This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, June 3, 2026
Life, as Ferris Bueller taught us, moves pretty fast.
One day, some things are sacred. The next day, they’re profane. And vice versa. Never was this more obvious than when Max Fawcett of the National Observer recently appeared as a guest on Ryan Jespersen’s podcast. For those of you who may not be aware, Fawcett has worked in journalism and was active in Alberta NDP politics for many years, including a stint in Rachel Notley’s government. He is as determined a fellow as there is when it comes to being convinced of his convictions.
The same could be said of Jespersen, who spent many years with CityTV’s breakfast show and, most famously, 630 (now 880) CHED in Edmonton as a talk show host until being abruptly fired by Corus. As with Fawcett, his views are strongly held. Neither gets invited to parties hosted by conservative-minded Albertans. But Canada is a profoundly left-of-centre country, so they are not without friends.
As part of their conversation, Fawcett took some time to defend his employer’s role as the leading recipient of government funding through the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), which covers the first $60,000 of designated reporters’ salaries on designated beats—climate change, for instance—for one year. National Observer’s publisher, Linda Solomon-Wood, was a member of the panel that adjudicated applications but, the Observer says, recused herself from rating her own applications.
Still, in her absence, they did very well. In some years, her Vancouver-based organization had as many as three LJI reporters, while, overall, 23 National Observer applications were approved since the program’s inception in May, 2019. These numbers and many other grants to platforms in major centres were always likely to attract attention, particularly given the LJI’s mandate, which, as outlined by Heritage Canada, states:
Support the creation of original civic journalism that covers the diverse needs of underserved communities across Canada. Communities are considered underserved if they are news deserts, communities where citizens do not have access to journalistic information about community issues and institutions because there are no daily or community newspapers or other media, for example community radio or television.
Sounds a bit more like Vegreville than Vancouver, doesn’t it?
To be fair to Fawcett’s employer, Solomon-Wood is far more transparent than most recipients of government subsidies and posts clearly on her website that 20 percent of National Observer’s operating costs are covered by the federal government. Whether or not the removal of that backstop would constitute an existential threat is a matter for conjecture.
But it was difficult not to notice that what had just been witnessed on Jespersen’s popular podcast was that a journalist from a publication heavily dependent on government money was criticizing another news organization with no dependence on government money for reporting on journalists’ level of dependence on government money.
Imagine if you told a room full of journalists just a few years ago that 98 percent of them would be living on government subsidies and they’d be slagging the 2 percent that aren’t for pointing out that they are.
In other words, what a handful of years ago had been profane—having a reporter’s salary paid by the government—is now to be considered so routine that it is rude to even discuss it, let alone criticize it.
This is why Heritage Minister Marc Miller should be taking a long look at the manner in which LJI money, which, like all government subsidies, appears to be both permanent and growing, is distributed.
That he does so has become somewhat urgent as he is considering expanding the list of news organizations that qualify for subsidies to include hundreds of TV and radio stations, many of which are owned by vertically integrated conglomerates such as Bell, Rogers, and Videotron.
Going forward, it should not be a matter of controversy to learn the details of these arrangements between media and the Carney government. In fact, all Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations (which are selected by a government-appointed panel) should be required, annually, to post a news story concerning how these and other funds are distributed. The public should know who got how much and why.
It should not be too much to ask an industry that has assigned itself the task of demanding public accountability from politicians to ask the same of itself.
With but a handful of exceptions, the days of a free and independent press in Canada are over. Now that the public is being asked, through the government, to pay our media’s bills, it’s only fair that we have a say in how they run their businesses.
We might as well get on with it.
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.
