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Book Review: Tera Henley’s The Trust Spiral

June 23, 2026

The 2026 Reuters Oxford Digital News report says we’ve hit a new low in public trust in Canadian journalism at 37%. Only ten years ago it was 55%.

That number might leave you with a lump in your throat. Canadian journalist Tara Henley is just as alarmed. She is about to publish The Trust Spiral: Why the Media Needs Objectivity on July 28th.

Henley sees a problematic spread of woke progressive culture in US and Canadian newsrooms over the last decade or so, careening out of control during the Covid Pandemic years that were marked in the United States by the popular outrage at the police murder of George Floyd and in Canada by the Convoy Occupation of downtown Ottawa.

Her 90-page book will draw comparisons to the American writer Batya Ungar-Sargon’s Bad News: How the Woke Media is Undermining Democracy (2023). That book is a wide-ranging indictment of the US “liberal elite,” the Democratic Party, and the class privileged members of the national media. As an English lit PhD born into a privileged class position herself, Ungar-Sargon describes herself as a “MAGA leftist” and is particularly scathing in her disdain for the New York Times which she portrays as something like the media anti-Christ.

Henley not so much. Unlike Ungar-Sargon, she’s a career working journalist who has practised the discipline: gathering and reporting the facts of what has happened in public life. Listen to her podcasts on Lean Out or Full Press and you’ll form an impression of her, and it won’t be that of a MAGA leftist.

There are no Bad Guys in The Trust Spiral and no demonized news institutions. How grounded. How Canadian.

But there’s a problem, says Henley. It’s the steady drop, nay a nose-dive spiral, in the public’s trust in “mainstream” news journalism (keeping mind that “mainstream” is a label affixed indiscriminately by others to a diverse assembly of established news outlets and it’s usually not a complement).

And while Henley is careful not to lay all of the blame at the door of newsrooms and journalists —she offers nuance and context about the complex roots of this decline in trust– she is calling for mainstream journalism to serve its audience better, with more accurate news reporting and fewer manipulative story narratives.

I will say parenthetically that the dreadful 37% figure for public trust is from a polling response to the question “how much do you trust the news as a whole within your country?” The related figures for “trust in brands” of leading Canadian news sources are a great deal higher, in the 50% to 60% range (higher in Quebec), while the “don’t trust” percentages are in the teens (and lower in Quebec).

This gap between 37% trust in overall news and the higher ratings for specific news outlets suggests Canadians are worrying a bit too much about untrusted news that other people are consuming. As well, the meagre 37% thumbs up for “news as a whole” is likely weighed down by the dim view Canadians take of news accessed on social media, search engines, and AI chatbots.

To close the bracket on this parenthetic thought, whether or not we are living in an existential moment for public trust in mainstream media is something you can decide for yourself at the end of the book. But I do share Henley’s alarm.

The mainstream media leans left, says Henley, continuing the analysis. When American journalists confronted Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 election they grappled with a crucial choice between sticking to the classic role of detached reporting of facts or becoming activist-journalists in countervail to the new President’s MAGA agenda, his vilification of the media, and his peerless ability to by-pass journalists and project his message directly to Americans through social media.

Journalism leaders like New York University’s Jay Rosen endorsed a departure from the sedate rules of detachment reporting on Trump in favour of “resistance” to “the erosion of democratic institutions and a common world of fact,” stopping short of recommending political “opposition.” Others like the Washington Post’s Marty Baron advised reporters to just “go to work” and report facts.

Even though Trump lost the November 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden, activist journalism didn’t release its grip on newsrooms, says Henley.

A cultural cocktail brewed from a concoction of controversial public health measures, the April 2020 police murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the reckoning of the Black Lives Matter movement and the street violence associated with BLM protests. Together they provided US and Canadian journalism with one opportunity after another to choose between old-school detachment and the moral certainty of activist reporting.

