Why Canadians Can’t See News on Facebook. I Read Every Word Meta Told Parliament to Find Out Who Decided.

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The Week the Country Found Out

On 16 August 2023, the Northwest Territories ordered the city of Yellowknife evacuated ahead of an advancing wildfire: almost 22,000 people. The mayor, Rebecca Alty, told residents to take what they needed and get out. And as the territory’s residents reached for the tool most of them use to share urgent information, they met something most of them did not know existed: for two weeks by then, no news link had been shareable on Facebook or Instagram anywhere in Canada.

Delaney Poitras of Fort Smith was evacuated twice in twenty-four hours: first to Hay River, then out again when Hay River itself was ordered emptied. “I’ve never been evacuated in my life, and to do it twice in 24 hours, it was scary,” she told CBC News from an evacuation centre in Leduc, Alberta. She tried to keep the people on her Facebook informed anyway: “It’s difficult to find the correct information to share to all the people that I have on Facebook, but I try to do my best to make sure that it’s correct.” And then the sentence that should sit in every account of that week: “In our community, the protective services and the RCMP were going door to door. I guess some people … didn’t answer the door or just weren’t aware that this was even going on.”

Another evacuee, Kelsey Worth, described stripping the source off the information she shared so the platform would let it through: “I avoid saying where it comes from because the second you say it comes from a radio station or a news outlet, they block you.” Her larger worry was what grew in the vacuum: with the news gone, she said, misinformation was spreading faster than the fire updates. Ollie Williams, the editor of Yellowknife’s Cabin Radio, reporting from Fort Simpson because the capital was emptying, called the ban “stupid and dangerous,” while insisting on the other half of the sentence too: he blamed the federal government for picking the fight in the first place. Every night after his shift he checked the platforms and found his own audience carrying his outlet’s reporting for him: “it’s just screengrab after screengrab after screengrab of our updates shared by our audience to their friends.”

By the following Monday the fires had reached British Columbia’s Okanagan, and Premier David Eby used a wildfire briefing to address the company’s chief executive by name, saying the province was being held “ransom” in a dispute between Ottawa and the platform: “This is not a time for making that political point.” The Prime Minister said Facebook was “putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety.” Meta’s spokesperson, David Troya-Alvarez, gave CBC the company’s answer in full: “People in Canada are able to use Facebook and Instagram to connect to their communities and access reputable information, including content from official government agencies, emergency services and non-governmental organisations.” The company activated Safety Check, the feature that lets users mark themselves safe. The news links stayed off.

Nobody died because of a blocked link that August. No coroner, no inquiry, no study has made that claim, and neither does this article. What that week established is narrower and fully documented: when a Canadian city fled a fire, the country’s largest information platform kept journalism switched off, said so, and held its position. Three years later the block is still on. This piece is about who made that decision, what it has cost and to whom, who carries the company’s case inside this country, and why no Canadian institution can see what the platform now shows the people who stayed.

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The Question Canadians Are Actually Typing

Three years after that August, the most common thing Canadians do about the block is type a confused question into a search bar. I harvested Google’s own autocomplete for this article on 31 August 2026, from ten seed phrases, recording every suggestion returned and inventing none. The pattern is unmistakable:

• “why can’t i see news on facebook in canada”
• “why can t canadians see news on facebook”
• “why did meta ban news in canada”
• “why did facebook stop news in canada”

Forty-seven distinct suggestions came back. Almost all of them are some form of why. That matches what researchers at McGill’s Media Ecosystem Observatory found by survey: only 41% of Canadian Facebook users and 26% of Instagram users correctly know that news outlets can no longer post on those platforms. The majority of Canadians on Facebook are living inside a policy decision they cannot name.

One seed phrase returned nothing at all. I typed “who decided to block news in canada” and Google offered zero suggestions. Nobody is searching it, because nobody knows it is a question with an answer. That is where this piece starts.

The most common Canadian response to the block is a question typed into a phone before dawn. Only 41% of Facebook users here know there is an answer.

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The Name Meta Has Never Said

Meta has never named the person who decided. The furthest the public record goes is a single exchange in a Canadian committee room on 8 May 2023, and it goes that far only because one MP asked the same question four ways.

To get to it I downloaded and parsed 456 House of Commons committee transcripts from Canadian Heritage, Industry and Ethics, across two Parliaments, and extracted every speaking turn by a Meta witness. Five people spoke for Meta: Rachel Curran (Head of Public Policy, Canada; previously Director of Policy to Prime Minister Stephen Harper), Kevin Chan (Global Policy Director), Marc Dinsdale (Head of Media Partnerships, Canada), Nathaniel Gleicher (Head of Security Policy) and Lindsay Hundley (Influence Operations Policy Lead).

On 8 May 2023, Liberal MP Anthony Housefather asked the question directly. This is verbatim from the House of Commons’ published Evidence:

Housefather: Has Meta’s board of directors discussed the proposed content-blocking in Canada if Bill C-18 is adopted?
Chan: …I said, “I don’t know.”

Housefather: Was the decision to do content-blocking in Canada if Bill C-18 was adopted made exclusively by the Canadian team?
Chan: I think there were a number of people involved… but I think this is concerning on the global level.

Housefather: Was Mr. Clegg involved in that decision, yes or no?
Chan: As president of global affairs, he would have been.

Housefather: Was Mr. Zuckerberg involved in the decision, yes or no?
Chan: I don’t know.

The public record on authorship ends there. What it establishes is narrower than the question it was asked:

• It was not a Canadian decision. Meta’s own witness placed it “on the global level.”
• Sir Nick Clegg is the only executive Meta has ever placed at it. Then President of Global Affairs, he signed the decision in his own name, and Meta published a statement in his name saying “we’ve taken the difficult decision.” He left Meta on 2 January 2025 and was replaced by Joel Kaplan, deputy chief of staff in the George W. Bush White House, under the new title Chief Global Affairs Officer. The one executive Meta ever placed at the Canadian decision no longer works there.
• Mark Zuckerberg has the structural authority, and no evidence places him in the room. Meta’s own annual report carries a risk factor headed “Our CEO has control over key decision making”: he “is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power… and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of all matters submitted to our stockholders for approval.” Whether he decided this is a question Meta was asked in Parliament and did not answer. This article does not assert that he did.

Clegg was to be Meta’s principal witness at it. Four days before, the committee retitled the session from “The Response of Companies in the Information Technology Sector to Bill C-18” to “Tech Giants’ Current and Ongoing Use of Intimidation and Subversion Tactics to Evade Regulation in Canada and Across the World.” Meta withdrew him. The committee then summoned him. NDP MP Peter Julian, on the record: “We have now summoned Mr. Clegg, so we will be coming back to Facebook potentially next week, or discussing non-compliance with a summons.”

And five days before that House hearing, on 3 May 2023, Curran and Dinsdale had already told the Senate. Chair Leo Housakos asked whether Facebook would prevent news outlets from posting links if the legislation passed. Curran: “Yes, senator. We have made that decision. We very much do not want to be in that position.” The decision was on the Canadian public record almost two months before the bill received royal assent.

Nick Clegg was confirmed as Meta’s principal witness, withdrew four days before the hearing, and was then summoned. The nameplate holder is empty because nobody filled it.

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Five Planks, Two Countries

Meta published the opening statement Clegg never delivered. Its argument rests on five planks, quoted here exactly:

1. The premise is wrong. “The Online News Act is based on a fundamentally flawed premise. Meta does not benefit unfairly from people sharing links to news content on our platform. The reverse is true.”
2. Publishers choose to share. “More than 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers are on links posted by the publishers themselves.”
3. News is trivial to Meta. “Links to news stories are a tiny proportion of that — less than three percent of the content they see in their Facebook Feed.”
4. Meta was already giving publishers a gift. “Facebook Feed sent registered news publishers in Canada more than 1.9 billion clicks… free marketing we estimate is worth more than $230 million.”
5. The industry must adapt. “It makes no more sense to claim social media companies are taking money from publishers than to say car companies stole from the horse and cart industry.”

Clegg had made this decision before. In February 2021 Facebook blocked news across Australia, and he explained it in a post under his own byline. I compared the two documents plank by plank. All five arguments appear in both, including the same device of quantifying the referral traffic as a gift:

In Australia the same argument came from different people. Simon Milner and Josh Machin used a phrase Curran would later repeat almost word for word in Ottawa: the payment obligation was “entirely uncapped and unknowable.” And on 22 January 2021, twenty-seven days before Facebook removed Australian news, Milner told a Senate committee there: “Just to be clear, we have not threatened… a potential worst-case consequence… it was absolutely not a threat.”

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The $33 Billion Nobody Had Subtracted

How much does Canada actually earn Meta? Every published account of this says the figure is unknowable, including my own until an editor corrected it, because Meta reports “United States and Canada” as one region. That is wrong, and the correction is embarrassingly simple.

In the same table of the same annual report, in a footnote on the same basis, Meta also discloses United States revenue alone. Canada is the residual. It has been sitting in the filings since 2016 as a subtraction nobody performed. For 2024: US and Canada, $63,207 million; United States, $59.73 billion; Canada, US$3,477 million.

Meta’s Canadian business grew every year of the news ban: $4.20B in 2023, $4.76B in 2024, $5.71B in 2025. Removing Canadian journalism cost it nothing measurable.

