Canada’s free and independent press is (mostly) dead—now what?: Peter Menzies in The Hub

This article originally appeared in The Hub.

By Peter Menzies, May 6, 2025

Only a few years ago, it was impossible to imagine that Canada would become a country within which the overwhelming majority of journalists are paying their mortgages and feeding their kids thanks to the government.

Way back in the 2010s, a scenario such as that would have been considered so morally repugnant, so ethically objectionable and embroiled with conflicts of interest, that it would have been dismissed with a wave of the hand as not just unlikely but impossible.

But all those moral and ethical objections collapsed faster than a frontal lobe after a couple of dirty martinis once Justin Trudeau said “yes” to the news industry’s request for temporary assistance, which to no one’s surprise became permanent.

The demise of the free press

Given that Trudeau’s successor, Prime Minister Mark Carney, seems poised to deliver the Trudeau agenda on steroids, there’s little reason to expect anything other than a deepening of the bond between the Liberals and government-funded media. And, given that late in the campaign the Conservatives also promised to enhance funding for news organizations, the hope that anyone in Parliament would oppose this codependence has essentially died.

Print, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Or, with occasional exception, it would be were it not for the Journalism Labour Tax Credit, the Local Journalism Initiative, the Changing Narratives Fund, and the Canada Periodicals Fund. News is an online entity.

Ditto for broadcasters, who are in the process of begging the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for subsidies picked from the pockets of foreign streaming companies such as Spotify, Netflix, and Disney+. It will come as no surprise that this is a contentious matter before the courts and is likely to be one of the issues raised in Carney’s economic negotiations with U.S. President Donald Trump (the Americans under Joe Biden had already objected).

But, not to worry, should that fail, there is every reason to believe the CRTC will find a way. My money’s on a levy applied to revenue gathered by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which means that if consumers’ streaming bills stay unaffected, internet bills will go up.

The CBC will grow, as Carney promised, which means everyone else’s subsidies will have to keep up.

All this is based on the very regressive “progressive” idea that the response to change is not to focus on the innovation needed for industries to adapt, but instead to cryogenically freeze existing structures in their current, dysfunctional state. And the most bizarre part about it is that all involved are very aware that the closer the bond between government and media, the higher the levels of distrust of what they produce will be. That is why those on the dole keep the public poorly informed about the subsidies, avoid awkward questions during election campaigns, rarely allow the matter to be raised by columnists, and minimize news when it is announced.

Even the first run of details regarding who is getting what from the $100 million Trudeau extracted from Google in exchange for it being exempted from the Online News Act was delayed until right after the vote on April 28.

There are a few independent holdouts who refuse to take (or keep) the subsidies, sure, including this very publication, but in a market landscape dominated by government-supported organizations, they face an uphill battle.

Now what?

So here’s what’s likely to come next.

The CBC, secure in its funding and the government’s love for it, will expand its footprint with no significant change to its mandate or governance. It will continue to alienate those with conservative and regional views by marginalizing their perspectives. Snubbed, they will seek out alternative media sources.

Trust will continue to decline in subsidized legacy media, which will persist in being semi-secretive concerning its dependence on the government. Readers, listeners, and viewers—particularly the younger ones—will continue to emigrate to alternative, independent media and its broader range of “acceptable” opinion.

Alarmed by this shift to what it will call platforms peddling misinformation and disinformation (which in some cases will be accurate), demands will grow for the regulation of news organizations.

This will start simply with the government insisting on the creation of some sort of professional body that will set standards regarding corrections, for instance, rebuttals and fact-checking. Basic stuff. The public will be reassured that this is all about keeping them safe, and most journalists will comply. Consequently, the regulator will face demands from pressure groups. This will include government-approved BIPOC, Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ2 groups asking for more op-eds and coverage. The Climate Emergency may also be mentioned. Some of this was already evident in the rollout of the Google money. Questions may even be asked about the lack of balance, aka left-wing views, in the pages of the National Post.

Funded legacy media will respond to this pressure by announcing it will meet these demands and that “voluntary” compliance will work for a while. But sure as summer follows spring, one day news organizations, much like those licensed by the CRTC, will be expected to dedicate fixed amounts of space to these groups and their topics and report on them annually if they wish to maintain their subsidies.

The calls for regulation—some are already being developed—will begin this summer. And, so long as journalists and their masters continue to pay their mortgages, no one wearing the government’s golden handcuffs will protest.

And, just like that, we’ll be living in a world in which government, with a soft authoritarian hand, controls media.