In US newsrooms, the most notorious incident was the newsroom revolt at the New York Times after Opinion Editor James Bennet green-lit a guest column “Send in the Troops” written by Senator Tom Cotton. The Republican legislator advocated domestic deployment of the military to suppress street violence and looting associated with BLM protests.

The Times newsroom roiled. A rank-and-file petition demanded editorial management’s disavowal of Cotton’s op ed (promptly delivered by publisher A.G. Sulzberger). The heated environment caused staff editor Barri Weiss to opine that “showing up as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.” (An aside: Weiss thinks she was a centrist?)

Accused of enabling racism and the reckless endangerment of his African-American colleagues reporting on the protests, editor Bennet was drummed out of the New York Times by the end of June.

Henley brings the focus back to Canada, recounting an incident the same month in which one of the country’s most famous journalists Wendy Mesley was suspended by the public broadcaster CBC from her host duties (and retired a year later) after a complaint that she used the N-word during a prep meeting for a segment focussed on a news subject who also spoke the slur.

June 2020 was perhaps the high point of “the great awokening” or (Henley’s alternative descriptive) “identitarian moralism” over issues of race and gender. My own view is that the accelerant to this moralizing was the Covid lockdown that fuelled intemperate statements on social media, unrestrained by the grounding of a common workplace and face to face engagement between long time colleagues.

But all of that is just flavour for the central narrative. Henley has a bigger issue and that is the mainstream media’s coverage of public health measures such as mandatory masking and vaccine mandates during the pandemic and, related, the convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa in February 2022.

Not alone in this view, Henley maintains that mainstream Canadian media fell well short of its duty to report on public health measures, and the science behind it, with the required professional skepticism.

When the Convoy protest entrenched itself for three weeks in protest of the same public health measures, Henley says that mainstream media unfairly and inaccurately portrayed those Canadians as kooks, dangerous insurrectionists, and trailer-park riff raff. Henley suggests a class bias on the part of the better educated, urban-dwelling, and affluent national press corps, something she sees as evidence of a fundamental issue to be addressed by Canadian news organizations throughout their news coverage of current affairs.

This is the same point made by Ungar-Sargon in Bad News where the focus is on the demographic profile of an urban, secular and affluent US national media (alas, there is very little Canadian data available to confirm or refute that profile. Both class status and class-viewpoint would require a great many data markers).

Whether or not we can lay the accusation of class bias at the feet of the press corps may not be as important as resolving the question of the mainstream media having internalized a deep-seeded ideological agenda, call it left-wing, progressive or woke (presumably the National Post and the Western Standard are excused).

The activist retort to that accusation is either (a) it’s a right-wing smear of honest journalists, or (b) it’s an appeal to the false god of “objective reporting” when there is no such thing as “objectivity,” either as an epistemological truth or a journalistic practice.

What has been set up rhetorically as a binary choice between “objectivity” in news reporting versus “activism journalism” is a false dualism that does not serve us well.

As Henley and many others point out, journalistic objectivity is a straw man and an euphemism for the pursuit of truth, both as a human aspiration and a professional discipline.

Writes Henley, historically “the journalistic method of objectivity —a set of practices designed to separate facts from value judgments —arose in distinction to a press dominated by both commercial and political interests.”

She delves into a brief account of the 19^th century partisan press, the robber baron press, the populist penny press, and the supine wartime press of the next century.

In reaction, says Henley, the “pursuit of truth” philosophy that is operationalized by a professional standard of journalistic detachment was the news industry’s dialectical evolution from the bought-and-paid-for press dominated by partisan political parties and the rich.

Still, you can find plenty of evidence of left-leaning activist journalists portraying “objectivity” as ideological cover for the stranglehold of the rich and privileged, including the racially privileged, over news reporting. As a kind of bookend, the right-leaning activist press thinks professional standards only obscure a different chokepoint over news reporting, one that favours the Big State and the suppression of liberty.

A plague on both your houses, I say.

What doesn’t get much oxygen in this debate is the dominant ideology of news journalism. And no, this ideology’s name is neither Woke nor Right.

