Google Dictum: No Canadian News For You.
An early Canada Day Weekend Special: News about The News While Covering the News out of Russia, Stuff you won't find in The News & Yet Another Threat to News Reporting. Not in that order.
Seek and you shall not find.
That’s what the search-engine giant Google is saying to anyone looking for anything that appears in print or broadcast news media in Canada. Meta says it will be adopting the same measures on Facebook and Instagram.
The Online News Act is now law, but the regulations aren’t yet in force, and Google concedes that it will take time to reconfigure its algorithmic alchemy in such a way as to ensure that Canadian news media content doesn’t turn up in its searches.
How much time we have left isn’t certain, but jeepers, you really have to wonder what the hell Ottawa is doing here.
Google executive Kent Walker blames a tangle of unmanageable encumbrances contained in Bill C-18, which became the Online News Act last week. The tech giants’ decisions came just as the House of Commons was adjourning for the summer for a break that will last until September 18.
Brilliant.
Today’s Real Story was supposed to be mostly about the latest developments out of Russia and Ukraine, and only partly about the latest developments in the immolation of journalism in Canada. So much for that plan.
I’ll be leaving today’s newsletter mostly above the paywall, but some will have to stay on the far side of it. The latest convulsions also include astonishing developments at Postmedia and the Toronto Star, which I’ll get into.
The Postmedia part in this drama may or may not be good news and may or may not impinge upon my own meagre livelihood, so here’s an inducement to take up a paying subscription to the Real Story: Three little prizes for the first three lucky paying customers to claim them in the comments!
Well. That was tawdry.
Sorry.
I’m also sorry that it must seem like I’m always beating up on Justin Trudeau. I really do have other things I’d rather be writing about and other things I’d rather be doing (like riding motorcycles and catching trout) but somebody’s got to do it.
It’s more or less my job. It’s not my fault that the Trudeau Liberals offer such a target-rich environment, but they’re the government, and in the beats I cover Trudeau keeps showing up in my crosshairs. He just does.
Dear Ottawa: If you’re not going to help, at least just leave us alone
I have no hard and firm opinion on the purported objective of the Online News Act, which was to hoover back some of the advertising revenue that has migrated over the years from the news media to the tech giants.
I’m disinclined to sympathy for Silicon Valley oligarchs, I confess, but it’s the Liberals’ incompetence and dishonesty attending to this whole thing that gets under my skin. Yesterday Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez claimed to be “surprised” by Google's announcement, which followed on Meta Platforms’ declaration of its similar intentions some weeks ago.
I mean, really. Heritage Canada, for the God’s sake. Pablo Rodriguez. The CRTC. These are the people who showered hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years on the drooling racist and antisemite Laith Marouf, a talking head on Khomeinst propaganda platforms run out of Tehran and on Kremlin-controlled television stations.
And that scandal only came to light after the mainstream news media was forced to notice that Diversity and Inclusion czar Ahmed Hussen had gone out of his way to praise a CRTC contract allowing Marouf to convene a national series of struggle sessions to hector Canada’s federally-regulated broadcasters on the measures they needed to adopt in order to demonstrate their anti-racist bona fides.
We were expected to believe that Marouf’s lifelong out-in-the open “anti-Zionist” and neofascist vulgarities had somehow simply escaped the notice of senior Heritage Canada and CRTC officials. And now we’re expected to believe Rodriguez when he says he’s surprised that Google and Meta Platforms say they intend to do exactly what they were warning they would do.
It’s also what everyone who pays attention to these things has been warning they would do, perhaps especially and most persuasively Michael Geist.
And now they’ve done it.
If one was conspiracy-minded or the least bit paranoid or even just cynical, it would be easy to surmise that the Trudeau government has done this deliberately, that all along, the real objective was to ensure the primacy of the CBC and to have every other media organization either dead and gone or permanently at death’s door, bowing and scraping and pleading for the mercy of more media subsidies.
A simpler explanation in this particular case is that the Liberal government is just precipitously stupid, dangerously incompetent and brazenly dishonest, as per usual.
Spain took on Google this way nine years ago and it was only two years ago that Google News returned to allow Spanish media to appear again in its searches. But the Australian government adopted the Make the Tech Giants Pay strategy, prompting Google and Facebook to mumble the same kind of threats, and yet the Australians managed to pull it off without putting anyone’s eyes out. We were supposed to be following Australia’s lead, not Spain’s.
There’s still time but it’s coming down to the wire, and for all the complaints that the legacy media is in the tank for Trudeau, his government hasn’t exactly gone out of its way conduct its affairs to accomodate a diligent press, the way a proper liberal democracy is supposed to.
The Globe and Mail has just begun a series on Canada’s utterly broken freedom-of-information system that’s worth following. And just you try to get a straight answer out of the Prime Minister’s Office on what those Peoples’ Liberation Army scientists were doing at the national microbiology laboratory in Winnipeg, or what Trudeau knew and when he knew it and what he did about the surfeit of intelligence-agency reports about Beijing’s backstairs work on his party’s behalf during the 2019 and 2021 federal elections.
