Carney’s next surrender likely to deliver a return of news to Facebook

Plus! No coverage of largest media lawsuit ever, silence is no longer violence and journos continue to use words they don’t understand

August is typically a slow news month as Ottawa bureaucrats sidle off from their exhausting 35-hour work weeks to heal body and soul, tan and tend to their cottages and watercraft.

It’s part of the culture. Even Prime Minister Carney has slipped away - a story broken on X - to Italy for a week of fine wine and perhaps a Negroni or two despite a looming trade deadline. This August also marks three years since the Liberal government’s doomed Online News Act resulted in Meta banning links to news stories in Canada on Facebook and Instagram. The action was described at the time by the author of this catastrophe, Justin Trudeau, as “inconceivable” even though it was anything but.

Some of us had predicted it wasn’t just conceivable, it was likely given the obvious global consequences for Meta had it agreed to pay up - ka-ching - every time a publisher posted a news story - for free - on its platforms. Proponents of the bill, who had based their arguments on a fabrication - that Meta and Google were “stealing” their content - thought Meta was bluffing. It wasn’t. And instead of the windfall publishers - and, later, broadcast execs - were hoping for, Meta ended its financial supports for news media and blocked their unpaid content at a cost to the journalism industry well in excess of $200 million a year. Google coughed up a $100 million annual ransom to establish a fund split between more than 400 news organizations, but it also terminated an estimated $40 million in commercial contracts. The act was, to be blunt, a stunningly stupid idea. The good news for news consumers is that US President Donald Trump’s administration doesn’t like the Online News Act. Meta, coincidentally, is working with Carney’s minions on a proposal to provide supports (non-monetary) for the industry in exchange for, if not the nullification, the emasculation of the legislation. Where that could leave the Google fund is anyone’s guess.

Carney, who is acquiescing to American demands at speeds not seen in generations, will try to declare victory when this happens. That could be real soon given the August 19 deadline Trump has imposed for his latest array of mind-numbing tariffs. Carney portrayed himself as a defender of consumers when he recently confirmed the gutting of the Online Streaming Act’s core purpose, which was to get money from web giants. Despite the obvious Carney blarney - Team Trump really hates that act - only a couple of newsrooms raised eyebrows.

So everything points to the return of news to Facebook and Instagram before the end of the year, perhaps within weeks. It will be a Carney surrender that every sensible person in the Canadian news industry should welcome. And, here’s the rub: they might have Trump to thank for it. Ouch.

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Once closing arguments are made in October, the judge will begin pondering a verdict in Caylan Ford’s defamation case against Press Progress, CBC, the Toronto Star and others regarding the manner in which she was portrayed when she was forced to resign as a UPC candidate prior to the launch of Alberta’s 2019 provincial election.

I have been careful not to say too much as I wrote an expert opinion on good journalism practices and was scheduled to be a witness at the trial, which has exhausted the finances of many of those involved on both sides (Press Progress recently laid staff off and hired a new editor). As it turned out, the defendants successful petitioned the judge to disallow my submission as evidence.

That aside, what is striking about the case, which involves claims by Ford for almost $7.7 million and is the largest of its kind in Canadian history, is that, other than opening arguments, no media covered it - not even when Jason Kenney testified. That meant that Ford was still unable to have her side of the story publicized. So when Ford recently let it rip on Substack and X, many commentators were shocked. Harrison Lowman, Sabrina Maddeaux and yours truly had a pretty good chat about all this in The Full Press podcast and if you want to hear Ford’s version of the story, open the link here. Hopefully, some media will cover closing arguments - that is unless settlements are reached before then, as some already have been.

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Speaking of cancel culture, it was only a few years ago when Canadians were being purged for their refusal to agree with former prime minister Trudeau’s assertion that Canada is a systemically racist nation. “Silence is violence” was a commonly used phrase on social media to force influential people to comply with demands for ideological purity.

I note that there has been nothing of the kind since Carney went mute and failed to provide the usual bromides regarding being appalled and antisemitism having no place. None following the apparent arson at a kosher Montreal restaurant, abuse of an Israeli footballer at a CF Montreal game or the arrest of a knife-weilding man threatening the Israel tent at an Edmonton festival. It appears that Canada is now an unsafe (really unsafe) space for Jews and media and the PM, bored, have decided to accept the situation as a fact of modern life. The US, however, doesn’t find its neighbour’s reality at all comforting, as Canadian Press reported. Nor did Marty Gold in the Winnipeg Sun.

But, again, Carney got away with silence. So while the polity has stayed frightfully accepting of the fact antisemitism is rife in Canada, there is not - as there was when George Floyd was killed in the US - anything close to demands for declarations of moral and ideological shame. Perhaps as a memento of those days, the grovelling apology made by National Post for Rex Murphy’s insistence that we are not a racist nation remains online.

By the way, it took CBC more than 24 hours to report on the soccer crowd incident (Radio Canada was faster) and as of Saturday the only reports I could find on the Edmonton knife incident were in National Post and the Jerusalem Post.

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There was no better illustration of where the Canadian news industry is at these days than the fact that only one company sent a team to cover the incursion of tens of thousands of young men from Morocco into Ceuta, which is the small part of Spain located in North Africa. That was Rebel News.

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Speaking of the right, Agence France-Presse came up with a new term - hard right - to describe the UK’s Reform Party, which has grown rapidly in popularity for opposing illegal immigration, Sharia law and rape gangs. The BBC, meanwhile, referred to those in Ceuta protesting their homes and streets being overwhelmed as “far-right,” a term the Globe and Mail’s standards editor once inquired into only to find that many of those who use it have little or no idea what it means. Here’s a tip: if you don’t know what a pejorative term means, stop using it.

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It would be inappropriate not to mark the passing of legendary CTV News anchor Lloyd Robertson. I’ll leave it to Alan Fryer, who himself logged a pretty significant shift at CTV to close. As Fryer posted on X:

“Oh man, this one hurts. It was another era, granted, but trust and tradition wasn’t just a network slogan, it’s what he practiced, it’s what he breathed, every day — working tirelessly to earn the trust of Canadians by insisting on traditional journalistic standards of accuracy, balance, fairness and speed. That’s what Lloyd demanded and what he expected from each and every one of us in his orbit. His unmistakable voice was both authoritative and soothing and live broadcasts is where he truly excelled. I was - and still am - honoured and privileged to have worked alongside such a titan of journalism for a quarter century. It’s often a rough and tumble business and Lloyd was one of the last true gentleman to practice it with integrity and class. Goodnight, old friend, and rest easy.”

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(Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, a former vice chair of the CRTC and a National Newspaper Award winner.)