion, living side by side in peace is not something that magically happens. It takes constant work, strong leadership and information to understand the context of plural (e.g. cultural, regional, etc) goals and grievances and to resolve tensions peaceably.

Non-biased, smart journalism has a big role to play in this regard. But with Canadian mainstream media outlets closing regional offices and firing international bureaus en masse, there's virtually no consistent mainstream coverage of how Canadian policies or politics are being felt by Canadian diaspora groups. Instead, the primary source of coverage many rely upon to understand factors that might impact different groups are stories found by using Google to search for minority community media outlets, often called Canadian "ethnic media" or "diaspora media."

However, after December 19, 2023, thanks to the Canadian federal governing Liberal's bill C-18, that capacity will be eliminated. December 19 is the day the bill comes into force, and the megalithic search engine Google said they would begin blocking search results for all Canadian news sources, including ethnic media. Google's move will come months after Facebook's parent company, Meta, blocked access to Canadian news sites across its platforms.

Google and Meta's moves come in response to the federal Liberals’ unyielding approach to addressing the tech giant's concerns about the international precedent setting uncapped liability the bill presents, instead choosing to favour the kill-the-goose-that-lays-the-golden-egg arguments of executives from failing mainstream press outlets like Postmedia and Nordstar. As the reality of losing massive amounts of revenue and traffic from a potential Google link ban sets in, the Liberals’ nonsensical, highly-panned recalcitrance to making changes to the bill is causing panic among startup media companies and mainstream outlets alike.

Much of the negative impact of the link bans has been focused on more traditional startup media outlets and the broader negative impact on the Canadian economy. But largely absent from coverage of the situation is the potentially massive impact of the loss of access to ethnic media sources on Canada's pluralism and the ability of Canadian diaspora groups to influence global news.

Canada's diaspora media has played a critical role in maintaining Canada's pluralism over the last two decades - providing coverage and a voice for people whose issues might have traditionally been marginalized or reported from a lens outside of their cultural context. 2023 research by the Media Technology Monitor found that newcomers are more likely than any other Canadians to access news through ethnic media stories distributed via social media. 

But that hasn't stopped the federal Liberal government from leaning into C-18, largely without substantive input from the diaspora news community and with full knowledge that Google and Meta would likely pull out of the Canadian news link arena. Rajinder Saini, President and CEO of Parvasi Media Group, summed up the gap between the Liberals and multiple ethnic media outlets on the bill when he was reported to have said, "Nobody has approached us so far, and we don't know how to participate in this debate."  

The Liberal government's argument that C-18 would be an opportunity for minority community media publications to have a more substantial hand in negotiating with online platforms like Google to attract advertising funding has been proven to be bullshit, as C-18 has led Meta, and soon Google, to cut off critical sources of traffic to their sites. 

In that, the impact of C-18 will likely be another example of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's tokenization of Canadian minority communities - using an argument that a bill designed to prop up establishment cronies of failing central-Canadian mainstream outlets would help minority voices when, in fact, it is serving to silence them. That diaspora media are likely to be among the hardest hit by the impact of C18 link bans on a bill the Liberals have promoted to protect "Canadian journalism" also sends a terrible message if one peers too closely at what the government might mean by that term. 

Invariably, the Liberals will try to blame any decline of diaspora media on Google or Meta for imposing the link bans. They will try to sweep under the rug that those bans were precipitated by C-18 - a badly designed and poorly implemented mess of a bill imposed on Canadian media by their government at the behest of media voices that have become less relevant and more myopic in a rapidly changing Canadian demographic landscape. They will also continue to ignore the reality that these tech giants would never accept the present terms of C-18 in the small but internationally precedent-setting Canadian marketplace and likely never will. 

If the Google news ban takes hold on December 19, the impact on the ability of Canadians to easily find news from any source will be dramatically changed for the worse. Alternative viewpoints will be harder to find, and beliefs will be calcified as Canadians' main way of becoming informed about issues will be through social media apps that use algorithms set by state-affiliated companies that may not have Canada's best interests at heart.

At a time when the federal Liberals need to show Canadians that they can unite the country, enforcing a bill that effectively makes it much harder for Canadians to understand their neighbours is un-Canadian at best and dangerous at worst.