First, Google and Facebook both put out articles explaining why the act is harmful and what steps they would take against it.
After some months, Google eventually caved and agreed to pay money to Canadian news organizations to keep the ability to link to news content in search results.
Facebook, on the other hand, started banning links to all news sites, Canadian or not. But they way they did it is very heavy-handed yet imprecise. Various "soft news" and industry-sponsored sites don't get banned, creating an artificial class divide. I don't think there's a legal requirement for Facebook to pay to display non-Canadian news, but they're banning international news anyway. When browsing the site, the shadow-banning of news for Canadian viewers creates a split-brain syndrome in big international discussion groups, where people outside of Canada can still see certain posts/comments/links but Canadians don't see them. Old posts, even from yourself, are retroactively hidden and you can't even see them, not even with a placeholder.
People in Canada, when discussing among each other and not with international peers, work around the news-sharing issues by posting screenshots of the news article or obfuscating the URL so that the text is obvious to a human viewer but not obvious to the machine.
Finally, the banning of news links on Facebook sparks continual debate in groups and among friends over big tech, power, money, journalism, and government. It splits opinion down the middle, where some people think big tech companies have too much power and the government was right to force them to pay for journalism, and other people think that linking is a fundamental freedom of speech and that we should never pay or be extorted for the act of referencing content.