How E-commerce is Shaping the Future of USA Retail

What can the provincial governments do about thisWith $10-a-day child care becoming a reality across Canada, provincial governments should act quickly to mitigate the program's anticipated regressive effects. Policymakers should consider implementing the following policies:Cash subsidies for alternative care in areas with a low concentration of $10-a-day centers: As B.C.'s experience shows, there will undoubtedly be significant regional inequalities in the implementation of $10-a-day child care. These inequalities could take years to balance out. Meanwhile, provincial governments should provide funding to finance alternative child-care arrangements (such as at-home care or relative care) in underserved areas.Reserve a quota of spots for 24-hour centers and those in low-population-density locations. White-collar metropolitan workers with traditional nine-to-five hours should not be the only ones who profit from $10-a-day child care. Policymakers should consider the demands of parents with unpredictable work schedules, as well as those who reside outside of urban areas, when deciding where to open new $10-a-day locations.Rahim Rahim Mohamed is a senior editor and contributing writer at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.The Hub has redesigned an alternative version of the Online News Act for you to read. Click here to learn more about the Horse and Buggy Act.

Late Friday afternoon, the Trudeau government issued. 

draft regulations that provide additional policy expression to its contentious Bill C-18 (Online News Act).Readers may recall that newly enacted legislation forces Google and Meta to form into voluntary arrangements with Canadian news media companies to "compensate" them for their material, or risk binding agreements imposed by the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunication Commission.The much-anticipated regulations, which aim to provide greater clarity about how the legislation will be implemented, including the formula for calculating the companies' liabilities and the parameters for their "voluntary" compliance, are unable to overcome the legislation's flawed assumptions.If anything, they highlight an insurmountable challenge for the government: prescribing the complexities of business-to-business relationships through law and regulation effectively transforms private companies into instruments of public policy, with significant implications for policy outcomes, public accountability, and market functioning.There is a good-faith debate about whether current challenges in journalism are signs of a market failure requiring policy intervention, or a messy yet normal market-based process of rationalizing outdated business models in light of new technologies and evolving consumer preferences. We believe there are valid reasons on both sides.The government has clearly supported the former. The fact that it is already providing direct subsidies to "qualified" media firms through payroll tax relief equal to 25 percent of their newsroom expenditures demonstrates its belief in the need for government action. The twist in the Online News Act is that it effectively outsources the implementation of government policy to private platforms, including, as we'll see, the decision on which media companies should receive financial support.

It strikes us as a deeply poor approach. 

to addressing (seen) market inefficiencies. If the government feels that the state has a role to play in supporting Canadian media, it should take action. Canadians can dispute the government's decision and eventually pass judgment during a future election. This is how democratic policymaking is intended to work.There is something strange about delegating responsibility for the government's policy decisions to two private businesses on the dubious grounds that they "owe" the Canadian news industry for dominating the digital advertising market.If we follow the government's logic here consistently, we may imagine innumerable cases in which new start-ups that outcompete older companies and industries are required to compensate those they've displaced. As we joked at The Hub today, that would be the same as asking Ford and Studebaker to compensate the horse and buggy business over a century ago simply because they provided consumers with something better and more valued. If we had done this, we might have been feeding horses this morning rather of relaxing after the long drive back from the cabin over Labor Day weekend.The government's "steel-manned" argument is that the Act aims to build a "market mechanism" to sustain the news media sector rather than relying entirely on government subsidies. The difficulty with such an argument is that it confuses market-based transactions with those legislated, monitored, and sanctioned by the government. It is not a "voluntary commercial agreement" if it begins and finishes with the government.

The Act effectively transforms Google and Meta. 

into public policy instruments by leveraging the government's legislative and regulatory authorities. Any financial agreements they strike with publishers under the Act are scarcely market arrangements because they must adhere to the government's guidelines and ultimately obtain CRTC approval. Such contributions should so be seen as an indirect government subsidy. The only significant distinction between a legislative subsidy and a direct subsidy is that the former is funded by the legislature rather than the public purse.The practical differences are primarily semantic. Simply think about it. If the government legislates that the companies must enter into financial agreements with the journalism industry, and then regulates how much they must compensate the industry and the detailed parameters that dictate with whom and under what terms they must enter into agreements, and then grants itself final approval that the agreements are satisfactory based on various criteria, including if they "provide fair compensation", "ensure an appropriate portion of the compensation Google and Meta may theoretically write the checks, but Ottawa, for all intents and purposes, decides where they go.