I’m sure it’s cold comfort to people in the eastern Plateau to know that the swimming pool in Baldwin Park is expected to reopen in 2026.
This pleasant park was created on top of an old dump, as was revealed a few years ago in reports from Radio‑Canada, meaning that building a new pool will be somewhat complicated.
We’re getting close to a record in summer electricity usage but if you read down, you’ll see it’s still only about half the winter peak from last February.
But it isn’t surprising given that we’re facing the world’s hottest days on record.
A big sign saying “bonjour Montréal” has been installed in the Old Port. I’m not finding those unicase letters especially appealing, but this is for tourists, not locals.
Begging for a prankster to append a “/ hi” after the bonjour.
I wonder what it would cost to mock up 2 letters and plant them in the grass there:
Yes!
The letters wouldn’t need to be made of anything substantial because they’d be taken down almost as soon as they went up. Or get Banksy to do it — that might give the authorities pause and would ensure worldwide media coverage, especially if the “artwork” were removed.
Maybe a couple of people wearing T-shirts with the letters on them. They could lounge next to the sign.
These two beauties have been sentenced to community work for their stunt in blocking the tunnel in March 2021 to protest pandemic measures.
Thursday night’s instalment of the fireworks festival is to go ahead with a display from Ukraine.
Quebec, the federal government and the city have stopped advertising on Facebook and Instagram. Quebecor is also pulling its ads from Facebook.
Does anyone here have a link to a good explainer about this? For example, if I link to a CTV story on my FB page, and people click that link, the CTV page opens. The ads run, and they run on the CTV page, so CTV gets the impressions and the revenue. (Or do they? Is there something I’m missing?) So why is this a problem for the news outlets? They’re getting the clicks and ad revenue they want (I think). What’s the problem?
BTW I understand that FB doesn’t want to have to pay the news outlets. My question is why is the government asking FB to pay in the first place, since having your news story posted on FB gives you ad revenue from the usual sources.
Maybe I don’t know much about advertising or the news business, but I don’t see what ads have to do with news in this case. News stories are useful and informative items, and ads are just annoying advertising. At least to me anyway.
Agreed that ads are annoying. But the news sites make revenue from ads. AFAIK that revenue isn’t affected by arriving at a news story via a FB link. So why the need for Bill C-18? What problem does it solve?
I don’t have an explainer to link to, but Blork, I believe your understanding of the situation is correct.
When Google announced they would block news outlets from appearing in Google search in Canada, I tried to find out what conditions would trigger a requirement for payment, and it’s not yet clear. The law says that any qualifying entity, (basically Google or Meta/Facebook), that “facilitates” access to “news content” has to pay a bill, but exactly what constitues facilitation is going to be up to the CRTC. The law has a couple of examples like “includes in a directory or index” – and you may have heard of the Google index, so they’re definitely on the hook. It sounds like facilitating could be as simple as hosting a link to the news content, as in Blork’s scenario, so this law could be, depending on exactly what the CRTC decides, a link tax. In some discussions some lawmakers have even said that if someone talks about a news article in a TikTok video, without even linking, that should count as facilitating access and TikTok should have to pay a bill.
As for why – I it’s because they think they can. They see the news industry struggling, and tech giants making tons of money, and think they can redirect that money to Canadian news outlets somehow. I can see an argument that when an image and snippet or summary of the story are shown with the link that the news outlet should be compensated – after all they created that and own the copyright.
However, the government appears to have forgotten, or to have never known, that links between documents are the filaments that form the world wide web, and removing links will leave us with have a bunch of documents in silos, we might as well go back to Usenet. They also don’t seem to understand that Google and Facebook drive traffic to news publishers websites, theoretically increasing their revenue as in Blork’s scenario. We may find that people do start directly visiting CBC or CTV or whatever, and they get more page views, but IMO the more likely outcome is that news organizations have even more trouble reaching an audience and their revenues sink even further.
There is also the potential side effect of removing the ability to put diverse information in front of people who might not otherwise see it, leading to the acceleration of our slide toward American-style news silos. If I get used to going to CBC for my news, and it’s not possible for an occasional Global article to cross my radar via a Facebook feed or Google News search when something interesting is going on, all my news is going to come from the left-wing outrage machine that CBC is slowly becoming. On the other hand, if I’m a Global reader I’m not going to have the tempering effect of occasional stories from left-wing outlets being shown to me.
It’s difficult to find an explainer that isn’t also an opinion piece. This item from McGill was posted before C‑18 became law, but it lays out some of the issues.
That Sue Gardner piece from McGill is very good, and pretty much confirms what I suspected was going on. (It expands on the points that John B mentions in his comment above.)
TL:DR is that the whole thing is well intentioned but very poorly conceived. It puts me in the awkward and uncomfortable position of agreeing with Facebook and Google.