Because the revenue is now a known number, so is the tax. Canada’s Digital Services Tax was 3% of Canadian digital revenue above $20 million. Applied to Meta’s filed Canadian revenue, that is about $382 million accrued for 2022–2024, payable 30 June 2025. That figure is a ceiling rather than a floor: the tax reached online advertising, social media, marketplace and user-data revenue, while the base it is applied to here is Meta’s total Canadian revenue, which also carries a small amount of Reality Labs hardware. Canada announced on 29 June 2025 that it would rescind the tax, hours before the first payment came due and two days after the United States terminated trade discussions over it. Rescinding it took another nine months: the repeal received royal assent on 26 March 2026, retroactive to the day the tax was enacted, and the Canada Revenue Agency is refunding what it collected, with interest. Meta’s share of that liability went from accrued to nil.

Washington counts that as its own win. Reporting to Congress in December 2025, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said: “I have been talking to Canada since April about these issues, and we have succeeded in getting Canada to meaningfully address some of them, including its Digital Services Tax, which would have cost American digital companies billions.”

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What Actually Happened to Canadian Journalism

Canadian journalism was collapsing long before Meta touched it, and the shape of that collapse is testable. Meta’s third plank, that news matters little to its users, survives the evidence. Its fifth plank, that the industry failed to adapt to digital, does not. Statistics Canada publishes the tables that settle it.

Canadian newspaper publishers’ operating revenue peaked in 2008 at $5.43 billion. In 2024 it was $1.61 billion. Magazine publishers fell 48.2% from their own 2013 peak over the same era. Over the same period the money did not leave Canadian advertising. The advertising services industry grew from $8.2 billion in 2012 to $15.4 billion in 2024.

The closures are counted. Toronto Metropolitan University’s Local News Research Project recorded 603 local news outlets closed across 388 Canadian communities since 2008 as at October 2025, against 406 launched and 278 still operating; its running count has risen since. A separate March 2025 study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with one local news source or none — about 6% of the population, against Statistics Canada’s 2025 estimate of roughly 41.7 million.

The clearest test of “the industry failed to adapt” is whether digital advertising replaced print advertising. Statistics Canada publishes both. Between 2014 and 2024, Canadian newspapers lost $1,722.6 million in print advertising and gained $80.6 million in digital. Digital replaced 4.7% of what print lost. Digital’s share of newspaper advertising rose from 9.9% to 43.6%, a statistic that sounds like a successful transition and is in fact a collapsing denominator. Digital ad sales in 2024 were lower than in 2022.

Then the ban landed on top of that. In the six months after 1 August 2023, engagement with Canadian news organisations fell 89% in rural areas and mid-sized cities, against 48% in large cities. The Media Ecosystem Observatory, which measured it, is careful to note that Postmedia’s debt restructuring, SaltWire’s creditor protection and the sale of Black Press all fell in the same period, so the 89% is not Meta’s alone. Roughly a third of Canada’s local outlets went inactive on social media altogether.

Where the newsrooms themselves went is something I measured directly. On 31 August 2026 I fetched the homepages of 50 Canadian news outlets and a 34-outlet non-Canadian control group in the same run, and recorded which platforms each one still links its own readers to, counting only cleanly readable pages. The Facebook half of that measurement produced a finding my own review process later withdrew — the instrument mishandled outlets whose pages render in JavaScript, and the retraction is printed in What This Article Got Wrong rather than asserted in either direction. One signal did survive scrutiny: Canadian newsrooms link to Bluesky at 3.5 times the control group’s rate, 38.9% against 11.1%, the clearest displacement signature in the dataset. Even that carries an honesty label: nine comparisons were run, and under a strict multiple-comparisons correction none of them clears, so it is offered as suggestive rather than settled. Not one of the 36 readable Canadian outlets linked to WhatsApp; four of the control outlets did.

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What the Block Did to Canadian Lives

The aggregates above have people inside them, and the impact was not evenly spread. It sorted Canadians by age, by geography and by what they do for a living, and for each of those groups there is a person on the public record and a number that can be checked. Everyone quoted below spoke in a parliamentary committee room or to a news organisation under their own name; nobody here is a composite, and no anecdote is doing the work of a statistic.

The 68-year-old and the 19-year-old are living in different countries

Statistics Canada’s general social survey settles how differently this lands by age. Asked their main source of news in 2024, 55.3% of Canadians aged 15–24 said social media. Among those 65–74, it was 6.7%; their news still comes overwhelmingly from television. The block therefore barely touched the daily habits of the oldest Canadians and sat directly on top of the primary news channel of the youngest, the group least likely to seek out a news website on its own. I computed those shares from the source table for this article, and they sum to 100% within every age band.

What replaced journalism for that younger group is also measured. The Media Ecosystem Observatory’s coding of 160,000 video transcripts found that on the platforms where most news engagement now happens, influencer content presents claims without attribution 76% of the time, against 31% for news organisations’ content, and scores consistently higher on emotional intensity. News organisations’ own posting fell 65% on Facebook and 74% on Instagram across the study window. The interpretation is mine, but it follows from the counts: the feed did not go quiet after the ban. It refilled with material that looks like news, carries fewer sources, and answers to no press council.

Trust splits along the same age line, and Statistics Canada has measured that too. Asked to rate their trust in news from media on a scale of zero to ten in 2024, Canadians averaged 5.0, and 55.7% placed themselves at five or below. The gradient runs with age: 57.8% of Canadians 15–24 sit at five or below, against 47.0% of those 65–74, and every age band under 45 averages below the midpoint. Low trust co-occurs with naming social media as the main news source; the survey identifies no direction of cause, and neither does this article. What the two tables establish together is stark enough without one: the Canadians most likely to get their news from the feed are also the Canadians least likely to trust news at all.

The Saskatchewan radio newsman

Murray Wood has spent 45 years in radio news, from North Battleford to Calgary, and now runs news talk programming for Rawlco Radio’s CKOM and CJME in Saskatchewan. His testimony to the Heritage committee on 14 April 2026 is the plainest account on the record of what a local newsroom is for. When the Humboldt Broncos bus crash happened at five o’clock on a Friday afternoon, his stations ran “30 hours of live programming that we hadn’t planned to do… People across Saskatchewan tuned in not just as a way of finding out the latest but as a way of coming together to grieve.” His stations still produce more than 200 newscasts a week in each market. Around them, he testified, entire news-talk newsrooms have been laid off, stations have handed licences back, Saskatchewan’s two main newspapers have cut publishing days, and “there is no longer a live, local TV newscast on weekends that originates in Saskatchewan.” The MP questioning him, Kevin Waugh of Saskatoon, put the same fact from the listener’s side: in his province there is now no local news, in print or on television, from Friday afternoon until Monday. When the engagement data says the ban’s damage concentrated in rural areas and mid-sized cities, at −89%, this is the infrastructure it landed on.

Since 2008, 603 local news outlets have closed across 388 Canadian communities. In much of the Prairies, a live overnight voice like this one is what remains.

The Montreal borough and the Quebec weekly

Ten days after the block began, on 11 August 2023, Métro Média suspended operations: the Métro daily and a network of hyperlocal papers covering Montreal and Quebec City boroughs, about twenty publications. Honesty about causation matters here: president and CEO Andrew Mulé blamed Montreal’s ban on Publisac door-to-door distribution and the collapse of institutional financing, and said Meta’s news block did not help the paper’s digital transition. The block was a headwind on a company already stalling, not the engine of the crash. But the shape of the loss is the point: the outlets that died covered boroughs, the level of news nobody else picks up. Quebec’s surviving weeklies told the Heritage committee in April 2026 where their floor now comes from: Hebdos Québec, representing about 40 independent owners and 137 print and digital outlets distributing some two million copies a week, testified that “we now have stability for the first time in many years thanks to the Online News Act and the Canadian journalism labour tax credit.” The money holding them up is Google’s money, flowing because Google complied with the law Meta blocked news to avoid.

The startup publishers who lost the on-ramp

The block did not fall hardest on the biggest newsrooms. Jeff Elgie, chief executive of the local-news publisher Village Media Inc., told the Heritage committee on 14 December 2023 that “the evacuation of Meta from the industry will, without question, disadvantage many small, start-up and independent publishers, because this was, in many cases, the on-ramp to their developing audiences.” Brandon Gonez, founder and chief executive of Toronto’s Gonez Media — a digital company of just over twenty people that publishes Now Toronto and what he described to the committee as Canada’s number one digital current-affairs show — described the same mechanism to the committee in April 2026: Facebook and Instagram “were driving huge referral traffic back to legacy publishers and digital publishers,” traffic those publishers could then build a business on. A generation of Canadian media companies was being built on that on-ramp. The ban removed it for the startups and the incumbents alike. The incumbents, though, had brands, apps and newsletters to fall back on.

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The Hours, Measured Against School

There is one more way to measure what a platform means to a country, and it is the bluntest: time. So I tried to compute how many hours Canadians actually spend on Facebook and Instagram, and the first finding is that no primary instrument in Canada can answer that question. Statistics Canada’s Time Use Survey has no social-media activity code — its own footnotes scatter feed time across “socializing,” “use of technology” and “watching television or videos.” The Canadian Internet Use Survey measures internet hours, not platform hours. And Meta publishes no per-country time-spent figure anywhere, including in its annual report. A company whose Canadian revenue can be derived to the million dollars discloses nothing about the one thing it actually harvests here. So what follows is a bracket, honestly labelled, built from the two national surveys that come closest.

