Peter Menzies: Canada’s last remaining independent media outlets are dropping like flies

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 grace 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. Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this column mentioned Village Media as an attendee at the Press Forward summit. While Village Media is a Press Forward member, it did not attend this event. In consideration with a concern raised by The Narwhal, The Hub has clarified a sentence that originally referred to them as “fighting against” the Coastal GasLink pipeline.