Canadian Heritage Minister insists that the federal government is still working to bring Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta back to the negotiating table to negotiate a deal to compensate Canadian news organizations as part of the controversial Online News Act’s regulatory process.

The Bill C-18, or the Online News Act, was passed in June, and it sets a framework requiring giant digital companies like Google and Meta to develop agreements with Canadian news sites to compensate them for hosting their journalistic content on their platforms.

Meanwhile, Pascale Saint-Onge – who was appointed to oversee negotiations on Bill C-18 with Google on behalf of the government – told CTV’s Question Period host, Vassy Kapelos, in an interview aired on Sunday, that she is still willing to bargain with Meta.

Saint-Onge said: "We are still looking at everything we can do to try to bring Meta back to the table." "And of course, my door is always open."

In response to the legislation, Meta began blocking Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram this summer, while Google threatened to do the same and block certain news content from its search engine.

However, the federal government announced this week that it reached an agreement with Google, under which the tech giant will pay $100 million annually to publishers, adjusted for inflation, and will continue to allow access to Canadian news content on its platform.

She also said: "But what I can say is that Meta, yes, decided to block news in Canada, but we see that they do this around the world," citing examples of Meta’s different rules and agreements with Australia. and some European countries as examples. She added: "So this also seems to be a business decision by Mark Zuckerberg to leave his platform open to misinformation and disinformation, and I think the public should be very concerned about that."

Reuters reported in August that data from various independent tracking companies showed that Meta’s ban on news links on its platforms in Canada "had almost no impact on Canadians' use of Facebook."

When pressed on what should be inferred from data showing that Meta’s blocking of Canadian news on its platforms did not affect the company’s bottom line, St-Onge said the tech giant still has to negotiate with the government as Google did.

She said: "We passed the bill because it is important that platforms that make money from Canadian content compensate the newsrooms that create that content." "Meta made a bad decision, in my opinion, their platform would be much better with news on it."

On Wednesday, Saint-Onge also told Kapelos on the Power Play program on CTV News that she "has had conversations" with Meta, but "Facebook has made it very clear that they are against the principle of compensating the news sector for the value they provide."

She also said she met with Rachel Curran, Head of Public Policy at Meta Canada, to discuss this issue, and reiterated that “her door is always open.”

LaVenture also repeated the company’s position that completely pulling Canadian news from its platforms is "the only reasonable way to comply with the Online News Act."

The legislation comes into effect on December 19.