From the Canadian Internet Use Survey, harmonised across survey years and corrected to a consistent denominator, 42.6% of internet users aged 15–24 were online more than 20 hours a week in 2022 — the heaviest segment being men 15–24, at 46.7%. Converted to annual hours, with the open-ended top band bounded rather than guessed, a Canadian aged 15–24 spends between 612 and 1,204 hours a year online; the average internet user of any age, between 448 and 918. The Time Use Survey’s own diary categories bracket the same picture daily: between 0.5 and 3.1 hours of screen envelope a day for the average Canadian 15 and over, and between 0.9 and 3.4 for those 15–24 — a floor that excludes in-feed video and a ceiling that includes broadcast television, which is exactly how imprecise the national instruments are. And within the survey’s comparable window, 2018 to 2022, the fastest-growing heavy-use group was not teenagers. It was Canadians 65 and over, up 41.7%.

Now the school side, from Statistics Canada’s education indicators, transcribed and re-summed for this article from the intended-instruction-time table (our re-sum of the Canada row lands within one hour of StatCan’s published total). A Canadian child’s entire classroom career, ages 6 through 17, is 11,080 hours. An average school year is 923 hours of class.

Read the comparison at its honest strength. The upper end of one year of a young Canadian’s internet use exceeds a full school year of classroom time; the floor is about two-thirds of one. Run forward, a twelve-year classroom career is matched by somewhere between nine and eighteen years of ordinary scrolling. None of this isolates Facebook or Instagram from the rest of the internet — and that inability is itself the finding: the country can tell you to the hour how long its children sit in class, and cannot measure at all how long they sit in the feed. The only platform-level numbers that exist are self-report panels, which put Canadian social-media time near 13 hours a week, about 670 hours a year; they are recorded here as context and excluded from the findings above, because none of them is a statistical agency and none isolates Meta’s apps.

Two more national measurements belong beside the hours. The Canadian screen-time guideline for ages 12–17 is at most two recreational hours a day; by Statistics Canada’s 2024 health measures, 72.2% of Canadians aged 12–17 exceed it, and only 5.1% of that age group meet the full Canadian 24-Hour Movement Guidelines. And in 2018 Statistics Canada simply asked social-networking users directly: 47.3% reported adverse effects from their use — 34.8% stayed on longer than intended, 20.4% reported less physical activity, 17.1% lost sleep. Among users aged 15–24, on a like-for-like base, the any-adverse-effect figure rises to 67.3%, with lost sleep about 2.2 times the all-ages rate. These are self-reports, not a causal estimate, and StatCan names no platform; what they establish is that a national statistical agency asked, and roughly half of Canada’s social-networking users said yes.

One more national series belongs beside these, carried with its own caveat at full strength. Police-reported cybercrime in Canada rose from 15,184 incidents in 2014 to 90,643 in 2025, an increase of 497%, in a series that reconciles exactly to its provincial parts in all twelve years. It counts what police recorded, which reflects reporting and classification practice as well as underlying crime, and it is not attributable to any platform. It is context for the world the feed sits in, not an indictment of any company.

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The $230 Million With Three Different Birthdays

The one claim in Meta’s case that can be independently checked is its fourth plank: that it was already handing Canadian publishers “more than $230 million” in free marketing. The number is not inflated.

Meta’s stated method was “what it would have cost news publishers to achieve the same outcome on Facebook if that space wasn’t provided to them for free”, which works out to about twelve cents per click, well below published Canadian Facebook advertising rates.

The problem is that Meta gave the identical statistic three incompatible measurement windows:

• “more than 1.9 billion clicks in a single year” — Kevin Chan, Heritage Committee, 28 October 2022
• “in the 12 months to April 2022” — Meta’s newsroom, May 2023
• “in the 13 months to April 2022” — the statement read into the record four days later, 8 May 2023

Then the one-off measurement became a recurring one. Rachel Curran, Ethics Committee, 13 December 2023: “$230 million per year.” The same witness, 24 October 2024: “more than $230 million in value for Canadian publishers every single year.”

Using the Internet Archive, I checked whether Meta edited its Canadian announcement after publishing it. It did, twice, in place, on the day of royal assent and on the day the block began, while the stated publication date remained 2 June. The “CDN $230 million” line was inserted on 1 August 2023 with its measurement period stripped out. Clegg’s May 2023 statement and the February 2021 Australia post were never edited.

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The Clause Meta Asked Parliament to Delete

Of 192 briefs filed to the Senate committee studying Bill C-18 that session, Meta filed one, on 1 May 2023. It is not an argument. It is draft statutory language in a two-column redline: the existing clause on the left, Meta’s proposed replacement on the right. Its priority amendment reads, verbatim:

“[Note: Preferred amendment is to delete s. 51 entirely + delete ss. 52 and s. 68 in their entirety which relate to this clause]”

Section 51 of the Online News Act prohibits an operator from acting in any way that “(a) unjustly discriminates against an eligible news business; (b) gives undue or unreasonable preference to any individual or entity, including itself; or (c) subjects an eligible news business to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage.” Meta also proposed stripping directors’ and officers’ liability, and excluding hyperlinks and publisher-posted content from the Act altogether.

Three months later Meta ended news availability for every eligible news business in Canada. That sequence is a fact; the inference is not one this article draws. Section 51’s application to the block has never been tested by any court or regulator, no finding of any kind has been made against Meta under it, and a company is fully entitled to lobby Parliament for the amendments it wants.

Two senators, René Cormier and Julie Miville-Dechêne, pressed Meta at that hearing for the underlying data behind its claim that news has no commercial value to the platform. Both witnesses undertook to follow up. The committee’s record of briefs shows no post-hearing document from Meta.

Meta filed one brief to the Senate committee. It was not an argument. It was draft statutory language, and its priority amendment was to delete section 51 entirely.

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Where the Lobbying Went

Meta did not lobby less after the block. It lobbied somewhere else. I rebuilt its federal record from the Commissioner of Lobbying’s own bulk data: 130 communication reports spanning 2011 to 2025, all filed as “Facebook Canada Ltd.”, never as Meta Platforms.

The pattern around the ban is stark. Meta’s recorded contacts with the Department of Canadian Heritage, the department that owns the Online News Act, stop dead after 11 July 2023, three weeks before the block. The next one is 10 September 2025. Twenty-six months, with zero recorded Heritage contacts in all of 2024.

Where it went instead is in the same registry. After the ban: 27 recorded contacts at Innovation, Science and Economic Development against 6 at Heritage. During the passage of C-18 there was also a concentrated Senate effort: 7 of Meta’s 13 recorded Senate contacts fall in 2023. Across the whole 130-report file, the phrase “proposed digital services tax” appears on exactly one filing: a 23 October 2024 meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office. The other meetings that day carry only the generic description Meta files for most contacts.

When Heritage contact does resume, on 10 September 2025, it resumes at the minister’s own office: the filings name the Chief of Staff and the Deputy Chief of Staff and Director of Policy. Three meetings at the Prime Minister’s Office follow the next day.

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The People Who Carry Meta’s Case in Canada

A decision made “on the global level” still needs Canadians to argue for it here, and the question of who they are has a documented answer. It comes in three strictly different categories, and the differences matter more than the names: people Meta employs, people Meta hires, and people who share Meta’s view of the law while owing Meta nothing. Every fact below is from the Commissioner of Lobbying’s own registry, a committee transcript or a published record, and none of it alleges anything unlawful about anyone. Registered lobbying is the system working as designed.

The employees

Meta’s Canadian case has been argued in public by its own staff, and the registry records where they came from. Kevin Chan, the Global Policy Director who fielded Parliament’s who-decided questions, spent 2004 to 2009 in the Privy Council Office, including a stint as a director in the Office of the Clerk, then two years as Director of Policy to the Leader of the Opposition, then served as Director of Policy and Research at the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the regulator that later fought Facebook all the way to the Supreme Court. Rachel Curran, Meta’s Head of Public Policy for Canada, was Director of Policy in the Prime Minister’s Office under Stephen Harper from 2011 to 2015. Garrick Tiplady has been Facebook Canada Ltd.’s in-house responsible officer on the lobbying file since 2018, with nineteen registrations under his name. All of this is disclosed on their own filings; the revolving door between government and the companies government regulates is legal, common, and worth seeing plainly.

The hired advocates

Since December 2011, 88 separate lobbying registrations have been filed to work Ottawa for Facebook or Meta, across seven firms: Heenan Blaikie, Crestview Strategy, Baker & McKenzie, Access Partnership, Argyle Public Relationships and, currently, Maple Leaf Strategies, plus one independent consultant. I rebuilt the full ledger from the Commissioner’s bulk data for this article.