It’s the creed of “Watchdog” journalism founded on a moral certainty that powerful people in government and big business are presumed to be up to no good, or at least seriously considering it, and it is the vocational calling of journalists to fearlessly expose it with factual reporting even if the underlying assumption of the unchecked abuse of power is itself a bias. The point is, it’s a consensus bias both in journalism and society at large (except among the powerful I suppose). This watchdog journalism has a long and venerable history. You could even label it activist.

Once journalists of all stripes acknowledge they share something very important, reversing the downward spiral of public trust should just be a matter of being fastidious in their devotion to professional standards, not wedging the moral of the story into news reports, and leaving moral certainty to the opinion writers.

No matter the best efforts of journalists, if the social currents that batter public trust in all public institutions continue to drag down the media, journalists can take pride in having worked hard to earn it back.

***

(An earlier version of this review inaccurately identified Wesley Lowery as a leader of the newsroom petition at the New York Times in the Cotton incident. Lowery was not employed by the Times or involved in the petition).

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Miller has no idea what Carney and Sarandos discussed – will Montreal voters punish the Netflix bailout? – Senate publishes CBC report – US media giants continue to merge

June 20, 2026

After getting challenged by CTV’s Vassy Kapelos for his government’s June 3rd “capitulation” on the Online Streaming Act, culture and identity minister Marc Miller travelled to the Banff World Media Festival this week where the Globe and Mail’s Barry Hertz put the same proposition to him.

“Look, well, it’s wrong,” said Miller rejecting the “capitulation” label. The minister is preparing to issue new instructions to the CRTC on foreign streamer contributions to Canadian content.

“There isn’t a chance that we won’t stand up and make sure that Canadian culture gets supported. I certainly do understand the frustration, because there’s been a lot of blood shed and battles fought on these grounds. … But you can have all the aspirations in the world to make sure that people are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, but if that doesn’t work, we have to act. And this reflects my impatience, and the Prime Minister’s impatience, to make sure that we are creating some stability in the system.”

Hertz also asked Miller if Netflix and the other US streamers would ever pay anything into Canadian media funds that subsidize Canadian content, given that Netflix had volunteered to the CRTC in 2023 that a two per cent levy was acceptable.

Miller responded that “we have to have that conversation with streamers, which has yet to occur in any developed form. My colleagues in the Bloc Québécois assume that it will go down to zero. That isn’t the case. We want people to pay what they would on a fair basis, and you can compare it to some other jurisdictions. It may be a staggered process of policy directions. I want to get it set out quickly, so we can get the ball rolling.”

Miller’s answer appears to contradict a government source in an earlier Globe and Mail story who said the government would direct the CRTC to levy no cash contributions on streamers at all.

Next, Miller was asked if the government is confident in its assumption that streamers can successfully pass along the CRTC’s 6.55% cash levy to Canadian subscribers given the aggressive price increases of the past years in an industry notorious for subscriber churn. Research from the EU suggests regulatory charges don’t necessarily get passed along.

“Not to minimize the counterpoint that you’re making,” he responded, “but we have seen in some of those jurisdictions an increase in production costs, which is an affordability issue from another angle.”

In other words, the government’s assumption of a subscriber paid “Netflix tax” is based not only on the CRTC’s order of 6.55% streamer cash contributions to media funds but also an assumed increase in streamer production costs arising from the CRTC order for streamers to spend 8.5% of Canadian revenues on making Canadian shows for their own platforms. (The EU study did however take that into account).

Finally, Hertz got to the salacious stuff and asked Miller what he knew about the private meeting that the Prime Minister had with Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos a week before his June 3rd announcement of the government bailout.

The minister said he didn’t know.

“I don’t know what was discussed, to be honest I know they met, and he meets with a lot of people in the industry. I don’t think that anyone meeting would shape policy in any way that’s material.”

