This article originally appeared in the Hub.
By Peter Menzies, August 20, 2024
Some news organizations have begun to bare their teeth and their bias in the fight to retain federal subsidy dollars.
In doing so, they are displaying a willingness to unashamedly defend Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government, in order to preserve the funding regime it established for media unable to adapt to the digital age.
Over the past five years, the Liberal government has introduced hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies for news organizations approved by a Canada Revenue Agency panel and through the Periodical Fund and Local Journalism Initiative overseen by the Department of Canadian Heritage. There is every reason to believe that in the year ahead, as we move closer to an election, those supports will continue to be enhanced and extended as they have been since they were first introduced five years ago as temporary measures. The prospect of all that loot being ripped like a soother from an infant’s mouth by Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives clearly has the industry on edge and, over the next year, it appears likely we will see an increasing number of outbursts.
This month, Poilievre visited Ontario’s Niagara-on-the-Lake and said some things about media funding that so enraged local newspaper Niagara Now that it decided to pen the longest editorial in its history. Entitled “Poilievre is truly great—at pandering,” it was lauded and amplified by Katie Telford, Trudeau’s chief of staff on X. Criticism of the piece set off an X storm, with attacks launched at The Hub’s own Sean Speer.
It should be noted that Niagara Now is a beneficiary of both the federal government’s “Local Journalism Initiative” which provides full time salaries for news reporters to the tune of $60,000 annually and the Canadian Periodical Fund’s “Special Measures for Journalism” program.
Referring to the Conservative leader, Richard Harley, the editor-in-chief of Niagara Now, writes early in his piece that “what he’s really the best at is pandering, lying and misleading.” About 1,500 words later, he states:
“So it’s our duty as a free press—one that isn’t going to take anything at face value from any political party—to call out Poilievre’s dangerous lies. Or his inability to comprehend the truth.
“Either he’s lying to you and knows it. Or he’s just incompetent.” And: “[H]e’s on another planet.”
He went on to call the Liberal’s media legislation “simple, fair and in the best interest of Canadian journalism organizations.”
Little wonder Telford along with Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland were happy to bring those words—distributed coast to coast via National Newswatch—to the attention of their combined 420,000 followers.
Niagara Now’s editorial works hard to explain why Poilievre isn’t just proposing an alternative policy approach, but lying, pandering, and misleading by not endorsing the Trudeau approach, which has resulted in, according to some observers, close to half of the nation’s newsroom salaries becoming dependent on the government.
The editorial was based on a separate news report by Richard Wright, a Local Journalism Initiative-funded reporter for the same paper. That story editorializes heavily (statements of fact are made without attribution) while fussing about “the internet,” where stories are “shared by people not trained in journalism and whose ethical standards or motivations may be suspect,” and is based on an interview with Poilievre. When asked whether he would continue to subsidize local journalism, Poilievre said he was “looking into it” but that Trudeau has “tried to take it over and basically wants everyone to work for the government so that he can have regurgitated propaganda paid for by taxpayers.”
Leaving some of the Conservative leader’s own hyperbole aside, Poilievre went on to say, according to the report (which was also shared across the country and picked up by UNIFOR), that he thought the solution for struggling media was to find new ways to rebuild traditional sources of financial support—subscriptions, sponsorships, and advertising. Or “[w]hat media have done for…3,000 years,” he explained.
You may or may not find those statements provocative. Obviously, Niagara Now did. Its editorial repeated long discredited tropes about how Meta and Google have refused to share immense profits with media outlets, allegedly earned through the carriage of news links. Among other stretches, it states “there’s no such thing as a censorship law” when the pending Online Harms Act is very clearly all about censorship. The author also insists Google should “pay for the privilege” of carrying news, when in fact it agreed to pay what amounts to an annual $100 million ransom in order to be exempted from the Online News Act.
While wrong, overwrought, and misleading on multiple fronts, the editorial sure stoked up Telford and many of the Liberal members of Parliament that, de facto, report to her. To them and their supporters, the Niagara Now polemic added fuel to a post-Olympics narrative they established to highlight the folly of Poilievre’s vow to “defund the CBC.”
This politicization of media by the federal government and its supporters was not expected until early next year. That’s when I suspected Telford and others behind the curtains of power would start making it clear to the press who their daddy really was, and heighten their demonization and conspiracy theories regarding those who believe in an independent, trusted media.
That’s when I thought media would begin to panic at the prospect of Poilievre ripping Trudeau’s financial security blankets from their grasp and begin unleashing both barrels on the Conservative leader until next spring—or at least until he promised, if elected, to keep the dollars coming.
But here we are, already. I don’t really care that Poilievre got slapped around. What I care about is an independent news industry that can be trusted to put the public’s interests ahead of its own.
There are increasingly few media platforms out there that value public trust in their independence and are willing to post commentary critical of the government’s growing financial leverage in the newsrooms of the nation. Most are happy to reject commentary offering alternative viewpoints on media funding and simply take the cash. Had they been more open in their approach, perhaps their employees might have a more informed view.
But they don’t, which means Niagara Now holds its views honestly, if incorrectly. It and others in similar positions may very well, as its editorial suggests, cast equally skeptical eyes over press releases from all political parties. But, had it applied the same rigour to the messaging produced by its own industry’s lobbyists, it might have avoided posting editorials stating “it’s our duty as a free press…to call out Poilievre’s dangerous lies” within readers’ eyesight of a government of Canada logo.
Expect a lot more of this in the next 14 months. And keep an eye out for those logos. They are a giveaway. And they’re everywhere.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