The first name on the first registration is worth pausing on. Erin O’Toole, then a lawyer at Heenan Blaikie, registered as a consultant lobbyist for Facebook, Inc. on 1 December 2011, and on 6 December 2011 the registry records him communicating on Facebook’s behalf with six federal offices in one day, including the Director of Stakeholder Relations in the Prime Minister’s Office and a director at Finance Canada. His registration ended on 29 February 2012. He announced his run for Parliament that May, won the Durham by-election that November, and became leader of the Conservative Party in 2020. The sequence is entirely lawful and entirely disclosed, and it means a future leader of Canada’s Official Opposition had once been Facebook’s registered advocate in Ottawa. The responsible officer named on that filing, and on Facebook’s Canadian consultant filings into 2017, is Sarah Wynn-Williams, the Meta policy executive who later wrote the 2025 memoir Careless People, which Meta moved to stop her promoting through an arbitration clause.

The ban era has its own roster. Since the block began, 53 recorded communications have been filed by five people: Tiplady in-house, and consultants Jill Briggs, Alik Angaladian, Stephanie Ritter and Phil Trinh; Trinh is himself a former Conservative caucus and opposition-leader’s-office staffer, per his own disclosures. Their recorded reach runs to the top of the government: the Minister of Justice (May 2024), four named advisers in the Prime Minister’s Office (October 2024 and September 2025), the Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet for artificial intelligence, the Minister of Artificial Intelligence (September 2025), and, when the Heritage freeze finally broke on 10 September 2025, the Heritage Minister’s chief of staff and policy director, by three lobbyists on the same day. On the parliamentary side, the registry records 2024 meetings with Conservative MPs Brad Vis and Karen Vecchio and with Aaron Wudrick, director of policy in the Office of the Leader of the Opposition. Being lobbied is not endorsement: those three rows record who Meta’s advocates reached, not what anyone agreed to.

The people who agree with Meta for free

The third category is the one where fairness matters most, because it contains no clients and no contracts, only Canadians whose stated view of the Online News Act overlaps with Meta’s, held independently and argued in their own name. Nothing below implies coordination, payment or sympathy for the company; several of these people are sharp critics of Meta itself.

Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, has been the law’s most persistent academic critic. His own committee opening, 28 November 2023, states his position on the company question better than any characterisation could: “I have never been compensated or otherwise received a benefit from any tech company in conjunction with any of my appearances… my views are not for sale,” adding that his criticism of the bill “was not opposition to tech regulation.” Conservative MP Rachael Thomas told the April 2026 hearings that “with regard to Bill C-18, it seems that the government perhaps made a few mistakes… the news needs to be where people are, which is largely digital nowadays,” and that based on the testimony before her the Act “hasn’t hit the mark.” And publishers like Brandon Gonez, quoted above, fault the law’s design while running businesses the block itself damaged. A reader can hold all of this at once: the strongest Canadian arguments against the Online News Act are made by people Meta never paid, while Meta’s paid advocacy operates in a separate, registered lane that this article has now put names to.

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The $100 Million That Never Applied

The single most repeated sentence about all of this, including in an earlier draft of this article, is that Google agreed to pay $100 million a year while Meta paid nothing. It is arithmetically true and it is misleading, and the regulation says so in plain words.

The Online News Act Application and Exemption Regulations, SOR/2023-276, section 9(2), sits under the marginal note “Exception — largest search engine.” It provides that the Commission must treat agreements as sufficient “if and only if” the intermediary is “the search engine with the greatest share of Canadian Internet advertising revenues among all search engines,” and then applies a formula: $100 million indexed to the Consumer Price Index. The figure was never flat.

No monetary figure was ever prescribed for a social media service. And the CRTC’s own report closes the loop: “the only online platform that notified the Commission that the Act applied to it was Google Search.” Meta never self-identified, so no payment obligation ever attached to it. Meta was never assessed $100 million.

What Google’s money actually did is measurable. The Canadian Journalism Collective has distributed $96.2 million to 445 recipients in year one and $102.5 million to 425 in year two: $198.8 million in total, all of it Google’s. The top 10% of recipients take 77–79% of it; the bottom half share under 5%.

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Then the File Moved to Washington

Meta argued in Ottawa that the Online News Act was bad law. Since 2025 that argument has had a second address. The Act now sits in the United States government’s official catalogue of foreign trade barriers, and the US Trade Representative has named it to Congress among the things America wants resolved with Canada. Neither was true in any earlier year, and I can show you exactly when it changed.

The catalogue is the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, delivered to the President and Congress every 31 March by statute. I downloaded eight consecutive editions, extracted roughly 1.85 million words, cut the Canada chapter out of each and counted.

America’s written complaint about Canada shrank for five straight years, from 7,517 words in 2019 to 1,899 in 2023. Then it more than tripled. The section carrying both the Act and the digital services tax, headed Electronic Commerce / Digital Trade Barriers, does not exist in the 2024 edition at all. That edition was not silent on Canadian media policy, since it covered broadcast quotas and the Online Streaming Act. Canadian content regulation was already on the American list. The news law was not.

Here is how the 2026 edition describes it, under the heading Mandatory Bargaining Code, in language identical to 2025:

“The Act gives the CRTC new powers to regulate the Canadian news industry, including determining who is a journalist and what is an eligible news business, and calculating compensation. The United States continues to monitor this issue.”

So who asked?

The trade-barriers report is not written in a vacuum. USTR builds it from a public comment docket, and anyone who wants a foreign law listed files a submission. Those submissions are public. I had earlier written that I could not determine whether anyone connected to Meta pushed for this, after a single database refused me. That was a shortcut, and the docket is the answer to it.

Docket USTR-2025-0016 took 167 comments between 15 September and 30 October 2025. I downloaded every one, with attachments, because trade associations file a one-line body and put the substance in a PDF. Seven organisations named Canada’s Online News Act, across eight filings, one of them submitted twice.

Meta filed nothing under its own name. The loudest filer was the Computer & Communications Industry Association, whose submission carries a section headed Forced Revenue Transfers for Digital News:

“Canada followed with the Online News Act, requiring select platforms to pay publishers for any use of their content, even links or brief excerpts, in a law that clearly targets U.S. firms… the second U.S. company ceased hosting links to news content in Canada… USTR should remain vigilant of action against these two U.S. companies and any others they may seek to scope into the law.”

CCIA publishes its membership. Meta is a member. So is Google. The “two U.S. companies” in that paragraph are both members of the association writing it, and the one that “ceased hosting links to news content in Canada” is Meta.

Two other filers go further than USTR ever does and name the company outright. The National Foreign Trade Council and the Coalition of Services Industries both told USTR that C-18 “targets specific U.S. companies (namely Meta and Google), as evidenced by Canadian lawmakers’ statements in Parliament and the Parliamentary Budget Office estimates.”

One filer argued the opposite, and it belongs here as much as the others. Public Citizen told USTR that the 2025 report had “reverted to regurgitating the hit list of other countries’ laws that large U.S. multinational corporations dislike,” and that countries hold not merely a right but an obligation to regulate in the public interest.

In December 2025 the US Trade Representative, Jamieson Greer, reported to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees ahead of the USMCA joint review. His list of what America wanted resolved with Canada runs to dairy, provincial liquor rules, procurement in three provinces, customs registration and Alberta electricity. One line reads:

“The impact of Canada’s Online Streaming and Online News Acts for U.S. digital service providers”

In the same statement Greer took credit for the tax: “I have been talking to Canada since April about these issues, and we have succeeded in getting Canada to meaningfully address some of them, including its Digital Services Tax, which would have cost American digital companies billions.”

What Meta itself says, and does not say

Meta’s annual report never names the Online News Act. Across the two most recent filings, roughly 160,000 words, the phrase appears zero times. The block that removed journalism from every Canadian feed gets one sentence, in a risk factor:

“Certain countries and U.S. states have also implemented or proposed legislation that may require us to pay publishers for certain news content shared on our products. For example, as a result of such legislation in Canada, we have ended the availability of news content for Canadian users on Facebook and Instagram.”

It is the mirror image of the trade report. USTR names the law but never the company; Meta names the country but never the law. The phrase “and U.S. states” is new in the most recent filing, which is Meta telling investors the same risk has arrived at home.

What Meta will say out loud, it said in a Canadian committee room. On 22 October 2025, Rachel Curran appeared before the Canadian Heritage committee. She is the same witness who told the Senate in May 2023, of the decision to block news, “Yes, senator. We have made that decision.” Bloc MP Martin Champoux asked whether Meta would reconsider:

Curran: “Look, we would love to bring news content back onto our platforms. I think I said that two years ago, as well. We are hopeful that the government will take another look at that legislation, which we think misrepresents the value exchange between publishers and our platforms… we would love to put news back on our platforms, and we’re hopeful that can happen.”

Champoux: “If I understand you correctly, your position has not changed and you are using the same arguments you used two years ago, despite the situation the news industry finds itself in. Is that correct?”

Curran: “I would say that we have a new government now. I think that the new government is more open to these kinds of discussions, so we’re hopeful we can make some progress with them.”

Three months later Canada confirmed it from the other side. On 28 January 2026 the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, Marc Miller, said his government was in contact with Meta about restoring news. He called the talks “very preliminary” and said “our door, at least Canada’s door, has always been open.” On the law he did not move: “We stand by the value of the two acts.”

The seat beside the president

Meta’s footing in Washington did not merely shift over this period. Its chief executive moved, step by documented step, from a suing adversary of Donald Trump’s movement to the chair beside him at dinner, and because each step is dated, the sequence can be laid out without characterising anyone’s motives.

