Party would cap wireless prices, too
By Christopher Guly
OTTAWA – Were she to become Canada’s next prime minister, Green Party leader Elizabeth May told Cartt.ca she would “take on Facebook and Google because they’re a threat to Canadian journalism and are sucking out revenues.”
“They’re calling themselves platforms and not wanting to be called publishers, but clearly they’re publishing,” she added.
As part of its 2019 election platform unveiled on Monday, the Greens would reform Canadian anti-trust laws “to enable the break-up of media conglomerates,” and “close the loophole that exempts social media platforms from collecting taxes on advertising and ensure all government advertising is placed in Canadian publications.”
“All we have in Canada are anti-competition laws, and that means if newspapers are colluding to set the sale price for the newspaper you can do something about it,” May told Cartt.ca. “But if your news media is being consolidated with only one owner for a whole province – as in the case of New Brunswick with the Irvings, except for the CBC – it is a real threat to being able to get a range of information, content and reporting. We want to be able to say, look, there’s an anti-trust issue here.”
A Green government – or more likely, as May acknowledges, a party that could hold the balance of power in a minority Parliament – would also “ensure that we pay attention to the financial challenges of Canadian journalism without the approach the Liberals took of setting up a panel to decide where to give that money,” she explained.
“We can create a much more level playing field by breaking up media conglomerates, by cutting the loopholes where social-media platforms don’t get taxed on advertising, and by ensuring that large aspects of public broadcasting are properly funded. The Canadian government should also only advertise in Canadian media and not on social-media platforms.”
The Green Party is calling for an end to the Canadian business deduction for the cost of advertising on foreign-owned sites, such as Google and Facebook, which the Greens say accounts for 80% of all digital ad-spending in Canada.
Friends of Canadian Broadcasting executive director Daniel Bernhard credited the Greens for “taking the threats to Canada’s media very seriously and recognizing the implications for our democracy.”
“Ensuring companies like Facebook and Google pay their fair share of taxes, that they’re subject to the same legal standard as Canadian publishers, and making sure that public broadcasting is strengthened are very, very important commitments,” he said in an interview. “I’m happy to see that Elizabeth May has put her party’s name behind them.”
The Green Party also wants a corporate tax applied on transnational e-commerce companies doing business in Canada by requiring these foreign vendors to register, collect and remit taxes where the product or service is consumed, and address the situation in which e-commerce giants Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Uber “command a significant share of the Canadian market but pay virtually no tax.”
On Canada’s public broadcaster, the Greens would like to see CBC and Radio Canada receive an increase of $315 million in annual funding until the per-capita level of funding is equal to that of the BBC.
The party platform also notes CBC/Radio Canada requested $400 million in additional funding in late 2016 to move to an ad-free model like the BBC, whose per-capita funding is “more than three times” the rate in Canada. Additional investments, the Greens say, would create thousands more new jobs and add hundreds of millions to the GDP.
“We also need to move forward and bring down cell and internet prices because it’s clear that we’re paying a lot more than people in other countries.” – Elizabeth May, Green Party
That approach is mirrored by one taken by Friends of Canadian Broadcasting’s We Choose Canada campaign which highlights that the BBC receives the equivalent of $100 per person per year and Norway’s public broadcaster gets $162 annually, yet the CBC “gets a measly $34.”
We Choose argues that Canada has little choice but to take bold action amid the threats from both Facebook, “which is besieging our democracy with misinformation and extreme content, at the very moment when Canadian journalism is facing extinction,” and from “unregulated broadcasters like Netflix [that] are Americanizing our screens, [yet] aren’t required to follow the same rules Canadian broadcasters must comply with.”
“We’re talking about tens of billions of dollars of economic activity in the media industry that are going untaxed while we have a huge federal deficit and you and I pay to pick up the slack,” Bernhard (right) told Cartt.ca – who added this should be a non-partisan issue even the Conservatives could promote.
“It’s about whether or not we’re going to allow these internet companies from Silicon Valley to tell us how we’re going to govern our country – who tells us whether sales tax is allowed, who tells us what they should be required to spend on Cancon? Right now, these companies are calling the shots,” he said.
“If we’re setting our cultural boundaries according to programs that come from a country where half the people think that it’s okay to take a gun to a daycare, we’re going to have problems.”
On telecom, the Greens are calling for an amendment to CRTC regulations to increase competition in wireless and internet services, and “decouple payments for cell phones from cell services.”
May told Cartt.ca that the party, like the NDP has, will provide a more fulsome plan to cap wireless and internet prices once the Green platform is fully costed by the parliamentary budget officer, which should come next week.
The Green platform also recognizes “the green economy is a digital economy,” in which “individuals and communities across the country need access to reliable, affordable, high-speed internet. Such infrastructure is as essential today as power and telephone lines were early last century.”
To help close the digital divide, the Green Party supports the Liberal government’s Connectivity Strategy, “but has concerns about the introduction of 5G technology and which companies should be involved in delivering this next generation of connectivity.”
The Greens would like to see a House of Commons committee struck to “examine the implications of introducing 5G technology, including security issues and impacts on weather forecasting, and make recommendations on how and if Canada should proceed.”
May explained that a review of 5G is necessary in light of concerns raised in a Scientific American article earlier this year that reported some frequencies in the next-generation communications network could interfere with nearby satellites that collect weather data.
“The Liberals did promise, and [ISED Minister] Navdeep Bains did deliver, on quite a lot of extensions for high-speed internet, but I’ve got parts of my riding that aren’t covered,” said May, the Member of Parliament for the British Columbia riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.
“We also need to move forward and bring down cell and internet prices because it’s clear that we’re paying a lot more than people in other countries.”