This legislation perfectly encapsulates the cynicism and incompetence of the liberal party. Instead of addressing serious ills on social media such as propaganda, addiction and teen depression/suicide not to mention actual criminality, they create some convoluted poorly-researched attempt to put money into the pockets of their big media lobbyists and cover the whole thing up in a fake ethical argument about protecting the integrity of the news.
How poorly it is researched and designed also reflects badly on the bureaucracy (which the Liberals have also neglected). I would love to see the demographics of the lawyers making the policy recommendations behind Bill C-31. I’m guessing old and white and mostly male and probably constantly relying on their tech support staff to get their phone to log in to Facebook.
One issue is how many people click through to a site after spotting a headline and link on social media. The rate is extraordinarily low on Facebook, and was even lower on Twitter before Musk started melting it down.
Facebook has made a lot of promises and suggestions to news media over the years, including the much touted “push to video”, that ultimately failed to do anything except keep users on Facebook… and contributed to rounds of layoffs and some companies failing because they believed what Facebook was saying.
A third issue is Advertising… and there are several subsets to this. Facebook and Google have sucked up massive amounts of advertising that a generation ago went to small local media across the planet. Small papers have vanished because Mom and Pop stores are now spending their ad money on FB and Google.
Part of this is because the giants are promising finely detailed results in targeting ads. But again, these companies vastly overstate their competence in ad targeting… and there are also sites that engage in blatant ad fraud, which is estimated at up to $120 billion a year.
>This legislation perfectly encapsulates the cynicism and incompetence of the liberal party
Also noteworthy is that the Liberal *party* has not stopped facebook advertising! They spend $15k a month apparently. If fb is so evil, and newspapers so important, and democracy needs so much saving, why do they continue? Perhaps because they value staying in power more? Hypocrisy thy name is Liberal.
>I would love to see the demographics of the lawyers … I’m guessing old and white and mostly male
Kate, regarding the Plante thread below: Here we see an analogy. Some attack Plante for being a “witless little girl”, and some will attack others for being old/white/male. It’s the same deplorable pattern alas.
I think Kevin raises a fair point. The people I know that get their news from Facebook will rarely click through the link to get to the full article. They will read the headline and the snippet that FB takes from the article and then call it a day. If people don’t click through, the news agency gets zero revenue, despite doing a majority of the work. With AI summarizing articles from news sources, this will only become more prevalent.
Chris, it’s not the same at all. When an older sibling punches the younger one and it really hurts and makes them cry and then the older sibling goes “but they hit me first!” That’s the analogy. The power levels are totally different and it is gender and race where the power resides.
People reading the headline & snippet but not the article is a big problem – and one of the reasons that near the end of the pre-Elon era Twitter started asking users if they are sure they want to post a link to something they haven’t had time to read.
But maybe the law, or a law, should have been written to reduce or ban snippets, or at least auto-generated snippets, to somehow encourage higher click-through rates, not to tax linking.
On the effectiveness of advertising, yeah, Google and Facebook aren’t as good as they promise, but I would bet they offer better return on investment than putting an ad in a newspaper, with the possible exception of some hyper-local papers. Maybe newspapers could have evolved, or if not, as the Sue Gardner piece says the problem being solved by the law should be how to ensure quality journalism exists in the modern media landscape, not how to keep existing, arguably failing, media companies from going bankrupt.
Steve Faguy wrote a clear explainer:
https://blog.fagstein.com/2023/06/30/online-news-act-fallout/
Tweets about Fagstein’s analysis:
From Marc Edge, author of “Postmedia Effect…”
“an excellent, if lengthy, analysis”
https://twitter.com/marcedge1/status/1674819318541058050?s=20
From Michael Geist, U of Ottawa prof.:
“This is an outstanding, balanced review of Bill C-18, the issues it raises, and the competing arguments from both sides. Highly recommend.”
Thanks, H. John. Steve’s been thinking clearly about this.
Linda Gyulai does one of her deep dives into the mysteries surrounding the sale of the old Children’s Hospital site for half the municipal valuation and well under market prices. Worth slogging through the Gazette’s byzantine tangle of ads and other interruptions.
Someone has posted the article with pics but sans ads on Agora Montréal:
https://forum.agoramtl.com/t/le-square-childrens-20-a-37-etages-2022/184/430
This reads like it should by all rights be a bombshell. Will be interesting to see if the French media picks up on it.
Gyulai is one of the few reasons the Gazette is occasionally worth reading.
Excellent investigative journalism and just absolutely maddening. Clearly a handshake deal between Coderre, the province and the developers, stealing millions of public dollars. What is missing is how much of the difference went into individual pockets.
I’d like to read the article but knowing what awaits me on the other side of a Gazette link makes it impossible to click it.
The driver in Tuesday’s fatal encounter between a tanker truck and a cyclist has been found, and will not be facing any charges.
In the same area, a cyclist was hit by a city bus late Tuesday, but this incident was not fatal.
Reply