Set beside that sequence, the Canadian file reads differently than it did in 2023. The years in which Meta’s chief executive acquired this proximity are the same years in which Canada’s digital services tax died with Washington claiming credit, the Online News Act entered the American trade-barriers catalogue, and Ottawa opened preliminary talks about news coming back. Whether any of those outcomes was caused by that proximity is not knowable from public documents, and this article does not claim it. A comparison readers will reach for, whether Zuckerberg now holds the kind of influence over this administration that Elon Musk once exercised from inside it, is not measurable from outside either: Musk held a formal governmental role and then publicly broke with the president in mid-2025; Zuckerberg has never held any role, and his access is documented only as dinners, donations, settlements and seats. What the record supports is narrower and still remarkable: a Canadian committee could not get Meta’s policy chief into a witness chair under summons, and could not get an answer about whether its chief executive was in the room where Canada’s news was switched off — and that same chief executive sat beside the American president at dinner, while the disputes that decide whether Canadians see news again now run through rooms he is welcome in.

Five days after Clegg’s exit, Zuckerberg published the video ending third-party fact-checking in the United States, and closed it this way:

“Finally, we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”

He did not name Canada. The places he named were Europe, Latin America and China. Reading Canada into that sentence would be my inference rather than his statement, so this article does not read it in.

Canada’s Online News Act entered the United States’ catalogue of foreign trade barriers in the edition published on 31 March 2025. It appears in no edition from 2019 to 2024.

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What Canada Cannot See

Blocking news removed journalism from the feed. It did not remove the feed. Meta’s ranking systems still decide what Canadians see on Facebook and Instagram every day, and no Canadian institution has any means of looking at how. That is not a suspicion about anyone’s intentions. It is what four documents establish between them.

Start with the simplest one. Meta publishes a Widely Viewed Content Report, the only recurring public account of what people actually encounter in Feed rather than what is posted. It covers the United States only. There is no Canadian edition, and Meta does not publish how many Canadians use its products. The figures in circulation, the twenty-six millions and the ninety-something percents, are advertising reach estimates, which count accounts an advertiser could pay to reach and not people who exist. This article does not use them.

What the strongest evidence actually supports

Here the honest answer is narrower than the fear, and saying so matters more than the fear does.

The most rigorous work on this question is a set of studies published in Science and Nature in 2023, run on Facebook and Instagram with consenting users during the 2020 United States election. They found that feed algorithms are, in the researchers’ words, extremely influential in what people see. They also found that changing the algorithm for three months did not notably shift political attitudes. Replacing ranking with a plain chronological feed actually increased the untrustworthy content people saw, because Meta’s ranking demotes sources that repeatedly share misinformation, while cutting hateful and intolerant content roughly in half.

So the switch-flipping picture, in which a platform simply decides what a country believes, is not supported by the best evidence available. What is supported is narrower and harder to dismiss: control of exposure is close to total, its effects are contested, and in Canada nobody can measure either. The argument is not that minds are being changed. The argument is that Canada has no instrument that would notice.

What is documented, in Meta’s own words

Two cases are not allegations, because Meta accepted them.

In November 2018 Meta published a human rights impact assessment it had commissioned itself, from the non-profit BSR, into its role in Myanmar. Its own summary of that report concedes: “prior to this year, we weren’t doing enough to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence.” The United Nations fact-finding mission had already found that Facebook was, for most first-time users in that country, the internet itself.

I read the assessment, all 26,252 words of it. The word “algorithm” appears in it once. So does “amplif-”. The company’s own human rights review of the worst case in its history barely examined ranking at all.

In October 2022, in the Tigray Communication Affairs Bureau decision, Meta’s Oversight Board recommended that the company commission an independent human rights assessment of how its platforms had heightened the risk of violence in Ethiopia.

And on 23 April 2025 the same Oversight Board published eleven decisions examining the changes Meta had announced that January. Its finding, on Meta’s own governance body’s letterhead, is that those changes were

“announced hastily, in a departure from regular procedure, with no public information shared as to what, if any, prior human rights due diligence the company performed.”

The Board added that because the changes were rolling out globally, it was now essential that Meta identify and address any adverse human rights impacts. Globally includes Canada. Nothing published since sets out what that assessment found here, or whether one was done.

The case nobody can settle

Iran is the sharpest illustration of the gap, and of why it matters who can look.

Protests began across Iran on 28 December 2025, after the rial collapsed. On 3 January the Supreme Leader called the protesters “rioters” who should be “put in their place.” On 8 January the state launched its crackdown. The killing was concentrated on the 8th and 9th. Amnesty International and the UK House of Commons Library carry death-toll estimates running from roughly 6,500 into the tens of thousands — a spread that is itself a measure of how little can be established from outside — and the authorities cut national internet access the same day. Roughly twelve days of protest, then the massacres, then the lights out.

Instagram was one of the last platforms still reaching Iranians, mostly through VPNs. What their feeds carried across those twelve days, and whether what was surfaced changed as the protests went on, is not knowable from outside. Meta publishes no country-level account of feed composition for Iran, exactly as it publishes none for Canada. Its research API is closed and its terms forbid scraping, so academics report that they cannot obtain the data on content flows that would settle a question like this one.

Two things about that period are on the record. In 2022, during the earlier Woman, Life, Freedom protests, Iranian activists publicly accused Instagram of suppressing their protest accounts and demanded an explanation from Meta. And in April 2026 President Trump said the United States had armed Iranian protesters. The quotation everyone has run — “We sent guns to the protesters, a lot of them. We sent them through the Kurds. And I think the Kurds took the guns” — reaches the public through a Fox News correspondent’s account of a telephone interview, and no recording of that call has been published. Trump then repeated the substance of it in front of reporters at the White House on 6 April. Kurdish groups deny receiving anything: a representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan said, “We did not receive any weapons during the time of the demonstrations in Iran.”

So there is an American president who says his administration armed demonstrators in a foreign uprising — a claim the alleged intermediaries deny, and which nobody has documented either way — a platform that was one of the only channels still reaching that country, and no data anywhere that would let anyone establish what that platform actually showed people. Iranians who lived through it have accounts of what their feeds did. Those accounts cannot be verified. They also cannot be refuted, and Meta has published nothing that would allow either.

Canada is not Iran, and nothing here suggests it is. The relevant likeness is narrower and it is uncomfortable: on the question of what the feed showed the country, Canada is in the same evidentiary position Iran is. No country report, no research access, no regulator with the power to compel an answer. Iran at least has the excuse of being cut off by its own government.

55.3% of Canadians aged 15–24 get their news mainly from social media. Meta publishes a report on what Americans see in their feeds; there is no Canadian edition, and no law in force that could compel one.

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Nineteen Years of Conduct, Forensically Assessed

There is an obvious question underneath all of this. What kind of people keep making these decisions? The honest forensic answer begins by refusing the question in the form it wants to be asked, and the refusal is not squeamishness. It is the discipline itself.

In 1964 a magazine polled 12,356 psychiatrists on whether a sitting United States senator was psychologically fit for the presidency. Of the 2,417 who replied, 1,189 declared a man unfit whom not one of them had ever met. The senator sued and won. The profession responded in 1973 with what is still Annotation 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association’s ethics, the Goldwater Rule: a psychiatrist may not offer a professional opinion about a public figure they have not personally examined. Canadian psychiatry works under the Canadian Medical Association code on the same principle.

The rule is stricter than most people assume, and it cuts in both directions. It covers every professional opinion, not just a diagnosis, which means a psychiatrist may not publicly declare that a public figure is disordered and may not declare that he is not. So no honest forensic section can characterise Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, and no honest forensic section can clear it either. Anyone who offers you either one, about anyone, is telling you something about themselves.

What forensic method does license is the assessment of conduct: a documented record of decisions, measured against what the decision-makers said at the time. That is available here, it runs from 2007 to now, and none of it requires speculation about anybody.

It is worth saying where the clock in that record comes from. Meta has spent most of its corporate life under American privacy supervision. It settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2012. It was penalised in 2019 for breaching that settlement, and the order imposed then is itself a twenty-year order, running to 2039. The company is currently in year seven of it.

The recurring feature of the record

Read down that column of documents and the recurring feature is not a temperament. It is a sequence. Act at scale first. Examine afterwards, if at all. Concede in a report the company commissions itself, years later, once the harm is no longer deniable. And in every instance, leave the ranking system out of the examination.

The 2012 and 2019 rows are the ones that make the rest legible. A company that has been under a federal privacy order since 2012, was fined five billion dollars in 2019 for breaching it, and remains under a replacement order until 2039, is not an organisation that has escaped scrutiny. It is one that has been scrutinised continuously, at enormous cost, and in which the same gap keeps reappearing anyway.

That last point is the one a forensic reader should hold onto, because it is measurable rather than impressionistic. In 2018, reviewing the gravest case in its history, the assessment Meta paid for used the word “algorithm” once in 26,252 words. In 2025, changing its rules for every country at the same time, its own Oversight Board could find no evidence that it had assessed the consequences at all. Seven years apart, in the two documents Meta itself is responsible for, the same thing goes unexamined.