Meanwhile according to Hertz’s further reporting, the Canadian producers attending the Banff festival were generally in a state of disorientation following the government striking down the Netflix levies and promising to replace the CanCon production money from a $600 million increase in federal cultural spending.

Like any entrepreneurs investing in multi-year projects, Canadian film producers need to know where their financing is coming from before they start taking out loans and passing on other projects. More than half of their production budgets come from government tax credits, media funds, and direct investments by broadcasters and, until June 3rd, foreign streamers too.

The government promised to replace the streamer money with taxpayer cash but for now no one knows when, how much, or what the program rules might be.

Yet despite all appearances to be making it up as they go along, there are signs that the federal Liberals know what they are doing but are keeping their cards close to their vest.

One clue is the special industry committee that Miller created in April to advise on the future of Canadian video production. In a press release, the government offered no details on the committee’s mandate. Neither did officials for the Canada Media Fund, the public-private subsidy fund central to any changes in the bundle of financing sources that consists of investments from independent Canadian producers, Canadian broadcasters, foreign streamers, and federal and provincial governments.

Now we have a second clue: a document obtained by veteran journalist Dean Beeby (who was kind enough to share it with me) written in October 2025 by former deputy heritage minister Isabelle Mondou for then-minister Steven Guilbeault. Commissioned immediately after the Carney government was elected in April 2025, the lightly redacted report appears to have three major recommendations:

Identify efficiencies by combining the program administration of Canada Media Fund, the National Film Board and Telefilm Canada.
Formulate an “integrated vision of audio-visual production.”
Align the funding mandates of federal subsidies (i.e. the Canada Media Fund and the CPTC tax subsidies) with that vision.

One of the salient points made by the deputy minister is that government CanCon subsidy is overwhelmingly dedicated to production financing and is underwhelming in its support of pre-production development and post-production distribution and export strategies. Although the final recommendations are redacted in the document, the deputy minister’s observation correlates with advice from some Canadian commentators that a policy shift is overdue (and see the item on the Fox-Roku merger, below).

The Mondou memo was signed off eight months ago by Guilbeault, so it may be that since then civil servants in the Department of Heritage have fleshed out a plan they want to run past the industry volunteers on the minister’s new committee.

It’s unknown if the new vision that emerges will dovetail with the minister’s other big files: rewriting instructions to the CRTC on streamer contributions, figuring out what that means for “equitable” contributions from Canadian broadcasters, and then replacing any shortfall from the $600 million bank account for federal cultural subsidies, also announced on June 3rd.

On another front, there is the policy storm moving in from a different direction: what to do about federal funding of news journalism.

Miller announced in May that the Carney government plans to extend federal QCJO journalism salary subsidies to broadcasting companies. The public consultation was also announced on June 3rd, the same day as the CRTC’s streamer levies were struck down. Those QCJO subsidies are scheduled to drop from 35% to 25% of journalist salary rates in 2027.

As well, the Netflix bailout scotched the annual $45 million in expected streamer contributions to the Independent Local Television News Fund earmarked as relief for the financially distressed Global News network and 19 other independent television stations.

The quashed streamer cash levies were also expected to put $40 million in annual radio news funding.

On yet another funding front, the federal government is cutting $10 million of the funding for weekly newspapers in the $85M Canada Periodical Fund .

With all of those funding cuts in the wind comes the news that Heritage is continuing its five-year review of the Periodical Fund but now also the $20M Local Journalism Initiative which was only recently reviewed.

Something’s up.

***

Another potential outcome of the Netflix bailout is whether the Liberals pay the price for their decision in Québec where electors rank cultural issues —-deeply intertwined with language issues—- near the top of their list. The Carney government’s shredding of the Trudeau-Guilbeault environmental policies is also on the list.

Not only is there a provincial election in October that could produce a separatist government spoiling for a fight with Ottawa, but the Bloc Québécois is gearing up for three federal by-elections in the greater Montréal area triggered by pending resignations from the House of Commons by Liberal Steven Guilbeault, the Bloc’s Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, and NDP MP Alexander Boulerice. Two of the three ridings are sufficiently progressive to have elected Québec Solidaire provincially.

