This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, January 28, 2025
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Canada’s media are fighting hard to keep their government subsidies
I always expected that the closer we got to a federal election, the more we would hear from taxpayer-subsidized media about the menace posed by a change in government.
So it was no surprise when the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) got the ball rolling with an analysis by Delacorte Fellow Lauren Watson headlined: “Bracing for Poilievre—Canada’s likely next prime minister threatens to gut the country’s press.” Yes, CJR is American and not subsidized by the Government of Canada. But, like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show was for Mark Carney, it’s as good a place as any to launch a campaign.
The author interviewed a chorus line of respectable left-leaning sources concerning Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s vow to “make sure the government does not use tax dollars to leverage news coverage in its favour,” noting that “Canada’s press ecosystem—both for-profit and nonprofit—largely depends on public support.
“Poilievre wants things to work differently,” Watson writes, by letting “media make money winning eyeballs and earlobes.”
Imagine.
Watson opens by quoting a distressed Richard Hartley of the Lake Report, the Niagara weekly that achieved a national profile by taking Poilievre to task on its publicly-funded pages after he “started bashing” the concept of subsidized media.
She then works through the “defund the CBC” issue and vividly describes how the Canada Periodical Fund and Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) are “liable to come under Poilievre’s knife” before offering the insights of Dru Jay of The Breach. Jay sees earning revenue based on the merit of a platform’s quality as “the least progressive way to fund news…Because you’re not incentivizing journalism. You’re incentivizing moneymaking.”
Next up was Linda Solomon-Wood, founder of Canada’s National Observer. She sees no difference between journalists depending on politicians to fund their jobs and the subsidization of the auto or energy industries. The Narwhal and The Tyee are also mentioned, with the publisher of the latter, Jeanette Ageson, pointing out that subsidies provide less than 20 percent of income and—to her credit—noting “we wouldn’t go out of business” if they were withdrawn.
On the other hand, journalism researcher and activist Marc Edge, claims that if Poilievre sticks to his principles, the media will experience “an extinction-level event.”
Goodness me. Imagine the struggle to maintain the will to live in a world without the National Observer, The Breach, The Narwhal, and The Lake Report.
The CJR analysis does not mention the journalists and platform owners (including The Hub) that last year signed the Ottawa Declaration repudiating government funding as an offence to the integrity of the craft and public trust in it. I was among them.
It also fails to mention that when the Journalism Labour Tax Credit (JLTC) and LJI were introduced in 2019 they were intended to only be active for a five-year period to help the industry transition to the digital age. Instead, proving the veracity of Milton Friedman’s assertion that “nothing is more permanent than a temporary government program,” both initiatives have been doubled, extended, and supplemented.
Nor was consideration given to the prescient words of The Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne, who is among those who signed the Ottawa Declaration. Referencing his earlier prediction that “before long” the industry would “be back for more,” he wrote the following in 2019 for the National Post:
I had thought two, maybe three years after we had gotten used to taking money from the people we write about and had discovered that, far from solving our problems, it had only encouraged us to put off dealing with them. I had not imagined our sense of entitlement would already have grown so bloated that we would be sticking out our hands for more even before we had pocketed the first dollar.
What the Columbia Journalism Review produced was not a balanced analysis. It was a one-sided polemic and a poor example of journalism. At the time of writing it has not responded to my request that it publish a rebuttal. But, lest I be too harsh, it has done a wonderful job of illustrating how swiftly and deeply Canadian journalism organizations have become entitled to their abhorrent entitlements and the gusto with which they will fight to retain them.
Playing the Hitler card
Not to be outdone, the Hill Times —described by Blacklock’s Reporter as the nation’s most heavily subsidised weekly—has weighed in with a full-blooded Erica Ifill column laden with Nazi symbolism, describing a world in which Hitler-like Poilievre has become prime minister.
Headlined “Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome,” the commentary raised the spectre of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Nazi authoritarianism and suggested Poilievre intended to “subvert legislative power and judicial independence.”
Blacklock’s, an Ottawa Declaration signatory, reported that the Hill Times has received $620,137 in federal grants since 2022, not including JLTC benefits which can be as much as $29,750 per newsroom employee.
Western justice
Last week I wrote about journalists’ general lack of interest in an Alberta Press Gallery member being banned from covering Mark Carney’s Liberal leadership campaign launch. Since then, the Canadian Association of Journalists noted its “concern” in a Tweet. But when I last checked there was nothing on its website, nor had it reached out to the reporter, James Snell, to ask about his eviction from the event’s premises by an armed police officer. Nice.
Peter Menzies is a commentator and consultant on media, a Macdonald-Laurier Institute Senior Fellow, a past publisher of the Calgary Herald, and a former vice chair of the CRTC