There is an established academic frame for exactly this, and it is about organisations rather than people. The sociologist Diane Vaughan, studying the Challenger launch decision, named the normalisation of deviance: the gradual process by which an unacceptable practice becomes acceptable, because it is repeated without catastrophic consequence until it is simply how things are done. Vaughan pairs it with structural secrecy, where an organisation’s own design prevents anyone inside it from seeing the whole picture. Neither concept requires a diagnosis. Both describe institutions, which is what they were built for, and both are testable against a record.

In the 26,252 words of the human rights assessment Meta commissioned on Myanmar, the word “algorithm” appears once.

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What Is Still Unresolved

Three live matters, each verified against the court or registry record on the day of publication rather than from news coverage. None of them is about the news block. Two concern privacy and one concerns youth harm, and nothing in any of them would compel Meta to restore news to a Canadian feed.

Since the ban, the Government of Canada suspended its own advertising on Meta platforms. Spend fell from $6,876,769 in 2022-23 to $476,271 in 2023-24, a 93.1% collapse. Then it went back: $1,409,238 in 2024-25, while news remained blocked. Neither departmental report explains the reversal, or contains the word “Meta.”

Engagement with news fell 89% in rural areas and mid-sized cities, against 48% in large cities. This is what it looks like when a place stops being told about itself.

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How This Was Researched, and Two Disclosures

Twelve original datasets were built for this piece. (1) 456 House of Commons committee transcripts swept across Canadian Heritage, Industry and Ethics, yielding 251 verbatim speaking turns by five named Meta witnesses, plus the testimony of the publishers, broadcasters and officials quoted throughout; (2) the Senate Transport and Communications record, recovered by brute-forcing 551 Evidence document IDs because the Senate renders its index in JavaScript; (3) Meta’s Canadian revenue, 2016–2025, derived as the residual of two disclosures in the same table of Meta’s own annual report; (4) the federal Lobbying Registry communications file, 199 reports rebuilt from the Commissioner’s bulk data; (5) Statistics Canada’s newspaper, magazine and advertising revenue series, recomputed from the source tables; (6) eight editions of the US Trade Representative’s trade-barriers report, roughly 1.85 million words, sliced and counted by script; (7) all 167 public comments filed to the USTR docket behind that report, downloaded with attachments and searched; (8) Meta’s commissioned human rights impact assessment of Myanmar, read in full and word-counted; (9) the last two Meta annual reports, searched for every mention of Canada and of the law; (10) the complete ledger of every person and firm ever registered to lobby federally for Facebook or Meta, 88 registrations since 2011, joined to each lobbyist’s own prior-public-office disclosures; (11) the scroll-hours-versus-class-hours bracket: five vintages of the Canadian Internet Use Survey harmonised to consistent bands and denominators, the 2022 Time Use Survey’s screen envelope, the 2024 screen-time guideline measures, the 2018 adverse-effects tables corrected to a like-for-like base, and Statistics Canada’s intended-instruction-time table re-summed and validated against its published total; and (12) an original field census of 84 newsroom homepages, Canadian outlets against a non-Canadian control group, with every excluded page named. A further harvest — 395 completed federal access-to-information request summaries mentioning Meta or the Act — is held for future work and available with everything else.

Adversarial review. Before publication this work was attacked in five separate review passes (forensic accounting, forensic law, investigative method, data forensics, and a final pass applying six academic disciplinary standards), each written to a different brief and each barred from reusing the instruments it was auditing. They found errors, several of them mine and substantive. All are printed in the next section, and the most damaging is described rather than quietly fixed. The review files, working scripts and correction log are available to any researcher, journalist or parliamentary staffer who asks.

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What This Article Got Wrong

Six of the twenty errors those review passes found were mine, and substantive. They are printed here rather than quietly fixed, because publishing them is the only way a reader can calibrate everything else on this page.

• I said Meta’s Canadian revenue was unknowable. It has been derivable from filed annual reports since 2016, as described above. It was the biggest error here, and it sat in my own primary source the whole time.
• I promoted a “derived” statistic that Statistics Canada already publishes, and my version was wrong by 16.5 percentage points for seniors. Retracted entirely.
• I dated a court decision a year late and described it as fourteen school boards seeking over $8 billion. It is one board, $1.6 billion, decided 7 March 2025.
• I repeated “Google paid $100M, Meta paid $0” without reading the regulation that makes it misleading.
• I built a measurement of Canadian newsrooms that excluded the wrong pages. My filter was discarding the very outlets that had left Facebook, which biased the result toward my own conclusion. Finding withdrawn.
• I compared two Statistics Canada figures with different denominators as though they were one series.

Two more surfaced after those four passes had finished, when I went back over work I had called done.

• I overstated what one lobbying filing said. A draft reported that Meta listed “proposed digital services tax” as the subject of meetings at Industry and the Prime Minister’s Office on the same day. Going back to the registry rows, that description sits on a single filing, for one meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office. Corrected above.
• I declared a question unanswerable after trying one route. I wrote that I could not determine whether anyone had pushed Washington on this, having been refused by a single database. The trade-barriers report is built from a public comment docket that I had not thought to open. It is now the section above.

And one more, which a reader caught rather than a review.

• I answered a question about Iran that nobody had asked. Told that Instagram’s feed had changed character during the Iranian protests, I replied with Meta’s reports on removing Iranian fake accounts. Those are two different mechanisms, and citing one against the other was a category error. The reader had been in Iran. He was also right on the facts I doubted: the protests ran from 28 December 2025 to the crackdown on 8 January 2026, and President Trump has since said the United States sent guns to Iranian protesters through the Kurds. The section above was rewritten from scratch.

Three more were caught by a final review pass that applied six academic disciplinary standards to the finished draft.

• I credited a statistic to the wrong institution. The finding that 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with one local news source or none belongs to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, not to the Local News Research Project it was sitting under. And the “7% of the country” I attached to it matched no source I could retrieve: against Statistics Canada’s current estimate it is about 6%. Corrected above.
• I called a tax liability “at least” $382.1 million. The tax reached specific categories of digital revenue; the base I applied it to was Meta’s total Canadian revenue, which is larger. The arithmetic was right and the direction word was wrong. It is a ceiling.
• I ran a contested claim without its denial. President Trump’s statement that the United States armed Iranian protesters was in this article for a day without two things a reader needs: that the quotation reaches the public through a correspondent’s account of a telephone call with no recording published, and that Kurdish groups deny receiving anything at all. Both are now in the section above. Leaving the denial out was the same error I criticise Meta’s own reviews for.

An earlier draft also treated a quote from Kevin Chan as though it answered a question it did not answer. That correction is in the section above, where it belongs.

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Questions Readers Ask

Why can’t I see news on Facebook in Canada?

Because Meta blocked it. Since 1 August 2023, news links from Canadian outlets cannot be posted or shared on Facebook or Instagram anywhere in Canada. Meta did this in response to the Online News Act, which would have required it to negotiate payment with news publishers. It is a company decision, not a government censorship order, and it is still in force.

Who decided that Meta should block news in Canada?

Meta has never named an individual. Asked directly at a House of Commons committee on 8 May 2023, Meta’s Global Policy Director Kevin Chan said the decision involved “a number of people” and was “concerning on the global level,” said that Nick Clegg, then President of Global Affairs, “would have been” involved, and said “I don’t know” when asked whether Mark Zuckerberg was involved or whether the board had discussed it.

Did Meta refuse to pay $100 million like Google paid?

No. The regulation setting that figure, SOR/2023-276 section 9(2), applies “if and only if” the company is the search engine with the greatest share of Canadian internet advertising revenue. No monetary figure was ever prescribed for a social media service, and the CRTC has stated that Google Search was the only platform that notified it that the Act applied. Meta was never assessed $100 million.

How much money does Meta make in Canada?

Meta’s Canadian revenue can be derived from its own annual reports, which disclose “United States and Canada” revenue and, in a footnote on the same basis, United States revenue alone. The residual is Canada: approximately CAD $4.20 billion in 2023, $4.76 billion in 2024 and $5.71 billion in 2025, and about $32.99 billion cumulatively from 2016 to 2025.

Did blocking news hurt Meta’s business in Canada?

Not measurably. Meta’s Canadian revenue grew in every year of the ban, and Canadian social-media advertising revenue as a whole grew 26.9% in 2024 to $5.42 billion, according to IAB Canada’s annual revenue survey — the first full calendar year the block was in effect. This is consistent with Meta’s own claim that news made up less than three percent of what users saw.

Has Meta done this anywhere else?

Yes. Facebook blocked news across Australia in February 2021 in response to a similar law, then restored it after the government amended the legislation. Comparing Meta’s published Australian statement with its Canadian one, all five of its core arguments appear in both, including the device of quantifying referral traffic as free marketing.

Who lost the most when news disappeared from Facebook?

Rural and small-town Canada. In the six months after the block, engagement with Canadian news organisations fell 89% in rural areas and mid-sized cities, against 48% in large cities. Researchers note that major financial events at Postmedia, SaltWire and Black Press occurred in the same period, so the decline is not attributable to the ban alone.

Did the Meta news ban affect the 2023 wildfire evacuations?

