Nothing, not even the mass evacuation of tens of thousands of people threatened by wildfires, gets in the way of advancing the interests of politics.
Policy and even public safety are too often little more than opportunities to be exploited to advance the electoral prospects of those who hold or seek to hold power.
So it comes as no surprise that while cars, trucks, and buses were streaming out of Yellowknife towards safety and scores of flights were ferrying evacuees into Edmonton and Calgary, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge used the occasion to try to wriggle her party off the hook it impaled itself on through its unctuous Online News Act.
For those just catching up, that act, a.k.a. Bill C-18, was passed in June. It is the outcome of the combined genius of St. Onge’s predecessors Steven Guilbeault and Pablo Rodriguez and is intended to force Google and Meta to share revenue with news organizations—primarily the CBC, Bell Media, Rogers, Postmedia, and the Toronto Star.
Despite warnings that the legislation’s assumptions, structure, and expectations were, respectively, false, flawed, and wildly optimistic, the act left Meta to conclude it had no choice but to block posts carrying news links on Facebook and Instagram. Google has threatened similar action. The government, which assumed both web giants would bow to its foolish demands, has been left embarrassed and bereft of ideas beyond name-calling.
Evacuation orders such as those issued recently in the Northwest Territories and British Columbia are, truth be told, the first test to determine if, despite Meta’s blocking of news links, citizens can continue to access vital information via its platforms. So far, there have been no reports of failure by anyone to access the pages of emergency agencies, but St-Onge insists citizens are endangered because they can’t link to news stories via Facebook.
The minister posted on social media that Meta’s decision to drop news links is “reckless,” and noted without evidence that the blockade is “hurting access to vital information on Facebook and Instagram.”
“We are calling on them to reinstate news sharing today for the safety of Canadians facing this emergency,” she wrote. “We need more news right now, not less.”
I expect few would disagree that at times of emergency, good information is gold. That’s why police and other emergency officials always encourage citizens to go directly to their websites or social media pages for the straight goods unfiltered by media. On the internet, you see, it is no longer necessary to communicate through journalists. Indeed, when matters are urgent, public safety officials are known to ask journalists not to relay any information on social media other than to direct people to their official pages.
Meta’s reported response to all this—something about permitting people to mark themselves “safe” from the fires—appeared weak. Yet more than 300,000 people had, a company official confirmed Aug. 19, visited its Yellowknife and Kelowna crises pages. As it turns out, it takes about 10 seconds to find a public group page entitled “Yellowknife and area evacuation information and check in” where people engage in a manner that illustrates the best of social media.
One woman, for instance, posted that “one of our elderly people accidentally got into Whitehorse and he knows no one and doesn’t speak English well!” She got immediate responses such as “I can help! I’m in Whitehorse … I am evacuee from Fort Smith.”
It would certainly be better if the bumbling bureaucrats behind the Online News Act hadn’t created a situation which denies the posting of news links. But so far it’s apparent that despite the absence of journalism organizations on Facebook, people in desperate circumstances are unimpaired in their ability to access vital information there.
If they can find a connection, that is.
Because if St-Onge and her colleagues really cared about emergency communications in the North, evacuees heading out on the highway from Yellowknife would have access to cellular service along the highway. Why does it matter what you can and cannot read on Facebook, after all, if you don’t even have access to a network?
It’s been seven years since the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission determined in its Basic Service Objective decision that “the latest generally deployed mobile wireless technology should be available not only in Canadian homes and businesses, but on as many major transportation roads as possible in Canada.” This was defined as “key interprovincial and international corridor roads ... that provide the primary means of access to northern and remote areas.”
All political parties are prone to put their own interests ahead of the public’s. In that tradition, St-Onge took the opportunity presented by the wildfire crises to whip up flagging support for failed legislation.
In doing so she may have served her party’s best interests, but the very real needs of the nation’s northern citizens remain unaddressed.
