Honestly, I don't know what the lawmakers expected. The bill is dumb. It'd be perfectly fine to require payment for copying a substantial amount of a new article (eg, if they want to prevent google from offering a public cache that gets around paywalls). But the bill outright requires paying to link to Canadian news sites in search results. That's outright madness.
Y'all can hate google and meta all you want. That's totally fine. I encourage you to use competing search engines (it's bad that Google has a near monopoly). But this bill is a bad bill.
The folks on this site might know about alternatives, but the average person doesn't. When the average person can't find Canadian news sites on Google, they're not going to switch to duck duck go or whatever. They're going to just use a non Canadian site. This bill is going to hurt Canadian news companies and it's disappointing to see people cheering it on because you're happier to see Google and meta hurt than you are sorry to see Canadian news sites hurt...
Yuuup. I think some of it is an American export (what with their politics being so...oh, you know), but also we just plain haven't done enough ourselves. I mean, the rhetoric PP is using stokes these kinda flames too.