This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Peter Menzies, October 7, 2025
Last week, a collection of news organization reps met at Carleton University to discuss the future of independent media in Canada.
Best known among those in attendance at the summit, organized by the always upbeat folks at Press Forward, was the Narwhal. It fought tooth and nail alongside the hereditary Wet’sewet’un chiefs against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, has won National Newspaper Awards, and is “Canada’s first English-language registered journalism organization.” Also there, among others, were UNIFOR, Harbinger Media, The Green Line, La Converse, The Resolve, the Tyee, Naked News, the Breach (which features “voices mapping a just future”), Canadian Affairs, Ricochet, Village Media, Edmonton podcaster Ryan Jespersen, and Brent Jolly of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
Not there were The Hub, The Line, Western Standard, Blacklock’s Reporter, and other free-spirited news and commentary organizations that may be more familiar to readers of The Hub.
The session I would most liked to have attended, had I been invited, was entitled “Public Policy and the Independent Press.” It featured Rachel Pulfer, president of Journalists for Human Rights, Sharan Kaur from Navigator, Emily Thorne from Crestview Strategy, and Jeremy Clark from CPAC.
I was curious because, right now, there is no public policy debate related to the sustainability of news organizations in Canada. As Sean Speer, The Hub’s editor-at-large, put it at an event in Calgary last week, the federal government’s smorgasbord of subsidies for news organizations has “suspended these (news) entities in stasis.”
Not only is the industry under museum glass, but there are very few platforms left that, while “independent” in terms of their ownership structure, are able to make the same claim when it comes to surviving “independent” of the federal government. The latter provides hundreds of millions of dollars annually through the Journalism Labour Tax Credit, the Local Journalism Initiative, the Orwellian-titled Changing Narratives Fund, the Canada Periodicals Fund, and the $100 million (soon to be adjusted for inflation) fund created by Google to avoid regulation via the tragic Online News Act. Publishers can belly up to that bar after applying to a panel of Liberal appointees for status as a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization.
Canada is, Hub publisher Rudyard Griffith told the same Calgary crowd, the only country in the world subsidizing its journalists in this manner. He called it the “soft, silent takeover of the nation’s press.”
There were and still are holdouts—journalists opposed to living as wards of the state who signed The Ottawa Declaration at a similar “summit” last year, organized by The Hub and the Macdonald-Laurier Institute (I am a senior fellow). But, when the Conservative Party of Canada declared in the dying days of April’s election that it stood foursquare behind the subsidization of Canada’s journalists, resolve within the group began to crumble. Last month, one of the most vocal opponents of the subsidy regime, Western Standard, threw in the towel.
“We simply cannot remain competitive in the long term if the business taxes we pay are syphoned off to subsidize multi-billion-dollar competitors,” publisher Derek Fildebrandt’s note to subscribers stated. “To retain our best staff and recruit top-level talent with salaries competitive with the legacy media, we simply cannot remain at a structural 35% disadvantage.”
With the CPC having lost both the election and its spine on this issue, it’s easy to understand Fildebrant’s decision.
The Conservatives had been looking at better ideas, some of which were proposed in a policy paper—And Now, The News—that I co-authored with Konrad von Finckenstein, my former chair at the CRTC and current ethics commissioner. Their leader, Pierre Poilievre, had vocally opposed keeping media on the dole, famously prompting the distressed editor of Niagara-on-the-Lake’s Niagara Now to pen perhaps the longest editorial in its history, accusing Poilievre of delivering a “plethora of lies.” The Colombia Journalism Review, equally panicked, described the Canadian news industry as “Bracing for Poilievre.”
There are a couple of theories regarding what prompted the CPC’s decision to turtle and deliver the coup de gras to the concept of a fully free and (worthy exceptions noted) independent press in this country.
Sure, it might just have been the usual politically panicked abandonment of principles. But the one passed along to me by a media executive I trust seems most consistent with my life experience. I was told it was Postmedia —publisher of the distinctly conservative National Post/Financial Post—that took on the role of Mephistopheles and, in a frank discussion involving matters of mutual interest, turned the Tories.
Right now, it probably doesn’t matter because it’s unlikely the Liberals will lose an election anytime in the foreseeable future. The overwhelming majority of media depends on them financially. Their appointees control the Senate, the courts, most public institutions, and decide which journalists the public can trust. But should they stumble and the Conservatives somehow, inexplicably, gain power, it will then be their appointees who decide which outlets qualify to get the loot—a prospect I expect would unsettle a great many of those who now cheerfully accept their unconscionable subsidies.
Only then, perhaps, will they realize to whom they have sold their souls.
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.