The Carney Liberals currently hold majority government by a three-seat margin.

***

The Senate Transportation & Communications Committee has released its report on the CBC.

The report made only seven recommendations, three of which can be summed up as arguing for a major pivot of the public broadcaster into local news.

What grabbed headlines of course was the recommendation of a regular audit of CBC News content by an external consultant to assess for bias in news reporting.

Source: Reuters Oxford Digital News Report, 2026

***

Media merger activity in the US is getting frothy.

After the US Department of Justice announced it had no anti-trust concerns about the Paramount $110 USD billion takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery, the Wall Street Journal published a story with sources from “people familiar with the matter.”

The story was that DOJ staff lawyers were “leaning towards recommending” a DOJ anti-trust lawsuit blocking the merger when senior DOJ officials unexpectedly announced the green light for a “pro-competitive” merger. The focus of the staff investigation had been whether Paramount CEO David Ellison can deliver on a promise to increase, not decrease, the number of feature film productions given the extraordinary debt load incurred to buy Warner Brothers.

In an unrelated announcement, the Murdoch-owned and content-rich Fox Corporation is paying $22 USD billion to buy streaming distribution giant Roku.

Fox already runs its own free advertising streaming television (FAST) platform Tubi that engages 100 million active users each month. Fox will consolidate Tubi with the Roku’s industry-leading 80 million accounts that are integrated into its streaming hardware and content launch screens.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Miller explains the Netflix bailout – Federal ad vouchers to support Canadian media? – US DOJ approves the Paramount/ Warner Bros merger

June 14, 2026

There are few things more refreshing than CTV’s Vassy Kapelos grilling cabinet ministers.

The host of Question Period had culture and identity minister Marc Miller in the dock on Saturday to ask him bluntly why Canadians would expect that his new Safe Social Media Act Bill C-34 won’t be given away upon President Donald Trump’s insistence, as were the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC’s assessment of cash and investment contributions to Canadian content by US streaming services.

Miller’s answer: there will be no surrender by the Liberals on his new bill. Protecting kids is not on the table, he said, “hard stop.” The minister thinks that similar legislative efforts being passed or proposed in Washington and various US state houses to protect children from online harms bodes well for Canada pursuing the same strategy.

Also, he said protecting children is more important than “redistributing money within an industry,” a reference to the CRTC ruling. (Public polling on conceding ground on the Online Streaming Act under US trade pressure is here.)

As for overruling the CRTC on streamer contributions, Miller said he wouldn’t comment publicly. That lasted about ten seconds once Kapelos went after him for “capitulation” to US trade pressure and American companies.

Kapelos asked Miller what Canada got, or might get, in CUSMA trade talks for coughing up the Digital Services Tax and the CRTC ruling.

“I’m not going to tell you,” replied the minister.

The minister then gave up some fresh talking points on the CRTC ruling and the $600M in federal funds that includes replacement of the streamer contributions:

The CRTC “is not the final arbiter” on implementing the Online Streaming Act, the government is.
The Prime Minister may have overruled the CRTC’s 15%-of-revenues assessment on foreign streamers but it is only because the 15% number wasn’t the right one. When the minister formally instructs the CRTC “in a few months” on the make-over of the overturned decision, there will be “a number.”
The annual $600M in federal funds announced on June 3rd will compensate for giving away the $200M in annual streamer contributions ordered two years ago by the CRTC in part because that streamer money is “tied up in court.” (The escrowed streamer funds from 2025-26 will have to be refunded to the streamers).
The federal $600M will include money for “independent journalism.”

***

There was an unexpected media policy post from Narcity publisher Chuck Lapointe last week that is worth reading.

Narcity is a Canadian news outlet with a heavy bent towards travel content. But it also publishes conventional news content and on a daily basis it re-posts Canadian Press news stories on Facebook in order to draw traffic to Narcity’s websites.

