'My door is always open': heritage minister insists feds working hard 'to bring Meta back to the table' on C-18

Canada's heritage minister insists the federal government is still working to get Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta back to the bargaining table to negotiate a deal to compensate Canadian news organizations as part of the regulatory process for the controversial Online News Act.

Canada’s heritage minister insists the federal government is still working to get Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta back to the bargaining table to negotiate a deal to compensate Canadian news organizations as part of the regulatory process for the controversial Online News Act.

Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, passed in June, and lays out a framework that would require digital giants such as Google and Meta to develop agreements with Canadian news sites to provide them with compensation for hosting their journalistic content on their platforms.

Pascale St-Onge — who was tasked with overseeing the negotiations over Bill C-18 with Google on behalf of the government — told CTV’s Question Period host Vassy Kapelos, in an interview airing Sunday, she’s still willing to bargain with Meta.

“We're still looking at everything that we can do to try to bring Meta back to the table,” St-Onge said. “And of course, my door is always open.”

In response to the legislation, Meta started blocking Canadian news from Facebook and Instagram this summer, while Google threatened to do the same and block certain news content from its search engine.

But the federal government announced this week it had reached a deal with Google, which will see the tech giant pay $100 million annually to publishers, indexed to inflation, and continue to allow access to Canadian news content on its platform.

“But what I can say is that Meta, yes, decided to ban news in Canada, but we're seeing that they're doing this across the world,” she also said, citing the examples of Meta’s different rules and agreements with Australia and some European countries, as examples. “So this looks also like a business decision from Mark Zuckerberg to leave their platform to disinformation and misinformation, and I think that the public should be very worried about that.”