I disagree with this sentiment, to some extent.

For industries and areas considered critical to national security / functions, they ought to extend and enforce a Canadian content like requirement for the sector ownership structure. That is to say, you’d define news sources / papers as an area of national interest, and require that at least 51% (or some other percent) of that industry’s stakeholders are Canadian citizens / organizations.

Blocking all foreign ownership of media is not the direction I would want to go, though I would like it to be transparent about its ownership structure, so that readers can make an informed decision about potential ownership biases in the content they read.

I also wouldn’t be opposed to the Government keeping track of a formal list of licensed News Agencies / Papers, with their ownership structures and official sites. Not only would that make different smaller/local papers easier to find / add to feeds, but it would help in weeding out the “fake” (ie made by unknown/questionable sources) sites. Businesses have to get licenses to operate anyway, so I don’t imagine this would be something too difficult to sort out for the Govt IT folks. Any information they’d require to make it work could be added to the licensing process pretty easily I imagine, and they could theoretically provide options for businesses to update their information in the event of things like site/domain name changes etc (if they expand it beyond just news agencies). They could even tie this in to the ACSS system, or Interac E-Transfers, to flag vendors that have Canadian hosted online payments available, for people wanting to avoid US card networks like Mastercard/Visa. As many business licenses are handled at a municipal level, you’d have in person verification options for all of these items, which could help cut down on potential fraud and abuse. Main hurdle would likely be sorting out how to have the information presented to end users, but if it used a federated approach with clusters for each municipality, province, nation-wide, and international, allowing users to opt in to whichever lists they wanted to reference/search for products, I imagine that sort of an approach could work… ? And honestly, might even give better results for marketing/connecting businesses and customers than something like Google or the existing search engines.

I admit I haven’t really dug into what’s online related to business licences etc as part of this, though I’m fairly sure we don’t have something like that. If it exists I’d welcome some insight.