Lapointe can get away with this despite the Meta banishment of news from its Canadian platforms because he signed off a Meta waiver saying his news product is not the kind of content that triggers financial compensation from Meta under the Online News Act, Bill C-18.

Speaking of Meta, Lapointe’s policy post points out how foreign platforms now completely dominate the Canadian market in digital advertising with the well known impact on the ability of Canadian media to monetize their content.

A good policy move, he says, would be for Ottawa to put new federal dollars in the hands of Canadian advertisers on the condition they spend it on Canadian digital platforms. That kind of voucher system might spur innovation by Canadian digital outlets competing for that ad spend.

It’s a smart idea that’s been circulating in various US states for some time now. In Canada, Senator Andrew Cardozo and I included the recommendation of an advertising voucher in our recent report, Making News Media Sustainable.

***

The US Federal Department of Justice has signed off on the blockbuster Paramount-Warner Brothers Discovery merger.

As often happens in government reviews of big mergers, the field of competition is configured to offer a rationale for the thumbs up or down. In this case, the FCC is saying it’s “pro-competitive” for Hollywood studios and streamers to consolidate in order to compete more effectively with Silicon Valley tech/media companies.

The merger story isn’t over. Some US state attorney generals, including California, are banding together to litigate an anti-trust action against it.

The merger also hasn’t been approved by the Canadian Competition Bureau. The European Union and the United Kingdom are also reviewing it: an early approval or the launch of further EU investigations might be announced in July.

***

Back to the Online News Act for a moment and attention all journalists.

An independent researcher from Simon Fraser University is running a survey on newsroom opinions on the consequences of the Online News Act. (She confirmed to me that she isn’t getting funding from foreign platforms. Her research appears to be supported by a federal grants).

English : The Online News Act and its consequences for Canadian Journalism

En français : La Loi sur les nouvelles en ligne et ses conséquences pour le journalisme canadien

***

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – a Netflix tax? – Fawcett defends boss, subsidies – the Online News Act v. 2.0.

The Leader of the Opposition gets his sunglasses stuck in his teeth

May 30, 2026

Last week I published my take on the CRTC’s latest ruling on how much Netflix and the Hollywood streamers will have to invest in Canadian programming and how they will make that content highly visible on their platforms.

As for what the Commission did for Canadian broadcasters, I was harshly critical of the decision to relieve them of minimum investments in English-language dramas and documentaries based on the sanguine hunch that US streamers might do it for them. I wish I could be harsher.

I highly recommend a Substack column by Derrek Lennox who casts cultural sovereignty as a project of building an infrastructure of empathy among Canadian communities. Worth the short read.

***

Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre is calling for the federal government to cancel the CRTC’s Netflix ruling on the grounds that it will cause subscription prices to rise —he’s calling it “a Netflix tax”—and goad the Trump administration into even more trade retaliation.

As yet, Poilievre isn’t recycling his old accusation that the Online Streaming Act’s promotion of Canadian content is “government censorship….pro-government, liberal-leaning, boring, statist content that is approved of by the establishment crowd in general and the liberal glitterati in particular.” Ouch!

Indeed according to Poilievre, the legislation is a Liberal tool intended to “favour certain kinds of pro-government content online while discouraging content that the government does not want us to see, in some cases taking that content off the Internet together.”

Sticking to the better messaging point, he says the new CRTC ruling is a consumer tax because the streamers will pass along regulatory charges to the public.

Poilievre isn’t wrong about that being possible, but here’s some context.

Netflix upped the price on its standard plan from $14 monthly to $15 in 2020. Then to $16.50 in 2022. Then to $19 in 2025. That was twice the rate of inflation.

As for the CRTC ruling, the cash cost to Netflix and the Hollywood streamers is not the 15% of Canadian revenues set as an overall investment in Canadian content, mostly in their own shows on their own platforms.

The out of pocket cash cost is not the 15% but an included 6.55% of revenues, paid to Canadian media funds supporting news, entertainment, and a short list of public service programming such as APTN, Omni multilingual, Ugavut TV or CPAC.

