By Denis Carmel
OTTAWA – “There’s a desire to have Facebook reappear in front of the committee, for a number of reasons. One was the recent news that we had out of Australia and, of course, the important implications that has for Canada and for the work of this committee. Also, there is some reason to believe that, intentionally or not, Mr. Chan may have misled the committee in some of the testimony he provided in his first visit to us this sitting” in January said Heather McPherson, the NDP critic.
In Australia, Facebook and Google agreed in February to pay news publishers for linking their news on their respective platforms – and this is one of the issues the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage is looking into.
McPherson made that statement during the February 26th meeting of the committee, which then decided it would then call Facebook back for another visit today – during a “break week”. Meeting during break week is unusual, since it is normally earmarked for constituency work by members of Parliament (However, many of them have been there for a while anyway, thanks to the pandemic).
Later, an invitation was extended to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who declined, and so the committee summoned Chan, Facebook’s Canadian counsel. He told the Committee’s clerk he was not authorized to accept the summons on behalf of Zuckerberg.
This seemed to irritate Liberal member, Anthony Housefather who grilled Chan, arguing that since he was not on the board of directors of Facebook, had no access to unredacted minutes of board meetings and was not on the calls between Zuckerberg and Australian authorities, “having established that a lot of questions the committee members have would be ones that Mr. Zuckerberg can answer,” he stated.
Adding, “it seems the questions I wanted to ask, you are not able to answer, because they were individual issues that Mr. Zuckerberg could have asked. I would like to ask you on behalf of this committee to please convey to Mr. Zuckerberg that we would like to hear from him,” he concluded.
Mr. Chan smiled and said he would.
The issue which dominated Monday’s meeting was Chan did not have access to the ad revenues Facebook earns in Canada, which left many members astounded and dubious.
Then Chan added: “If the Canada Revenue Agency wishes to make it the case that all these companies report its local revenue, we will be happy to comply.”
Housefather then asked: “Are you telling me that you don’t know or that you cannot tell me because they are confidential?” Both, said Chan.
But he added:” If the Government of Canada, and the Parliament of Canada in its wisdom wishes to take more revenue from a U.S.-based company, and give it to some other purpose, the simplest and the most effective way to do that is to tax these companies, have it going in the consolidated revenue fund and make a separate funding decision about what the Government and the Parliament would like to fund.”
A message about C-10, perhaps?
NDP critic Heather McPherson then asked if he could get the numbers and share them with the Committee.
“We can do one better than that, I am pleased to share with the Committee that we are working hard to change our structure at Facebook, in Canada… we are doing this unilaterally, on our own, no other company to my knowledge on the Internet space is doing that,” Chan explained.
“What that will mean is that we will register with the CRA and when we do that, not just for 2020, we will on a full forward basis report our revenue to the CRA, in perpetuity. We will be doing that in the coming months… People want transparency. Regardless of what the rules are in Canada, we will unilaterally make this available.”
But he did not share the numbers. However, since the federal budget, which will be announced April 19th is expected to require foreign companies who sell digital products and services, as well as on-line merchants in Canada to register to collect HST/GST, this announcement is a bit moot, we would think.
