(Toronto) Canada assured Friday that it was “not going to back down” on its new law forcing digital giants to pay the media for sharing their content and is confident of being able to convince Google to comply.

“I am optimistic because [Google] participated in the legislative process from the start,” Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge declared Friday in front of news agency bosses gathered in Toronto as part of a large media conference.

The Online News Act will force digital giants to enter into fair commercial agreements with media outlets on content broadcast on their platforms, or risk having to resort to federal arbitration.

Stating that Canada would stand firm in the face of “great resistance” from the Californian giants, Ms. St-Onge noted that Google’s reaction to the legislation, adopted in June and which will come into force in December, differs from that of Meta.

“Google participated and collaborated throughout the process while Facebook blocks news in Canada even though the law is not yet in force,” she regretted.

Google, however, had a slightly different reading of the situation.

Contacted by AFP, Google Canada mentioned on Friday the “critical structural problems” of the text “which, regrettably, were not resolved during the legislative process”.

The new Canadian law, inspired by what Australia did in 2021, only targets Google and Meta for the moment and should allow press companies to receive up to 230 million Canadian dollars, according to Ottawa.

The federal government thus wishes to slow the erosion of the press in Canada for the benefit of digital giants, to which advertising revenues have migrated in recent years.