MONTREAL — The apartment is located in a triplex in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood, complete with the residential streetscape’s signature steep staircase and vine-strewn railings. Over the years, it has served as the Canadian head offices for a social and environmental justice group and an advocacy organization for small-scale farmers, as well as the mailing address for an outfit called Funderground Sound and Vision.

No one answered the door on a recent Tuesday afternoon, roughly a month after the apartment took on arguably its most important role yet: headquarters of the group that one of the world’s biggest tech companies has chosen to throw a $100-million lifeline to Canada’s struggling media publishers.

Last month, Jaffer Zaidi, Google’s vice-president of global news partnerships, announced the company had selected the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC) to dole out its yearly contribution of $100 million, indexed to inflation, to the country’s news outlets. Google was doing so to avoid paying what Zaidi called a “link tax” imposed by the Online News Act, the federal government’s attempt to get Big Tech companies to pay for news posted to their platforms. 

The act, which came into effect in June 2023, lets digital platforms reach compensation agreements with news publishers, rather than submit to a government-mandated arbitration process. Google’s $100-million deal, inked last fall, requires an administrative body to distribute the lucre. Less than two months ago, the lone bidder for the right to do so was the Online News Media Collective (ONMC), a group made up of the CBC, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, among others—well-established entities that collectively represent over 2,000 news outlets and publications. (The Logic is a member of News Media Canada, but is editorially independent.)

Google instead chose the CJC, a newly formed late entrant to the bidding. In Google’s announcement, Zaidi wrote the group was “best aligned” with the principles spelled out in the Online News Act regulations: “diversity of representation, a robust governance structure, a high level of transparency, and assurance that as much funding as possible would go to news organizations.”

Along with having existed for less than two months, the CJC represents far fewer, and generally smaller, publications than does the ONMC. Since Google named it the winner in June, the CJC has already asked the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the federal agency the government put in charge of administering the Online News Act, for more time to provide governance documents necessary to distribute the funds—an indication of the size of the job at hand, perhaps, if not the CJC’s lack of administrative muscle.

The selection of the upstart collective—many members of which, like Google, have taken a jaundiced view of the Online News Act—has also sparked a rift between the CJC and the ONMC, and raised concern about when the money will actually start to flow. 

Meanwhile, the Online News Act’s long-term future is in question, given Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s telegraphed disdain for government involvement in paying journalists. Some in the industry believe Google will be off the hook entirely should the Conservatives win the next election. “If Poilievre gets in next year, it becomes a one-and-a-half-year program,” said Jeff Elgie, CEO of Village Media, which is a member of the CJC.

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The CJC’s Montreal head office is temporary, on loan from The Breach, a left-wing publication headquartered at the Plateau apartment since its founding in 2022, “pending decisions about where to locate the CJC,” The Breach publisher Dru Oja Jay said.

The Breach is part of Indiegraf, an organization founded in 2020 by sisters Erin Millar and Caitlin Havlak that bills itself as “the Shopify for community news,” and offers tech, marketing and sales support to independent news publishers. Its website lists 60 in North America, including 16 in Canada. The company has received seed funding from the Google News Initiative and the Meta Journalism Project, among others.

Like Google and Meta, Indiegraf has been critical of the Online News Act. The law, the company wrote in a 2022 open letter signed by over 100 community publications—13 of which were Indiegraf network members—privileges legacy news publishers at the expense of smaller players. The act ultimately led to Meta’s blocking of Canadian news from its platforms, which “had a significant negative impact on Indiegraf’s partner publishers,” Millar told The Logic.

In June 2023, Google threatened to cease carrying Canadian news, saying the Online News Act was “unworkable” and would “break Google search.” That month, in an email sent to News Media Canada lobbyist John Delacourt, a copy of which The Logic obtained, Millar echoed Google’s point, saying the law “poses an existential threat to dozens of local newsrooms across the country.” 

Moreover, Millar said, News Media Canada was risking “harming all of us” by demanding $300 million from Google and Meta as compensation to news organizations, according to the email. “$300M isn’t going to be accepted by the platforms,” she wrote, saying $150 million was a more reasonable figure. 

(“There was no conversation with either of the companies about that number, or about any number,” News Media Canada president Paul Deegan said.)

Characterizing herself as “one of the leaders in our industry building the ecosystem of the future,” Millar said News Media Canada’s “irresponsible” position threatened her network. “We urge you to enter into a good-faith negotiation that provides an off-ramp to the destructive course of events that is about to damage our industry,” Millar wrote. 

In a recent interview with The Logic, Millar accused News Media Canada of “bully tactics” and “targeting the women involved” in the CJC bid, though she didn’t offer any examples directly linked to the group. (“I don’t even know what they’re talking about,” Deegan said.) 

