This is The Week in Polling, your Saturday dose of interesting numbers from top pollsters in Canada and around the world, curated by The Hub. Here’s what we’re looking at this week.

Nearly half of Canadians say they want a smaller federal government

Since he took office, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government have hired nearly 109,000 additional employees to the Canadian government.

This represents a 42 percent increase over his nearly decade-long tenure. There are now over 367,000 employees working for the federal government.

The total cost of these employees was $67.4 billion in 2023, a record high.

Total social media engagement with local Canadian news has declined by more than half, with social media engagement with all Canadian news dropping by nearly half, one year after Meta’s Canadian news ban, the result of Canada’s Online News Act.

With the passing of the Online News Act (Bill C-18) in June 2023, the federal government required U.S. online media giants Meta and Google to share more of their profits for linking to Canadian journalists.

“Thanks to the Online News Act, newsrooms across the country will now be able to negotiate fairly for compensation when their work appears on the biggest digital platforms. It levels the playing field by putting the power of big tech in check and ensuring that even our smallest news business can benefit through this regime and receive fair compensation for their work,” Minister of Canadian Heritage Pablo Rodriguez said about the act following its royal assent.

A month later, Meta responded by banning all news posts to their sites (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) for Canadian users.

“The fact that these internet giants would rather cut off Canadians’ access to local news than pay their fair share is a real problem, and now they’re resorting to bullying tactics to try and get their way. It’s not going to work,” Prime Minister Trudeau said at the time.

After considering a similar news ban, Google and the federal government reached a deal concerning the act. The company will pay $100 million annually, to be distributed by the Canadian Journalism Collective, to continue to host Canadian journalism on their search engine.

While some lauded the government for taking on American tech giants, others criticised its approach, viewing it as a massive gamble with journalism outlets paying for the loss.

“With links to news pages banned, the millions of readers Facebook had been sending the industry’s way every day—for free— vanished. The government had calculated that Facebook was bluffing. It wasn’t,” Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne recently wrote.

One year after Meta’s news ban, engagements with local Canadian news outlets fell by over five million (58 percent) between the social media sites Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube, according to research published last week. National Canadian news engagement declined by 24 percent.

The Canadian news ban had almost no effect on Meta’s Canadian user traffic or time on the app, according to Reuters. The company had previously said that links to Canadian news make up less than three percent of the content on their feeds and lack economic value.

Total Canadian news engagement fell on the social media site by 42 percent, according to the report published by the Media Ecosystem Observatory (MEO), a McGill University and University of Toronto think tank concerned with the health of Canada’s news industry.

The loss of engagement has meant approximately 11 million fewer views per day for all Canadian news outlets. Facebook and Instagram drove the decline, where Canadian news engagement fell by over six million (82 percent) and two million (90 percent), respectively.

Meanwhile, the social media giant TikTok, based in China and subject to its laws, grew Canadian news engagement by more than one million and is now the largest social media purveyor of Canadian news.

The total decline in engagement is not good for Canada’s stuttering local journalism industry, which generally relied on Facebook for much of its online circulation and brand advertisement.

A year following Meta’s news ban, the number of Canadian news outlets active on social media fell to 555; 501 local and 54 national. The vast majority of Canadian news outlets that went offline were local news: 212 outlets, representing 98 percent of those no longer active on social media. National Canadian news outlets active on social media, meanwhile, declined by three.

In 2023 alone, at least 36 local news outlets shut down across Canada, some even citing the Meta news ban as a main reason for their demise. Since 2008, a total of 516 local Canadian radio, print, TV, and online news outlets have closed.

"The ban has had the most severe impact on local news organisations in Canada. Many lack the resources to build an audience from the ground up on any other platform or are already struggling to stay afloat, so the overall visibility of local news in Canada has decreased and will likely only continue to go down. The worst part is that the majority of Canadians haven't even noticed this is happening," MEO analyst Sara Parker told The Hub.

Discussion of Canadian news across Facebook groups—at least concerning politics in the most preeminent discussion forums—was nevertheless essentially unaffected by Meta’s ban, according to the report from the MEO.

Across Facebook’s 40 most active Canadian political discussion groups, users found a workaround of posting unverifiable screenshots rather than links.

Just over half of Canadians who use Facebook and Instagram to receive their news (51 percent) said they were unaware of Meta’s ban on news content. A majority (about 70 percent) still use the sites as a primary news source, according to the MEO report.

Meta has no intention of lifting its Canadian news ban. Ottawa has no plans to change the Online News Act and recently suggested Meta may still fall under its regulation given Canadian journalism appearing as screenshots on the company's platforms.