(Quebec) The Legault government is asking Ottawa to exclude CBC – Radio-Canada from the royalties that Google will pay to Canadian media thanks to the agreement reached with the federal government under the Online News Act (C-18) .
The Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, said Thursday that this agreement between Ottawa and the American web giant is “good news” and “a step in the right direction to support our local media”.
However, the Quebec government believes that this new fund of 100 million per year, which must be indexed to inflation, must be aimed at “private media which are losing advertising revenue.”
“I think Radio-Canada should be excluded from this revenue sharing,” he said in the context where the public broadcaster already receives more than $1 billion in federal funding.
In addition, “Quebec must have a say in how revenues will be shared [because] for the moment, the federal government is going it alone as if culture and communications were its responsibility,” denounced Mr. Lacombe. THURSDAY.
“Whatever Ottawa thinks, Quebec culture and media must be governed in Quebec and, whatever initiatives are taken in Ottawa, they must be in consultation with Quebec,” said the minister in a written statement.
The agreement concluded between Ottawa and Google provides for a sum of 100 million per year, an amount well below the 172 million which had been estimated by the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Instead of negotiating individual agreements, Google will be able to pay this sum to a collective which will distribute it to eligible news media, “according to their number of full-time equivalents in journalism,” indicates the press release published by the Ministry of Heritage. canadian. The share that each media will receive remains to be determined.
Canada also reserves the right to reopen the agreement if there are better agreements concluded elsewhere in the world.
For the president of the Professional Federation of Journalists of Quebec (FPJQ), La Presse journalist Éric-Pierre Champagne, “the last thing journalists and the media need right now is a quarrel between Quebec and Ottawa on the back of the media crisis”.
“Media outlets close, journalists lose their jobs and it’s information that suffers. Certain regions in Quebec will soon become media deserts if we do nothing. This is the sad reality,” he wrote on the social network X on Thursday.
According to the FPJQ, “help must be available to everyone, including Radio-Canada and Quebecor,” even if the latter media group is not a member of the Quebec Press Council. On this subject, Mr. Champagne recalled in an interview on the program Tout un matin on Thursday that several Quebecor journalists are members of the FPJQ and that they respect its ethics guide.
“For the rest, we are waiting to see the draft regulation that will be submitted by Minister St-Onge before commenting in more detail,” said Mr. Champagne.