Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is wrong about Bill C-18 making news disappear. .“Facebook doesn’t want to pay their fair share and are making news disappear,” tweeted St-Onge on Wednesday..“Pierre Poilievre continues to stand up for the tech giants instead of Canada’s free and independent press.”.St-Onge was commenting on Poilievre saying Bill C-18’s implications are becoming “more and more surreal.” .“A government law is making news disappear from the internet,” said Poilievre. .“When Trudeau said he admired ‘China’s basic dictatorship,’ he meant it.” .Western Standard columnist and show host Cory Morgan said there was “no throttling of news links before [the government] tried to shake down platforms with C-18.”.“Now they have stopped posting the links,” said Morgan. ."The cause was your f*cking bill." .Rally Public Affairs founder Stephen Taylor said Facebook paying its fair share is a stretch when it has the choice of doing business in a regulated space. .“Facebook has chosen not to,” said Taylor. .“It is irresponsible to knowingly lie about what a business owes the government when that business has indicated they will follow the law.”.Meta made good on its threats to restrict access to news sites because of Bill C-18 on July 18. .READ MORE: Meta begins throttling Canadian news outlets, including Western Standard.If people were trying to access the Western Standard on an iPhone, they might have received a message which read “In response to Canadian government legislation, news content can’t be viewed in Canada.”.The restrictions appear to be selective at this point, depending on platform, device, and operating system.