Indiegraf has an outsized presence within the CJC. Millar played a key role in mounting the rival bid to distribute Google’s $100 million, according to Elgie, and people associated with Indiegraf publications hold eight of 12 positions on the CJC’s steering committee, and four of seven seats on its interim board. A fifth—independent board member Sadia Zaman—is CEO of the Inspirit Foundation, which in 2019 funded the project that begat Indiegraf. Inspirit has also awarded grants totalling more than $750,000 to at least four current or former Indiegraf publications, according to the foundation’s website, three of which—The Resolve, The Breach and IndigiNews—are represented on the CJC’s steering committee or interim board.

Millar, herself one of the interim board directors, said this was a matter of necessity. She and her associates reached out to a range of publications to join the collective, including Le Devoir, The Globe and Mail and the CBC. None of them accepted, she said.

(After this story’s publication, both CBC and The Globe and Mail said they had not been approached. “I can confirm that CBC/Radio-Canada was never approached by the CJC to join their collective,” CBC spokesperson Leon Mar said in a statement to The Logic. “My understanding is that the Globe was never approached by the CJC to join their collective,” said Globe spokesperson Lindsey Lowy.)

After Google chose the upstart group, News Media Canada and a group of community and ethnic news associations called on the CRTC to make sure the CJC’s governance “is robust and in keeping with modern governance practices” and recommended that its administration “be independent from any member of the Board of Directors,” and that board members not be related parties, or be eligible for money under the Online News Act, “to properly exercise their fiduciary duty and to avoid self-dealing.”

On Wednesday, the CJC revealed its proposal for a permanent governance structure. Its board will consist of 19 directors, including eight members representing publishers and another eight representing broadcasters. Three members will be independent. Both the publisher and broadcaster classes must include representation from large, small, startup and non-profit operations, as well as from Black, Indigenous and Francophone groups, among others. The CBC, which can be given as much as $7 million of the $100 million, can appoint a non-voting representative.

It still isn’t clear when the money will start flowing, however. Earlier this month, the CJC asked the CRTC for a week’s extension to submit key documents, including those detailing its plan to distribute the $100 million. The CRTC granted the extension. When the CJC submitted its proposed governance structure Wednesday, it said the documents were not yet in their final form and it needed still more time for consultation.

In an interview prior to the CJC’s submissions to the CRTC, Millar said the government body hadn’t given it any direction as to how it should structure itself to incorporate bigger players like the CBC and Postmedia. “We have no control over their process,” she told The Logic. “They don’t have a reputation for being the quickest moving organization in the world.”

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Though they are charged with distributing a half-billion dollars, no one at the CJC seems particularly thrilled with the government legislation that begot it. “I think it’s terrible,” said Elgie. Until the Online News Act and Meta’s ensuing decision to block Canadian news, Elgie said the company’s platforms were instrumental (and inexpensive) distribution channels for Village’s 29 mostly local news sites. “I would rather have the Meta traffic back and not a bit of extra money,” Elgie said.

$100 million a year for up to five years sounds like a lot of money. Two decades ago, though, Canadian newspapers alone were generating nearly $4 billion in ad revenue a year, said Chris Dornan. In 2017, Dornan co-wrote The Shattered Mirror, an often-bleak treatise on the health of Canadian media which the federal Liberal government commissioned from the Public Policy Forum, an independent think tank. “Google’s money won’t return the kind of stature, attention, readership or reach that the news industry once enjoyed,” Dornan said. 

Some have speculated that Google chose the CJC as a kind of middle finger to the government and the country’s legacy news media, both of which have often been critical of the search engine giant. Others, like Jason Kint, CEO of U.S.-based digital content industry trade association Digital Content Next, say the company could be rewarding CJC members for their staunch opposition to the Online News Act.

Dornan thinks otherwise. He says Google’s selection of the CJC reflects how the contribution—which by News Media Canada’s estimate will amount to about $20,000 per full-time journalist—will be more meaningful to smaller publications than to, say, Global News, whose parent company Corus is servicing over $1 billion in debt. “For Google, the optics are much better by picking the little guys over traditional legacy media, because the little guys will benefit more from Google’s money,” he said.

For the CJC, there is an enormous amount of work ahead. Apart from electing a new board, the organization will need to parse the list of nearly 1,500 media entities that have signed up for a piece of Google’s contribution. That Plateau apartment will be a busy place in the months to come. 

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include comments that the CBC and Globe and Mail provided after publication. It has also been updated with details about the CJC’s submission to the CRTC and about the composition of the CJC’s steering committee and board. This update clarifies the timing of Erin Millar’s comments about the CRTC, and clarifies information about the size of the Indiegraf network.