It ran through them. When almost 22,000 people were ordered out of Yellowknife in August 2023, news links were already blocked, and evacuees described sharing screenshots with the source stripped off so the platform would let information through. BC Premier David Eby publicly asked Meta to lift the ban; Meta declined, noting that government and emergency-service pages remained available, and activated its Safety Check feature. No death has ever been attributed to a blocked link, and this article does not claim one.

How much time do Canadians spend on Facebook and Instagram?

Nobody can say, and that is itself a finding. No Canadian statistical instrument measures platform-level time, and Meta publishes no per-country figure. The honest bracket, from the Canadian Internet Use Survey, puts a Canadian aged 15–24 between 612 and 1,204 hours a year online; a Canadian school year is 923 classroom hours, so a heavy year of scrolling exceeds a year of school. Self-report panels put Canadian social-media time near 13 hours a week, but none isolates Meta’s apps. Separately, 72.2% of Canadians aged 12–17 exceed the national recreational screen-time guideline.

Who lobbies for Meta in Canada?

Since 2011, 88 federal lobbying registrations have been filed for Facebook or Meta across seven firms, per the Commissioner of Lobbying’s registry. During the ban, the recorded work has been done by Meta’s in-house responsible officer Garrick Tiplady and consultants Jill Briggs, Alik Angaladian, Stephanie Ritter and Phil Trinh, whose 53 recorded communications since August 2023 reach the Prime Minister’s Office, the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Artificial Intelligence. The first person ever registered for Facebook, in 2011, was Erin O’Toole, later leader of the Conservative Party.

Is the Online News Act still in force?

Yes. It received royal assent on 22 June 2023 and remains law. Google obtained a five-year exemption by agreeing to fund the Canadian Journalism Collective, which has distributed about $198.8 million over two years. Meta never notified the CRTC that the Act applied to it, and blocks news instead.

Can I still share Canadian news on Facebook somehow?

Not as a link. Canadians commonly work around it by posting screenshots, which strips out the publisher’s attribution, their advertising and any correction they later make. The most reliable alternatives are visiting news websites directly, using a news app, subscribing to newsletters, or following journalists on platforms that still permit links.

Is the Online News Act part of Canada–US trade talks?

Yes. The Act appears in the US Trade Representative’s annual trade-barriers report for the first time in the edition published on 31 March 2025, and again in 2026, described under the heading Mandatory Bargaining Code and marked “the United States continues to monitor this issue.” It appears in no edition from 2019 to 2024. In December 2025 Ambassador Jamieson Greer listed “the impact of Canada’s Online Streaming and Online News Acts for U.S. digital service providers” among the matters the United States wanted resolved ahead of the USMCA joint review. Canada’s position is that the law is not changing, and no Section 301 investigation into Canada has ever been opened.

Who asked the United States to treat the Online News Act as a trade barrier?

Trade associations, on the public record. USTR builds the report from a public comment docket, which took 167 submissions in autumn 2025. Seven organisations named the Online News Act. The most detailed came from the Computer & Communications Industry Association, which urged that “USTR should remain vigilant of action against these two U.S. companies”; Meta is a CCIA member, as is Google. The National Foreign Trade Council and the Coalition of Services Industries told USTR the law “targets specific U.S. companies (namely Meta and Google).” Meta filed nothing under its own name, and one filer, the consumer group Public Citizen, argued against listing the Act at all.

Can anyone in Canada audit what Meta’s algorithm shows Canadians?

No. Meta’s Widely Viewed Content Report, its only recurring disclosure of what people actually see in Feed, covers the United States only, and there is no Canadian edition. The Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, which would have created a Digital Safety Commission with audit powers, died without passing and would not have covered recommendation algorithms in any case. Bill C-27 died too. Political advertising is regulated here, through identity confirmation, disclaimers and a registry required by the Canada Elections Act, but those rules govern what is bought rather than what is ranked.

Could Meta swing Canadian public opinion if it wanted to?

The best available evidence does not support the simple version of that fear. Studies published in Science and Nature in 2023, run with consenting users during the 2020 US election, found feed algorithms are extremely influential in what people see but that three months of algorithm changes did not notably shift political attitudes. A chronological feed even increased untrustworthy content while halving hateful content. What is established is narrower: control of exposure is close to total, its effects are contested, and in Canada nobody can measure either.

Can anyone diagnose Mark Zuckerberg from the outside?

No, and the prohibition is formal. Annotation 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association’s ethics, the Goldwater Rule, has since 1973 barred psychiatrists from offering a professional opinion about a public figure they have not personally examined. It followed a 1964 magazine survey in which 1,189 psychiatrists declared a US senator unfit without meeting him. The rule covers every professional opinion, so it equally bars declaring that a public figure is well. This article offers no opinion about anyone’s psychology and assesses conduct instead: what was decided, on what date, in whose document.

Is Canada talking to Meta about bringing news back?

Yes, and as of publication nothing has been agreed. Marc Miller, Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, said on 28 January 2026 that discussions with Meta were “very preliminary” and that “our door, at least Canada’s door, has always been open to have those discussions.” He also said the government stands by the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act. News remains blocked.

Is there any Canadian court case that could reverse this?

None that would. The live cases involve privacy and youth harm, not the news block. The Supreme Court heard Facebook Inc. v. Privacy Commissioner of Canada on 19 March 2026 and reserved judgment; a Toronto District School Board claim survived a motion to strike in March 2025 with allegations unproven. Nothing before a Canadian court would compel Meta to restore news.

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What This Piece Cannot Tell You

1. Whether Mark Zuckerberg personally decided, or whether Meta’s board discussed it. Meta’s own witness said “I don’t know” to both under direct parliamentary questioning. No document I obtained answers either.
2. What Meta would say now. I did not put these findings to Meta before publication, for the reason given in the disclosure above. That is a genuine limitation.
3. What Meta advertised about Bill C-18. Meta’s Ad Library requires an identity-verified account; every unauthenticated route returned an error. This is a gap I could not close, not an absence of ads.
4. What Meta’s own US lobbying filings say. The Senate lobbying disclosure system returned HTTP 403 to every route I tried. The trade docket above answers a different question, namely who filed a public comment, and it is not a substitute. What Meta reported spending, and on what, in Washington remains unread rather than absent.
5. Whether Meta had any hand in the CCIA submission. Meta is one of about twenty-five CCIA members. No document I obtained shows it directing, drafting or funding that filing, and this article does not suggest it did.
6. How many Canadians use Facebook and Instagram. Meta does not publish it and Statistics Canada does not break out social media use by platform. The figures in circulation are advertising reach estimates, which count reachable accounts rather than people, so this article uses none of them.
7. What Meta’s ranking systems actually show Canadians. No Canadian transparency report exists, no Canadian law compels one, and no regulator can compel an audit. This is unmeasured, which is the point of the section above, and it is not evidence of anything either way.
8. What Canada and Meta are actually discussing. The talks confirmed in January 2026 are described by the minister as preliminary. No terms are public, and this article does not guess at them.
9. Anything about the psychology of any person named here. No individual discussed in this article has been examined by its author, who is not a psychiatrist. Under the professional rule described above, no such opinion would be legitimate in either direction, and none is offered.
10. Anything about motive. The redline before the block, the lobbying that moved departments, the tax that was rescinded: each is set down here as a documented sequence and nothing more. No causal or improper intent is alleged against any person or company.

The law is still law. The block is still on. Learning it was made costs nothing at all.

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The Bottom Line

The block is three years old, it is still on, and 41% of the Canadians living under it know it is there. That is the finding in one sentence. A decision taken outside Canada, defended in a Canadian committee room by a witness who could not say who took it, has held for three years against a country that mostly never noticed it happened.

It has cost Meta nothing anyone can measure. Its Canadian revenue rose in every year of the ban, $4.20 billion, then $4.76 billion, then $5.71 billion. It was never assessed the $100 million it is so often said to have refused, because no dollar figure was ever prescribed for a social media service. The tax that would have taken something on the order of $382 million from it was rescinded hours before the first payment came due. The measurable cost landed somewhere else entirely: engagement with Canadian news down 89% in rural areas and mid-sized cities, against 48% in the big ones. And of the money that did arrive, all of it Google’s, the top tenth of recipients took 77 to 79% while the bottom half split under 5%.

I did not start out looking for any of that. I typed the question a Canadian types, and for “who decided to block news in canada” Google returned nothing at all, while forty-seven suggestions came back for the other seeds and almost every one was some form of why. There is an answer to why. It is a five-plank argument Meta had already run once in Australia, with the Canadian numbers dropped into the Australian sentences. The answer to who is a name Meta has never said out loud, in Parliament or anywhere else. Asked four ways in one hearing, its Global Policy Director said “he would have been” and “I don’t know.”

What has changed since is that the argument left the committee room. The Online News Act now sits in the United States government’s catalogue of foreign trade barriers, put there after trade associations asked for it in submissions anyone can read, and Meta belongs to the association that asked hardest. Ottawa has confirmed it is talking to Meta about news coming back. Meta’s own witness told a Canadian committee in October 2025 that the company would “love to bring news content back,” and that it was hopeful because “we have a new government now.” Nobody has said publicly what that would cost. The law is still law. The block is still on. Both could be settled by people the reader will never meet, in rooms nobody is livestreaming.

