A Third Year of the Same Bargain
The Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC-CCJ) — the nonprofit the CRTC designated to distribute Google's Online News Act payments — is preparing to open its Settlement Year 3 application portal in October 2026. Over the summer it ran eligibility and claims webinars aimed at different sectors of the news industry, and it is now hiring Claims Verification Agents to process the next round of applications. Mechanically, this is the system working as designed: a third consecutive year of claims intake, verification, and disbursement under a framework that has now been running since late 2024.
That framework traces back to a specific trade. On October 28, 2024, the CRTC approved Google's application for a five-year exemption from the Online News Act's default bargaining and arbitration regime, in exchange for Google paying $100 million annually, indexed to inflation, into the CJC (CRTC decision 2024-262, via Canada.ca). Over a five-year exemption term, that is roughly $500 million in nominal terms. The CJC's own eligibility rules flow from Section 27 of the Online News Act itself, which defines an "eligible news business" as, broadly, either a CRTC-licensed broadcaster, a qualified journalism organization under the Income Tax Act, or an outlet employing at least two journalists in Canada that is not focused on a specialized topic like sports or lifestyle (Online News Act, S.C. 2023, c. 23).
The Case for the Fund
The strongest argument for this arrangement is not abstract. Local and regional newsrooms in Canada have shed jobs for two decades as digital advertising migrated to a handful of platforms that carry news content without paying to produce it. A stable, indexed, five-year funding commitment — administered by an industry collective rather than negotiated outlet-by-outlet — gives smaller and independent newsrooms a predictable revenue line that ordinary market bargaining was never going to produce for them individually. According to reporting from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, the CJC now distributes funds to over 400 eligible news organizations, with allocations weighted toward newsroom size and reporting hours rather than a flat per-outlet split — a design meant to route money toward outlets that actually employ journalists, not shell operations chasing a subsidy (Reuters Institute).
Where the Mechanism Falls Apart
But a well-run distribution mechanism is not the same thing as a policy success, and the Act's original goal — restoring the bargaining position of Canadian news publishers vis-à-vis the platforms that carry their links — has not been achieved for the platform that mattered more to publisher traffic. Meta responded to the Online News Act, which received royal assent on June 22, 2023, by blocking all news content on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users starting August 1, 2023, and that block remains in effect three years later. Google took the opposite path: rather than fight, it negotiated the collective $100 million exemption and continues to carry news links as before. The law's actual effect, then, has been to convert one platform's compliance into a redistribution fund while the other platform simply exited the news-linking business in Canada entirely — a bifurcated outcome the statute's drafters did not intend and cannot undo, since Meta's exemption is a business choice, not a status the CRTC can compel.
The distribution formula itself has also drawn criticism for who it favors within the fund. Legal analysis of the CRTC's implementation, published by University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, noted that the commission calculated eligible headcounts using only employees who receive Canadian T4 tax slips, which excludes freelance and contract journalists — a decision that tilts money toward larger, more traditionally structured newsrooms and away from the leaner outlets the fund was partly meant to help (Michael Geist). Broadcasters also see caps that written media do not: CBC's share is capped and private broadcasters face a ceiling, while roughly two-thirds of the money flows to print and digital outlets, according to reporting on the CRTC order's terms (The Globe and Mail).
What Year 3 Actually Tests
Entering a third settlement year without a change in Meta's posture, and without a public reckoning over the T4-only eligibility rule, means the CJC's hiring of Claims Verification Agents and its eligibility webinars are optimizing the wrong variable. The administrative machinery is getting more efficient at sorting an already-fixed $100 million pool among applicants; it is not creating new leverage over the platform that actually mattered most for Canadian publishers' referral traffic. A proportionate fix would decouple journalism funding from platform-specific bargaining leverage altogether — direct tax credits or a broad-based media fund, already partially in place through Canada's existing journalism labour tax credit, achieve redistribution without requiring a platform to either pay a toll or exit a market. The Online News Act's link-tax model, by contrast, has now produced three straight years of evidence that a mandatory-bargaining threat can be priced and negotiated away by a large platform (Google) or simply absorbed as an opportunity cost by another (Meta) — and neither outcome restores the open link-sharing the law's proponents said they wanted.
The 2024 CRTC order permits the CJC to "annually admit additional eligible Canadian news businesses that did not respond to the initial open call," meaning the applicant pool — and the slices each recipient gets — will keep shifting every settlement year, including this one.
For Canadian newsrooms, Year 3 will bring the same check, cut along the same disputed lines, from the same single platform. For the broader project of restoring competitive balance between platforms and publishers, the last three years suggest the Online News Act bought a subsidy, not a fix.