The streaming market —the highly concentrated streaming market— will determine how much of this 6.55% cash levy that Netflix can pass along to subscribers.

Still, you would expect at least some of that 6.55% levy to drive the 2028 price increase higher. As much as, I dunno, twice the rate of inflation?

***

Kudos to Max Fawcett, the National Observer columnist who stepped up to take one for his team.

It began with a Blacklock’s Reporter story reporting on the journalism subsidies collected over the last ten years by the Observer from the three major federal programs. That wouldn’t be especially newsworthy except for the fact that Observer publisher Linda Solomon Wood is one of five news publishers sitting on a panel that decides which news outlets get a piece of the Local Journalism Initiative.

A past recipient of the National Newspaper Award for best columnist, Fawcett went on Ryan Jespersen’s Edmonton talk radio show and gave a scorching elevator speech defending the Observer and the federal programs.

He didn’t address the point raised by Blacklock’s reporting that maybe his boss should not be sitting on the panel that carves up limited funds in the federal Local Journalism Initiative.

Wood and the other members of the judging panel did recuse themselves when their own publications were reviewed. The Observer was awarded two out of the 700 one-year job subsidies this year and three last year.

Still, Canadian Heritage would do well to consider putting academics and retired journalists in charge of the LJI disbursements, as it does for the QCJO program.

On the general topic of journalism subsidies, I came across a parliamentary brief that Torstar just submitted to the Heritage committee’s investigation into the state of news journalism. I confess to a love-hate relationship with Torstar (I was the Unifor union rep at the Toronto Star for many years) but I found this submission has a lot of policy gravitas.

Torstar Submission to CHPC – FINAL Download

***

The Online News Act, directing Google payments for news links, is under threat. But not just from looming CUSMA trade negotiations, rather from AI technology.

This has been known for some time. Google’s Search’s AI Overviews and AI Mode offer comprehensive answers to questions, before you get to the page after page of ten blue links.

Google’s referral traffic to news sites has already plummeted and it will get worse as late adapters get comfortable with AI tools. If the Online News Act was intended to compensate news publishers for populating Google’s blue links, that intention is being steadily eclipsed.

The next AI wave is now hitting Google Search which enjoys a 90% world market share. You can read the long versions at TechCrunch or in Press Gazette, but two of the new features of an overhauled Google AI mode stood out to me.

The first is what you already get on most AI chatbots: Google Search will engage in a conversation with you, deducing your research mission and offering help. Its response will be gussied up by creating multimedia answers to your question. Clicking through hyperlinks to original news sources, even if these are still offered, will be for suckers. I will remain one of those suckers, but I expect most will not look the gift horse in the mouth and let AI mode take over their brains, although maybe not for the more discerning news consumers who still want to check the underlying reporting.

But the truly revolutionary AI feature will be creating autonomous research agents that become your auto piloted research apps for the next days, weeks or years and periodically bring to your attention breaking news and developments relevant to your search query.

At some point, I may break down and create an AI agent for “what is happening in Canadian media policy.” Just as a science experiment, mind you. Right now, I read e-newsletters offering links to media news.

The point is, the new Google may well kill Search referrals to original news sites. Kill them dead.

That appears to be the goal, anyway. And with that death goes any Google argument that its intermediation of hyperlinks, as they currently argue, makes them a benefactor to the news industry whose content they ingest.

On the other hand, the alternative (and unofficial) government intention behind legislating the Online News Act was not just compensating news outlets for their journalism, but effectively levying an anti-competition fine against Google Search for its oligopoly power over advertising in the absence of any action by the federal Competition Bureau. Google isn’t able to exercise that kind of monopoly power in the AI market, at least not yet.

As for the impact on the Online News Act, any retreat from offering news hyperlinks means Google will certainly buck against renewing its $100M/yr deal to fund news journalism that expires in 2030.

