This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, April 1, 2026
The subsidy party for Canada’s media isn’t exactly coming to an end, but heads up, newsroom employee: the pencils are sharpening.
That’s because, as we enter the seventh year of the “temporary,” five-year Journalism Labour Tax Credit (JLTC), its also temporary three-year increase to its benefit to publishers is looking like it might actually be as transient as advertised.
When the JLTC was first introduced in 2019 under the Trudeau government, it was built to pay 25 percent of newsroom salaries up to a maximum of $55,000. That translated into $13,750 per employee earning at least that amount. But in the years leading up to and including the last federal election, that was increased to 35 percent of salaries, up to $85,000, translating to $29,750 per eligible employee.
In Quebec, where, among even more subsidies, there is also a provincial JLTC, newsroom wages have been almost completely covered by the government. This made it possible for La Presse to post a net profit of $9 million in 2025.
But now, and alas for those who have benefited from the federal tax credit, the belts are tightening because the credit will be returning to its original 25 percent. Applied to a maximum $85,000 salary, that puts the benefit at $21,250 or $8,500 less per worker. In a newsroom with 20 qualified workers, that’s a $170,000 loss to their bottom line, which likely means jobs will disappear—potentially a 10 percent cut in the workforce.
While the Department of Heritage is soliciting input from stakeholders and experts (I was not asked) to figure out what to make of this mess, the forecast for the subsidized is grim.
According to preliminary estimates, the Canada Periodical Fund, which subsidizes print magazines and community newspapers and digital periodicals, will be reduced from its current $85 million to $73 million in 2027-28. The following year, it will drop down to $59 million. For an outlet such as Maclean’s magazine, which took $1.1 million from the fund in 2023-24, that’s a reduction in revenue of more than $200,000 next year, which likely means more “efficiencies” will be coming there and elsewhere across the country.
Then there’s the big wave that appears to be heading towards the CBC, which is responsible for about one in every three journalism jobs in Canada.
The public broadcaster was promised, during last spring’s election campaign, a $150 million boost, moving its annual public funding north of $1.5 billion. There was also aspirational talk of doubling the Mother Corp’s funding to make it more comparable to public broadcasters in Europe and the U.K.
It’s possible the government has a new type of funding mechanism up its sleeve, but as it stands, the CBC stands to lose $192 million in funding for 2027. That’s quite the turnaround.
So, unless Prime Minister Mark Carney is planning some kind of annual fee charged to TV and internet users to cover the Mother Corp’s losses, the CBC will be pondering what to do with all the new journalism jobs it created after receiving its $150 million post-election windfall.
Depressing news, it appears, for all newsrooms except the handful that, on principle, refuse to be wards of the state. They, of course, have a much better chance to prosper on a level playing field.
Which explains why the subsidized publishers have really upped their lobbying game. Already relentless in their demands to have a much larger share of all federal advertising directed their way, they’ve now launched a new campaign for an expanded Online News Act (Bill C-18).
Never mind that the current version of the act led to Meta refusing—at considerable financial cost to publishers—to let Facebook carry links to news, anti-Big Tech warrior Jason Kint has declared C-18 to be fabulously successful.
Kint is an American and CEO of Digital Content Next. He was a big backer of the Online News Act, which many of its proponents swore would be a global model for newsroom prosperity and not the cautionary tale it turned out to be.
Undeterred, he recently declared on the pages of the National Post that “The Online News Act (C-18) is in fact working.
“It’s delivering real resources into newsrooms. And that’s precisely why it is under attack. By Meta. By its proxies and lobbyists. By its friends in government.”
He went on to detail how he believed reports of Meta negotiating with the federal government to abolish the act are proof that the global behemoth is suffering without news links on its Canadian platform.
More, he says, “cash is flowing directly into newsrooms across the nation” as a result of the $100 million fund Google created to be exempted from the legislation.
He goes on to, without mentioning how it has largely unravelled, praise Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, a failure similarly held up as wildly successful by its founder on Postmedia’s pages in previous weeks.
Suffice to say that while the Online News Act almost certainly was a net financial detriment to publishers, its authors and proponents don’t shame easily.
There’s every reason, therefore, to believe that as the Carney government begins scaling back its news subsidies, hungry publishers will be working even harder in the year ahead to cozy up to and enhance their partnerships with politicians in new and mutually rewarding ways.
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.
