MONTREAL — Four years ago, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault put Big Tech on notice: the days of running roughshod over the country’s democracy were over. Under his leadership, the Facebooks, Googles and Twitters of the world would be compelled to shut off their respective spigots of misinformation, hate and exploitation under threat of “very, very important fines” dispensed by a government regulator. 

Big Tech, not one for legislative guardrails, conspicuously bridled, and deadlock ensued. Soon enough, Guilbeault was on to bigger things, visiting similar hell on the oil and gas industry when he became environment minister less than a year later.

Now, Guilbeault is back to lord over Big Tech once again. The 54-year-old Montrealer has returned to the heritage fold, albeit as Minister of Canadian Culture and Identity, Parks Canada and Quebec Lieutenant—a shoehorned title seemingly designed to project strength in the face of Trump’s “51st state” blather. 

As both keeper of Canadian identity and the Liberal Party’s fortunes in Quebec, Guilbeault is keenly aware of the country’s Big Tech malaise. Some say it has eroded cultural sovereignty, kneecapped journalism and rendered our children into TikTok-obsessed zombies. In fact, Guilbeault made these very arguments himself in book form. We can surely expect him to again direct his owlish indignation at the platforms during his second kick at the can. The question is whether it will have any measurable effect on how Big Tech behaves.

Much has changed since Guilbeault last manned the drab confines of the Canadian Heritage building in downtown Gatineau. Facebook, now Meta, is less a social media platform than a “social technology company.” Twitter, now Elon Musk-owned X, is an ever-expanding sewer. Both companies, along with Google, used to at least listen when the government upbraided them—if only to delay for time and massage legislation. 

Big Tech’s vibe has since shifted. Meta once professed its dedication to eradicating misinformation. It has since fired its fact-checkers and pledged to move its trust and safety teams to allegedly bias-free Texas. Kevin Chan, once Facebook’s head of public policy for Canada, was a self-professed news junkie who helped create journalism initiatives and signed content deals with several newspapers. The company has since yanked all Canadian news from its platforms rather than pay for the content, as a federal law compelled it to do. Google, on the other hand, has abided by the same law—but fought like hell to get out of it.

It was hard enough to design legislation when Big Tech was performatively woke-y and at least nominally concerned about the effect of its platforms on its users. Now that Big Tech practices Muay Thai and hangs out at Mar-a-Lago, Guilbeault may find himself screaming into the void. 

If he even screams at all, that is. Much like Big Tech, the Canadian government has also undergone a vibe shift. Under Justin Trudeau, the Liberals promised to hold “digital giants” accountable for online harms, otherwise known as the wretched parade of hate, sexual abuse material and violence appearing on their platforms. The Carney government is decidedly less aggressive. Big Tech is barely mentioned in his platform, and when it is invoked—on the issue of online harms, say—it’s to promise a law enforcement crackdown on the perpetrators, not the platforms. 

To be sure, the Carney government sees misinformation and foreign interference as uniquely distressing problems that the country needs to address, a source tells me. In 2021, Big Tech’s enabling of lies and foreign interference would have had Guilbeault’s name written all over it. Given Carney’s apparent law enforcement bent, misinformation and foreign interference could well be Public Safety’s purview, sidelining Guilbeault even more.

If so, I don’t suspect Guilbeault will complain much. For someone who once scaled the CN Tower to denounce climate change, Guilbeault is remarkably adept at nailing the mushy centrist zeitgeist. He’s a longtime consumer carbon proponent, who was among the first Liberal ministers to endorse Carney—even after the latter pledged to scrap the tax altogether. Guilbeault long-decried Big Tech’s perfidy when everyone was blaming Big Tech for everything. Why, then, should anyone be surprised if he’s quiet now that the world has seemingly moved on?

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panellist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”