As an entrepreneur and the very proud third-generation owner of Le Courrier de Saint-Hyacinthe — founded in 1853 and the oldest French language newspaper in North America — and several other newspapers in Quebec, I and my family are personally and professionally invested in the future of news media in Canada.

A year ago, after careful deliberations, parliamentarians passed the Online News Act. The premise behind the act is that huge online search and social media companies benefit from the news content our journalists produce and they should pay us fair compensation for the value of that original news content. Meta decided it didn’t want to pay, so it walked away. Google, on the other hand, took a more professional approach. As a result, Google will pay Canadian news businesses $100 million annually, indexed to inflation.