News Media Canada: Canadians Want Federal Government to Halt Theft of News Content by AI Companies

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seventy-one per cent of Canadians agree the Government of Canada should take action to prevent artificial intelligence companies from taking and repackaging news content without permission or providing compensation, according to a new survey conducted for News Media Canada.

“Canadians want the federal government to halt the theft of news content by AI companies, and there are immediate concrete steps the government can take,” said Paul Deegan, president and chief executive officer of News Media Canada.

“First, the Minister of Industry should direct the Competition Bureau to conduct a market study into the state of competition with respect to search and AI, with a view to separating Google’s crawler into separate crawlers – one for AI and one for search.

Second, the Government should clearly indicate that the Copyright Act will not be amended to include a text and data mining exception.

Third, Public Services and Procurement Canada and Treasury Board should work together to ensure those on the Government of Canada’s list of interested artificial intelligence suppliers commit to the principles of transparency, consent, and attribution with respect to all copyright-protected news content.”

“Real news, created by real journalists, involves fact-gathering, fact-checking, as well as editorial and legal review, and that costs publishers like me real money,” said Dave Adsett, chair of News Media Canada and owner of The Wellington Advertiser.

“We fully support building safe, trusted, and fair AI systems so long as they are not built and maintained at the expense of those who create the underlying intellectual property that feeds them.”

The online survey of 2,404 adult Canadians was conducted by Totum Research between December 2025 and January 2026. The maximum margin of error is ±2.0% at the 95% confidence level.

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News Media Canada represents more than 500 trusted news titles in every province and territory. For more information, visit www.newsmediacanada.ca.