Google & Meta send their money to the shareholders in NYC that own 85% of Australian media, not to the journalists in Australia. Simlilarly Bill C-18 will be a windfall for a little NJ company.
Heck if they only remove Canadian news that Bill C-18 defines as "news" then most of us probably won't even notice! One thing that doesn't get discussed enough is the narrow definition of news within C-18. Most of my news won't see a penny, because they're just rando web sites even though most of them are seasoned investigative journalists who lost their jobs (see my previous post re: hedge funds).
Hedge funds are the problem - look who owns the owners of Canadian newspapers and you'll see why newspapers are suffering. Shareholders want to see cash flow and if you can't get it selling subscriptions and classifieds, or getting a bailout to not cut staff or close papers, then you convince your buddies to pass a law forcing some other rich company to give you some of their cash flow. Google and FB are the current evil-du-jour so they pin this one on them.
I'm of a similar mind.
My time online is limited, and if Threads ends up having the most interesting stuff then that's where I'll spend my limited time. If I can follow users from Threads over at mstdn.ca then I would very likely stick with the Fediverse to get the best of both worlds. I'm mostly a content consumer so I go where the content is.
Also, I don't really think Threads and Lemmy are a good match, if Threads is more a Twitter substitute then I think Mastadon is a better match (and all micro-blog class Fediverse platforms). So I suspect not many people will use Lemmy to follow anyone/thing from Threads, defederating them won't have much practical effect.