OTTAWA — Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez tabled legislation Tuesday designed to make digital platforms pay news publishers for links that they scrape onto their sites or that users post there.

“The news sector in Canada is in crisis,” Rodriguez said in a press conference about the new Bill C-18. “This contributes to the heightened public mistrust and the rise of harmful disinformation in our society.”

The government hopes to remedy that by making platforms such as Facebook and Google send some of the advertising money they’ve vacuumed up to the news outlets that used to depend on ads, he said.

Here’s what you need to know:

Who pays: The rules will apply to digital platforms that meet the thresholds for global revenue and Canadian market share that the department will set via an order within six months of Parliament passing Bill C-18.

The system is based on the one in Australia, but Rodriguez said a key difference is that here, measurable criteria will determine which platforms have to pay, not a minister’s decree.

The rules target platforms “facilitating access to content for free to Canadians, so things like Google search or Facebook,” a senior government official told reporters Tuesday before Rodriguez spoke. (The government routinely conducts such technical briefings on the condition that officials not be publicly identified.) The system won’t apply to paid services that already license content, like Apple News, or on which content is primarily user-uploaded, like YouTube, or to private-messaging services like WhatsApp.

Who gets paid: The bill allows publishers to band together to collectively bargain licensing agreements with the digital platforms. If the two sides can’t reach a deal on their own, a three-member arbitration panel will set the terms of a binding contract. As The Logic reported last week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will oversee and enforce the rules. It will be able to fine non-compliant platforms up to $15 million a day.

The CRTC has experience with arbitrations in broadcasting, Rodriguez said, though he emphasized the commission itself won’t conduct them—only supervise the process. 

Ottawa has a system for identifying qualified Canadian journalism organizations (QCJOs); such outlets can currently apply for wage subsidies and offer subscribers tax credits under an existing Canadian Heritage program. (The Logic has QCJO status.) Those firms will be able to participate in the mandatory bargaining, but so will broadcasters and foreign media outlets that meet similar criteria.

The carve-out: Platforms that make their own deals with publishers can ask the CRTC for exemptions to the forced-negotiation process. The regulator will assess whether those agreements provide “fair compensation.”

Rodriguez said platforms will have six months to a year to make qualifying deals under these provisions. Agreements with big outlets won’t be enough, he said; they’ll have to include breadth of geography and audience, and outlets of different sizes and types.

Australia has yet to subject any digital platforms to its own bargaining system because Facebook and Google came to terms with media firms there. But smaller publishers argued they were left behind as the platforms first did deals with conglomerates like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

The reaction: Earlier consultations told the government that Canadian news organizations generally favoured the Australian model.

Kevin Desjardins of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters told The Logic his organization hadn’t yet been briefed on the bill, but in principle, is pleased to see it. News Media Canada, a newspaper lobby group, called for Parliament to pass the legislation before the summer recess in June.

The platforms primarily targeted by the bill were non-committal.

“We are carefully reviewing the legislation to understand its implications. We fully support ensuring Canadians have access to authoritative news and we look forward to working with the government to strengthen the news industry in Canada,” Google Canada spokesperson Lauren Skelly said by email.

Meta Canada’s public-policy manager Rachel Curran said, also by email, the company is reviewing the legislation and will be “engaging with stakeholders once we more fully understand what the bill entails.”