A subtle pattern begins to emerge. Actually it’s not subtle at all.
My last newsletter was about the extraordinary lengths the federal cabinet is prepared to go to muzzle journalists about what really happened during the months-long “Rodney King moment” Trudeau incited two years ago. Long story short: they’re thinking about criminalizing any unflattering expositions of what led to the orgy of church burnings Trudeau’s histrionics put into motion.
This officially-endorsed extremism percolated into the outer circles of the news racket last week and I did my best to shine a spotlight on it in The National Post: Concept of 'residential school denialism' is the true fringe movement: Its purpose is to end questioning and to patrol what knowledge we're entitled to possess.
Well, guess what. Another crowd of journalist-muzzling enthusiasts led by two of Beijing’s leading point men in the Red Chamber (Victor Oh and Yuen Pau Woo) is relying on the Residential Schools Denialism template to fashion from it a similarly fatuous taboo-enforcing abstraction.
It’s a perfect fit with the Trudeau government’s persistently manic obstruction of any and all attempts by the Opposition to scrutinize anything that could be placed in the category of “Canada-China relations.” More on that below the paywall.
If it’s not obvious already, this is not the easiest time to be a journalist in Canada, especially on these beats.
At least there was no banghra dancing this time
Since I’m officially sanctioned by the Kremlin, and having been permanently barred from Russia as of April last year, I reckon I should disclose that chip on my shoulder before getting into the autopsy of Russia that was supposed to be the main attraction in today’s Real Story newsletter. And I guess I should further disclose another chip more recently acquired.
Earlier this month the imprisoned Russian patriot and democracy campaigner Vladimir Kara-Murza was granted honorary Canadian citizenship. We’re both senior fellows with the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. So that’s two chips, but now that we’re both Canadians too maybe a totally full disclosure brings it to three chips.
My working life this week wasn’t quite like toiling in the gulags of Kolyma, but here’s how it played out.
On Sunday my editor at the National Post, Carson Jerema, called me away from what I’d hoped would be a pleasant evening after churning out that in-depth Residential Schools Denialism Throughtcrime Law newsletter. Carson wanted me to dig deep and file overnight about what the heck those inscrutible Russian warmongers were up to. It’s been all Russia all the time ever since.
Monday morning, straight out the blocks when nobody knew what the hell was going on, the unequivocal headline The beginning of Vladimir Putin's inevitable end notwithstanding, the conclusion I’d reached after working through the night to assemble a backgrounder was what follows, in summation:
The Russian state has been hollowed out, carved up and looted, and no amount of pro-Putin propaganda — hadn’t he brought this crisis to a conclusion with only the tiniest bit of bloodshed and gunplay? — can change that. Nobody can say whether the weekend’s drama will be the end of Putin, the most savage war criminal of the 21st century. But it’s a good guess that it’s the beginning of the end, and that will have to do.
It still holds as the consensus of informed opinion, seven days after Yevgeny Prigozhin’s massively mechanized long march to Moscow took a surprise detour into Belarus.
On Monday I watched the wires and checked in with what the smartest people on the subject were saying and consulted various samizdat sources and references. To make my usual weekly deadline I was up all night again (time zones and all that).
In the end I couldn’t resist the temptation to focus very closely on what the hell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was saying about it at that Arctic Council huddle up in Iceland. He had just one job. . .
Filing shortly after dawn Wednesday to the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen, the result: All Trudeau had to do was stay on script on Russia. Guess what happened.
If you listened closely you could hear Trudeau inadvertently giving away everything he has done and failed to do that has so radically diminished Canada’s international relevance. You can also hear an articulation of the key stupidity the London School of Economics professor Brian Klaas identfies in his book, The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy.
“First, do nothing. Don’t worry about democracy elsewhere,” is the way Klaas characterizes that catastrophic policy, which was adopted to varying degrees by several leading NATO states at various junctures in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse and the Tiananmen Massacre in China.
“Treat a country the same, regardless of its political system” is how Klaas describes it. Klaas notes that this is precisely the approach China’s Xi Jinping’s China tells the world’s democracies to take if they want to fit in with the new world order he and his fellow tyrants are carving out of the old one. “Security” and “stability” must come before all else! So what does Trudeau say for himself in Iceland? You guessed it.
It’s all there in my column. Trudeau’s Jinpingist utterance was also a reminder of Stéphane Dion’s disastrous Kremlin-friendly days as Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister. It lingers, like a bad smell.
Still, we should count our blessings I guess: At least the things he said could not be twisted into “evidence” of a NATO puppet master in the shadows who turned a greasy warlord’s unrequited affections against his genocidal sugar daddy in Moscow. Given Trudeau’s innumerable wince-inducing “world stage” pratfalls, gaffes, celebrity-circuit spectacles and wardrobe malfunctions, this is a small mercy.
We can be thankful for it, and relieved.
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