Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is taking back his comments about licensing media in Canada.
He has clarified that the government “has no intention to impose licensing requirements on news organizations, nor would we try to regulate news content.”
Guilbeault acknowledged that his previous comments about requiring media to be licensed caused confusion. He believes that it’s important to clarify that the government does not plan to license new outlets.
“We are committed to a free and independent press, which is essential to our democracy. Our focus will be and always has been to ensure that Canadians have access to a diversity of high-quality and credible news sources,” he told reporters on February 3rd.
Guilbeault previously said that the government would make sure that media organizations would be licensed based on their size.
He had said that: “if you’re a distributor of content in Canada and obviously if you’re a very small media organization the requirement probably wouldn’t be the same if you’re Facebook, or Google. There would have to be some proportionality embedded into this.”
Guilbeault walked back these comments and clarified that he wasn’t referring to news media outlets, and that he was actually talking about outlets that produce and content.
Source: CTV News
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