And the feed did not go anywhere. What left was the journalism, on the one surface in Canadian life where a country still argues with itself at scale. Meta publishes a report on what its American users actually see and none on what Canadians see. The Canadian law that might have compelled one died twice, and would not have reached the ranking anyway. None of that means anyone is being manipulated, and the strongest experiments say the simple version of that fear is wrong. It means that if it ever happened here, there is no one left in the room who could tell you.

Which is the argument for knowing. Delaney Poitras, evacuated twice in twenty-four hours, did her best to keep her Facebook accurate by hand while protective services knocked on doors that did not answer. Kelsey Worth cut the names of newsrooms off screenshots so the platform would let the information pass. Murray Wood is still doing two hundred newscasts a week into the province everyone else’s schedule has abandoned. None of them was consulted about the decision this article reconstructs, and most of the people it reached will never read the transcripts it came from. A decision that has lasted three years largely because most of the people living under it never learned it was made is a more fragile thing than it looks, and learning it was made costs nothing at all.

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Sources

Every figure traces to one of these, all retrieved and read on 31 August 2026.

1. Parliament of Canada — published committee Evidence, House of Commons (Canadian Heritage, meeting 79, 8 May 2023; meeting 50, 28 October 2022) and the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications, 3 May 2023. 456 transcripts swept; 251 Meta witness turns extracted.
2. Meta Platforms Inc. — Forms 10-K filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Note 2 (Revenue) and the risk factor “Our CEO has control over key decision making.”
3. Meta newsroom — “Meta’s position on Canada’s Online News Act” (8 May 2023, publishing Nick Clegg’s undelivered statement); “The Real Story of What Happened With News on Facebook in Australia” (24 February 2021, by Nick Clegg).
4. Online News Act — S.C. 2023, c. 23, and the Application and Exemption Regulations, SOR/2023-276, s. 9(2).
5. Statistics Canada — tables 21-10-0191-01 and 21-10-0043-01 (newspaper publishers), 21-10-0033-01 (advertising services), 21-10-0196-01 (advertising by format), 18-10-0005 (CPI).
6. Courts — Canada (Privacy Commissioner) v. Facebook, Inc., 2024 FCA 140; Supreme Court of Canada docket 41538; Toronto District School Board v Meta Platforms Inc., 2025 ONSC 1499.
7. Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada — registry open data: the monthly communication reports (199 Facebook/Meta rows, 2011–2025) and the registrations exports (88 Facebook/Meta registrations with named lobbyists, firms and each lobbyist’s own prior-public-office disclosures), both rebuilt by script for this article.
8. Wildfire coverage, August 2023 — CBC News, “N.W.T. wildfire evacuees say Facebook’s news ban ‘dangerous’ in emergency situation” (Pete Evans, 18 August 2023 — the Poitras, Worth, Alty, Williams and Troya-Alvarez quotes); The Canadian Press via CBC, Premier Eby’s 21 August 2023 briefing; Al Jazeera, 29 August 2023 (the Prime Minister’s quote). CBC News, Métro Média’s closure, 11 August 2023.
9. Parliamentary testimony on the block’s impact — House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage: 45-1 meeting 30, 14 April 2026 (Murray Wood; Hebdos Québec) and meeting 32, 21 April 2026 (Brandon Gonez; Rachael Thomas); 44-1 meeting 105, 14 December 2023 (Jeff Elgie); 44-1 meeting 101, 28 November 2023 (Michael Geist).
10. Statistics Canada, main source of news and trust in news by age — table 45-10-0103-01, shares recomputed for this article and validated to sum to 100% in all eight age bands; the same table carries the average trust-in-news ratings by age.
11. Statistics Canada, the hours — Time Use Survey 2022, table 45-10-0104-01 (daily hours by activity and age); Canadian Internet Use Survey, table 22-10-0136-01 (weekly internet hours, five vintages harmonised and denominator-corrected for this article); table 13-10-0969-01 (2024 screen-time guideline adherence); tables 22-10-0114-01 and 22-10-0142-01 (2018 adverse effects of social networking, recompared on a like-for-like base for this article); table 35-10-0002-01 (police-reported cybercrime, reconciled national-to-provincial); and Education Indicators in Canada, 81-604-X, intended instruction time re-summed and validated to within one hour of the published Canada total.
12. Newsroom social-link census — original field measurement, 31 August 2026: 50 Canadian outlet homepages against a 34-outlet non-Canadian control, four fetch outcomes tracked separately, every excluded page named in the dataset. The Facebook comparison is retracted in What This Article Got Wrong; the Bluesky and WhatsApp differences are reported with the multiple-comparisons caveat stated in the text.
13. The Zuckerberg–Washington sequence — Forbes, the $1M inaugural donation and Mar-a-Lago dinner (12 December 2024); PBS NewsHour, the $25M settlement (January 2025); Al Jazeera, inauguration seating (21 January 2025); CBS News, the 4 September 2025 White House dinner; Business Standard, the hot-mic exchange; CNBC, the 18 November 2025 FTC ruling; NPR, on Careless People.
14. Media Ecosystem Observatory (McGill) — The News Canadians Actually See, Summer 2026. Counts used; conclusions mine.
15. CRTC — Broadcasting Regulatory Policy 2024-262 and the Commission’s report under s. 86 of the Act.
16. Public Services and Procurement Canada — Annual Report on Government of Canada Advertising Activities, 2022-23 through 2024-25.
17. Local News Research Project, Toronto Metropolitan University — local news map data, as at October 2025: 603 outlets closed across 388 communities since 2008. Its running count has risen since; the figures here are the October 2025 snapshot. The separate finding that 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with one local news source or none is the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’, March 2025.
18. IAB Canada — 2024 Internet Ad Revenue Survey and 2025 Forecast (October 2025): total Canadian internet advertising $18.20 billion, social media $5.42 billion, up 26.9% year over year.
19. Office of the United States Trade Representative — National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers, 2024, 2025 and 2026 editions, Canada chapters; and the Section 301 digital services tax investigations page.
20. Ambassador Jamieson Greer — opening statement to the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees on the operation of the USMCA, 16–17 December 2025; and his statement on the USMCA joint review, 1 July 2026.
21. The White House — presidential memorandum, “Defending American Companies and Innovators From Overseas Extortion and Unfair Fines and Penalties”, signed 21 February 2025.
22. Government of Canada — Joint Review of the Canada–United States–Mexico Agreement. Minister Marc Miller’s remarks on talks with Meta, 28 January 2026, as reported by Global News.
23. USTR public comment docket — USTR-2025-0016, “Request for Comments on Significant Foreign Trade Barriers for the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report”: all 167 comments and attachments retrieved and searched. Principal filings cited: Computer & Communications Industry Association, National Foreign Trade Council, Coalition of Services Industries, Information Technology Industry Council and Public Citizen. CCIA membership from its own members page.
24. USTR, earlier action — “United States Requests USMCA Dispute Settlement Consultations on Canada’s Digital Services Tax”, 30 August 2024.
25. House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage — 45th Parliament, 1st Session, meeting 8, 22 October 2025: testimony of Rachel Curran and Kevin Chan, Meta.
26. Meta transparency and governance — Widely Viewed Content Report (United States only); quarterly Adversarial Threat Reports; BSR, Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar (commissioned by Meta, November 2018); board appointments, 6 January 2025.
27. Oversight Board — Tigray Communication Affairs Bureau, 2022-006-FB-MR (4 October 2022); and the eleven decisions of 23 April 2025 addressing Meta’s January 2025 policy changes.
28. Peer-reviewed algorithm research — “How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?”, Science (2023), and the companion papers in Science and Nature from the US 2020 Facebook and Instagram Election Study.
29. Canadian legislative record — Bill C-63, Online Harms Act (44th Parliament, did not pass); Bill C-27; and Elections Canada, registry requirements for political ads on online platforms.
30. Iran, 2025–2026 — Amnesty International on the January 2026 crackdown; UK House of Commons Library research briefing, Iran protests 2026. President Trump’s statement that the United States armed protesters: the quotation originates in Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst’s account of a telephone interview, for which no recording has been published; Trump repeated the substance before reporters at the White House on 6 April 2026. Reporting and the Kurdish denials, Al Jazeera and Snopes, April 2026. Iranian activists’ 2022 allegation that Instagram suppressed protest accounts, Iran International, 23 October 2022.
31. On researcher access — Meta’s research tools and datasets, and the academic literature on platform data access, including “Addressing social media platforms’ influence on academic research”, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
32. Professional ethics — American Psychiatric Association, the Goldwater Rule (Annotation 7.3, in force since 1973); the Canadian Psychiatric Association applies the Canadian Medical Association code.
33. US Federal Trade Commission — “FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook” (24 July 2019), and the accompanying order fact sheet, for the 2012 order, the 2019 penalty and the twenty-year term running to 2039.
34. Organisational analysis — Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA (University of Chicago Press, 1996), for the normalisation of deviance and structural secrecy.
35. Google autocomplete demand harvest, 31 August 2026, ten seeds, 47 suggestions recorded verbatim. Raw file available on request.

Written by Milad Ghobadibeygvand, BScN (Western University, 2014), co-founder of Zeus eBikes Canada. This is a Civic Duty essay. It contains no product recommendations and nothing on this page is for sale. Corrections and challenges are welcome and will be published: milad@zeusebikes.ca.

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