Canada’s bumpy ride toward a national news strategy: continuing the discussion

By Howard Law and Ivor Shapiro

July 31, 2023

The path toward a consensus strategy to bolster news journalism took a few new twists in Canada’s smoke-filled early weeks of summer, 2023.  

The federal parliament passed the Online News Act, a.k.a. Bill C-18, and its chief targets, Meta and Google, promised news-throttling countermeasures. Bell Media, owner of the country’s biggest private TV network, cut 340 jobs and then asked the CRTC for relief from all license conditions for local news.  Meanwhile, the two biggest online journalism companies in Canada – Postmedia and NordStar – announced merger negotiations (only three years after their “swap and close” deal shuttered 44 local publications) and then halted talks citing, amongst other things, “regulatory and financial uncertainty.”. 

Into this conflagration of reminders of Canadian journalism’s sustainability crisis came an ambitious proposal for a national news strategy from respected conservative voices Konrad von Finckenstein and Peter Menzies, published June 7th by the Macdonald Laurier Institute…

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Howard Law

I am retired staff of Unifor, the union representing 300,000 Canadians in twenty different sectors of the economy, including 10,000 journalists and media workers. As the former Director of the Media Sector and as an unapologetic cultural nationalist, I have an abiding passion for public policy in Canadian media.

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