They Broke the News Industry. Now They Want a ‘Serious Conversation.’

On March 17, Culture Minister Marc Miller stood at a national AI and culture summit in Banff and said the government must have a “serious conversation” about artificial intelligence companies using Canadian journalism without compensation or attribution. “Having the news cannibalized and regurgitated undermines the spirit of the use of that news,” Miller said. He called it a question of companies “paying their fair share.”¹

The words are reasonable. The record behind them is not. This is the same Liberal government that spent a decade intervening in the Canadian news industry — and at every turn made the problem worse.

Start with the Online News Act. Bill C-18, passed in June 2023 under then-Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez, was supposed to force Meta and Google to compensate news outlets for displaying their content. Rodriguez assured Canadians the tech companies were bluffing when they warned they would pull news off their platforms. They were not bluffing.²

Meta blocked all news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users in August 2023. It has not restored access. Two and a half years later, Canadians still cannot see, share, or access verified news from Canadian outlets on the country’s two most popular social media platforms. The ban applies to all news — Canadian and foreign, large and small, public broadcaster and independent startup alike.

Google negotiated a deal: $100 million per year to a collective fund managed by the media sector. But university of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, one of Canada’s leading digital policy experts, noted the government had to rewrite the regulations to make the deal work — essentially changing the law it had just passed. Geist called the outcome a “lose-lose-lose-lose” for publishers, platforms, Canadians, and the news industry.³

Reporters Without Borders listed the Online News Act and Meta’s response among the causes for dropping Canada seven spots on the World Press Freedom Index between 2024 and 2025.⁴

Before the Online News Act, there was the bailout. In 2019, the Trudeau government created a $595-million package of tax credits and subsidies for “qualifying” news outlets. An independent panel — staffed largely by the same legacy media organizations that had lobbied for the funding — decided which outlets qualified. Andrew Coyne, then a columnist at the National Post, wrote that taking money from the government would place journalists in “a permanent and inescapable conflict of interest.” Former Ottawa Citizen editor Andrew Potter called it “a toxic initiative” in which the government was creating a list of “State Approved Media Outlets For Purposes of Getting Public Money.”⁵

Gabriel Dalton / Unsplash — More than 470 Canadian media outlets have closed since 2008. The Liberal government’s interventions have not reversed the trend.

In 2023, the Liberal government topped up the program with another $129 million. The Canada Revenue Agency refused to disclose which outlets received how much, citing taxpayer confidentiality. The total public subsidy for Canadian media — including the CBC’s annual allocation, the journalism labour tax credit, the Local Journalism Initiative, and the periodical fund — now runs well into the billions.

Now the same government says AI is the new threat. The McGill University study Miller cited is real and the findings are damning. Researchers tested 2,267 Canadian news stories on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok. When asked about Canadian news events from their training data, the AI models failed to provide source attribution 82% of the time. When web search was enabled and specific articles were queried, the models provided enough of the original reporting that most users would not need to visit the source.⁶

The researchers’ conclusion is precise: AI companies are not just aggregating attention around news the way social media did. They are “absorbing the substance of journalism, and delivering it directly to consumers as their own product.” The consumer’s need to visit the source is “rendered unnecessary by the AI’s response itself.”

Miller’s response to this documented crisis was to call for conversation. Not legislation. Not regulation. Not an amendment to the Copyright Act. When asked directly whether the use of copyrighted material for AI training violates copyright law, Miller said he does not believe there is a need to open up the law. He called intellectual property reform “a complex issue” and “a multi-year process.”⁷

This is the contradiction. The government passed the Online News Act in months — a law so aggressive it drove news off the country’s largest social platform entirely. It created a $600-million bailout in a single budget cycle. But when confronted with evidence that AI companies are systematically extracting the substance of Canadian journalism without payment or attribution, the Culture Minister says the existing law “does and should protect” creators — while simultaneously refusing to update it.

Meanwhile, the industry is left to fight for itself. A coalition of major Canadian news outlets — including the Canadian Press, Torstar, the Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and CBC/Radio-Canada — filed a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI in late 2024. The case argues OpenAI used their content to train ChatGPT without permission or compensation. It remains before an Ontario court with no resolution in sight. AI companies maintain that using the material for training does not violate copyright.⁸

Miller says he wants companies to act “responsibly.” He says the “principle of proper compensation for use of proprietary material doesn’t change.” But the principle, without enforcement, is a press release.

The Liberal government told Canadians the Online News Act would protect journalism. It drove news off Facebook and Instagram instead. They told Canadians the $600-million bailout would save newsrooms. More than 470 outlets have closed since 2008. Now AI is systematically extracting Canadian journalism without paying for it, and the Culture Minister’s answer is that he wants a “serious conversation” — while refusing to update the copyright law, refusing to extend the Online News Act, and leaving the industry to sue its way to a remedy in court. The conversation has been happening for a decade. What Canadian journalism needs is not another conversation. It needs a government that stops making the problem worse.