This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, March 11, 2026
When Canada’s failing newspapers first lobbied for subsidies from a government with a deep affection for the practice, it at least did so with a sense of humility.
“There does need to be a deadline” to mark the end of subsidies, said Bob Cox, then-chair of News Media Canada and publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, in testimony before the House of Commons Finance Committee on May 15, 2019.
Speaking of the need for “temporary” tax credits during a time of digital “transition” 20 years too late for an industry going under the wheels of the internet, Cox said, “The program itself is envisioned to be for five years.
“Deadlines can focus you and get you moving to where you aren’t moving now,” Cox said. “I don’t like the idea of a long-term subsidy for newspapers that became permanent.”
Seven years later, the deadline has long since passed and the only transition that has occurred is that which turned a fiercely independent industry into a distrusted ward of the state.
As Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, aka The Food Professor, recently put it in an X post, “I’ve worked with the media for nearly 25 years. For most of that time, the relationship was professional and balanced. But in recent years, something has shifted….
“I now find myself learning more about Canada’s economy and policy changes from American outlets than from Canadian ones. Much of our national coverage feels reactive, shallow, or overly fixated on partisan narratives rather than substantive policy analysis.”
In other words, while many political reporters always struggled to understand economics, there’s a sense that despite the more than $1 billion spent so far to subsidize news media’s “transition,” newsrooms aren’t getting any sharper.
Certainly there are exceptions. Although they are increasingly few, some media (The Hub, an excellent source of policy analysis, is among them) have chosen, on principle, not to soil their reputation by accepting the government’s warm embrace. But the rest have not only accepted it as the permanent state that made Cox nervous in 2019, they’re looking to embed it, wallow in it, and take its direction.
Take the words of Rod Sims, former head of Australia’s competition bureau and a big promoter of Canada’s disastrous Online News Act. Writing last month in the National Post, Sims admitted that there was a “significant design flaw” in the Online News Act, but it wasn’t the fact that it was based on a ridiculous notion—that Meta was “stealing” wildly popular newspaper posts—that troubled him.
The problem, as Sims sees it, is not that the Online News Act insists that wealthy social media companies compensate newspapers every time they post a news link—for free—on their platforms. Nor is it that, due to that outrageous demand, Meta banned the posting of newslinks in Canada at an estimated annual cost of $200 million to the industry.
No. The problem, he wrote (while neglecting to mention the unraveling of his News Media bargaining code in Australia), is that the Online News Act allowed Meta to decline to carry the newslinks for free, ending its alleged thievery. What Sims wants now is for the Online News Act to be amended so that its administrator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), can order Meta’s Facebook to carry newslinks from government-approved newspapers and pay them to do so. In other words, turn Facebook into a cable company that “must carry” content a government agency approves of and assumedly would license.
The CRTC, through the Canadian Journalism Collective (CJC), has already indicated it is happy to stick its nose into the nation’s newsrooms. The CJC administers the fund that Google created to pay $100 million-plus annually to news organizations. In exchange, Google got exempted from the act. Last fall, the CRTC asked the CJC to collect information on the demographics of fund recipients’ newsrooms.
It did so because the CRTC is mandated to ensure the system it regulates reflects Canada’s diversity, specifically BIPOC and “racialized” communities.
So, having collected the data it requested, chances are it will now be pondering what can be done about the fact that Globe and Mail columnists are predominantly white, male, and either over or pushing 60. As with Postmedia, while there is a smattering of females, few appear representative of LGBTQ communities, let alone BIPOC.
Never mind that Sims and the publishers are still talking about “links” when AI is already making them redundant; the door they are trying to kick open would almost certainly invite no end of meddling in how they conduct their businesses.
The government may believe the “must carry” solution could be a way to get news media off its books. And inviting the CRTC into their lives could extend legacy media’s palliative care for a few more years.
But every trade has a tradeoff, which in this case would mean a further diminishing of the publishers’ dignity and independence. Sims and others best be careful what they wish for. Should they be successful and their titles become firmly conjoined with the CRTC, they will regret it for as long as they live.
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.
