The Law of Unintended Consequences: How Bill C-18 Misfired
An analysis of CRTC testimony reveals a critical gap between legislative intent and real-world impact for local news in Canada.
When Parliament passed the Online News Act, known as Bill C-18, the stated goal was straightforward. It was designed to create a framework that would require large digital platforms to negotiate fair compensation with Canadian news outlets for the use of their content. The intent was to support a struggling industry, particularly local journalism. Yet, as testimony from a September 24, 2025, meeting of the Standing Committee on Industry and Technology reveals, the intricate machine built to solve one problem has created significant collateral damage, leaving the most vulnerable players in a worse position. The story of what happened to small, independent publishers is not just about one piece of legislation. It is a case study in the critical difference between a policy’s goals and its results.
A Lifeline Severed Overnight
Before Bill C-18 became law, many small, independent news outlets relied heavily on social media to reach their communities. Consider the case of the River Valley Sun, a publication that distributes 6,000 free newspapers monthly. Its situation was presented to the committee by Member of Parliament Michael Guglielmin.
Before Bill C-18, the River Valley Sun... relied heavily on Facebook to share its content. It saw around half a million engagements in a typical month before the news ban saw the audience abruptly cut off... The ban is also causing financial pain. The River Valley Sun... “used to go live on Facebook at some local events, with the businesses paying for that coverage.”... losing that ability has cost them “the equivalent of two months of printing newspapers, or the cost of hiring a summer student.”
This is not an isolated incident. Professor Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia School of Journalism estimated that local news start-ups lost about 30% of their audience overnight when Meta blocked news content in Canada in response to the legislation. For a new venture without a large marketing budget, social media was the primary tool for audience development. When that tool was removed, their connection to the community was severed. The legislation, intended as a lifeline, functioned as an anchor for these small publishers. It raises a fundamental question: how could a law designed to help journalism end up causing so much harm to its most fragile participants? The answer lies in the mechanics of its implementation.
A Regulator’s Constrained Mandate
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was tasked with administering the new law. When pressed on whether independent publishers were benefiting or being marginalized, the CRTC’s Vice-President for Broadcasting, Scott Shortliffe, provided a revealing answer. He carefully explained the CRTC’s position.
As the tribunal, we were not responsible for the legislation. We were asked to administer it, so I have to be very careful, because it’s not our role either to criticize or to applaud legislation. It’s our role to administer it... Our part of it, which is to ensure that the money flows to both print outlets and broadcasting outlets, is happening.
Here is the detail I find most revealing. The CRTC sees its role as ensuring the machine functions as designed, not questioning the design itself. The legislation created a kind of Regulatory Rube Goldberg Machine. The goal was simple: move money from online giants to news outlets. But the mechanism was incredibly complex. It gave platforms like Meta the option to simply withdraw from the system, which it did. It allowed Google to make a deal with a single entity, the Canadian Journalism Collective, which then decides who is eligible for funds.
The CRTC’s job is simply to certify that the parts of this machine are in place. It is not mandated to measure the collateral damage. It can confirm that $100 million is flowing into the system, but it cannot formally address the fact that outlets like the River Valley Sun lost their entire digital distribution channel. The CRTC is a process administrator, not an impact auditor. This structural limitation is the root cause of the disconnect. The system was built to perform a task, but it lacks the feedback mechanisms to notice, let alone correct, its own destructive side effects.
The Gulf Between Intent and Impact
This situation points to a foundational principle of effective governance. The success of any law cannot be measured by its intentions, only by its outcomes. Bill C-18 was built on the admirable intention of supporting Canadian journalism. Its outcome, however, has been to redirect funds to some outlets while inadvertently crippling others.
The testimony from the industry committee meeting shows a critical flaw in our governance structure. When you create a quasi-judicial tribunal and give it the narrow mandate to administer a law, you sever the connection between implementation and evaluation. The people on the ground experiencing the negative consequences, like publisher Theresa Blackburn, have no formal channel to the regulator that can lead to a course correction. The CRTC, for its part, must operate within the strict confines of the law as written. Its officials can only point to the parts of the system that are working as planned, even as other parts are actively causing harm. This creates a system that is brittle and unresponsive, incapable of adapting when its real-world impact diverges disastrously from its theoretical intent.
The Real Accountability Gap
The failure here is not one of bad faith, but of flawed design. A system of governance that cannot measure and adapt to its own unintended consequences is a system destined to fail. The experience of Canada’s small news publishers with the Online News Act is a clear warning. We must judge our laws not by the problems they hope to solve, but by the new ones they create.
Sources:
Standing Committee on Industry and Technology. (2025, September 24). Evidence, Number 004 (45th Parliament, 1st Session). House of Commons Canada.