The Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, asks that CBC / Radio-Canada not touch media royalties resulting from the agreement between Ottawa and Google.
“This is aimed at private media which are losing advertising revenue. So I think that CBC / Radio Canada should be excluded from this revenue sharing,” he declared Thursday in the corridors of the National Assembly.
Under an agreement announced by Ottawa on Wednesday, Google will pay $100 million per year in royalties to Canadian media. The funds will pass through a collective which will represent all media eligible for financial assistance.
The Canadian Minister of Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, did not want to say whether CBC / Radio-Canada will be able to touch its share of the envelope. The public broadcaster already receives around a billion dollars per year in government funding.
Details about media eligibility for Google royalties will be known on December 19, when the Online News Act, also known as C-18, comes into force. This legislation aims to force digital giants like Google and Meta to enter into compensation agreements with media outlets for sharing their content.
In the press scrum, Minister Lacombe said he considered it essential that the Quebec government have “a say in the way revenues are going to be shared.” He later added that “for now,” Ottawa is “going it alone, as if culture and communications were its responsibility.”
“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,” he insisted.
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