That’s how much time the federal government has to wake up and acknowledge that Google and the other AI bots are ingesting Canadian news by scraping their websites without a license. What is needed are amendments to an Online News Act v.2.0, starting with a new definition of a “digital news intermediary.”

***

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Catching up on MediaPolicy – media funding in Québec – innovation in news journalism – The Netflix Effect

Québec culture minister Mathieu Lacombe

May 18, 2026

There’s an election upcoming in Québec this fall and the politics of media and culture can be expected to get a lot of attention.

This past week media titan Pierre-Karl Péladeau delivered his remarks about Québécor’s most recent quarterly report by celebrating the strong growth in his expanding national telco business. He then tacked on a threat to cut more jobs and programming in his money-losing television business unless he gets what he wants.

Péladeau has cut 800 television jobs in the last four years and 20% of original programming. Citing a 14% drop in ad revenues over the last year, he told reporters that he has done his part by cutting jobs and programming, bringing his media division back to break-even after years of losses (owing to his cuts and stronger broadcasting revenues from Montréal Canadians hockey).

Now Péladeau wants to squeeze his suppliers. By that he means price reductions from independent producers who make his TV content and wage concessions from the crews that shoot them.

From the provincial government, Péladeau wants more television production tax credits and the removal of tax deductions for Canadian advertisers patronizing foreign tech platforms. His explicit “or else” is more job cuts and replacing original television content shot in Québec with foreign acquisitions.

The new CAQ Premier Christine Fréchette didn’t take the bait from Péladeau, the former leader of her rival Parti Québécois, preferring to reflect that her government “is closely monitoring developments in the cultural sector and in relation to digital media.”

But her culture minister Mathieu Lacombe, not so much. He was annoyed by Péladeau’s ultimatums, reminding the him that the province —which just increased its $50M annual budget to supplement federal contributions to French language television production—won’t overcommit to television programming on a “dying” cable television network. Salting it some more, Lacombe suggested that following Péladeau’s logic the province was being invited to go down the path of “nationalizing” Québécor’s TVA network.

Also, Lacombe might not appreciate Péladeau’s public demands just two months after his government’s March 2026 budget that delivered on extending Québec’s journalism labour tax credit to licensed television and radio stations at a cost of $40M annually. At the time, Péladeau commented that “while we have been calling for this for many years, the Québec government’s decision represents a major step forward.”

***

The Québec government’s decision in March to extend journalism tax credits beyond print media to include television and radio stations did not get much attention in the English language press. The federal government is now considering the same move.

Under the radar, the Québec budget began its three-year phase out of an eight-year-old $8M/yr spending program for digital transformation of legacy media.

Québec has always been more aggressive than the federal government about supporting digital innovation through subsidies, both as one-of tech projects and the inclusion of IT staff in its labour tax credit.

As Senator Andrew Cardozo and I wrote in our recent report, La Presse credits Québec’s support for digital innovation as making a big contribution to its successful digital transformation as well as its ability to retain software developers who might otherwise abandon their employer for better paying jobs in the tech ecosystem.

But in the March budget, the province eliminated the IT salary subsidy and began the wind down of the digital transformation grants.

***

“Innovation” holds a magical place in media policy.

Some see innovation and government subsidies as binary: one cancels out the other. The assumption is that the opportunity for innovation to grease the skids of transition from legacy media to a successful new business model will be stymied so long as news outlets can fall back on subsidies.

In our report “Making News Media Sustainable,” Senator Cardozo and I see innovation and subsidies as complimentary. We wrote a longish part of the report on innovation and observed that the nation’s best adapters to digital —the Globe & Mail, La Presse, Village Media— draw journalism subsidies.

On either view, realizing the potential of innovation probably comes down to corporate leadership, something I think Ariel Freiman described well in this recent piece in J-Source.

It’s possible that if innovation and subsidies can elbow each other out, it will probably depend in part upon the particular market in which news outlets operate. Is that market national, regional, local or hyperlocal? What is the audience demographic? How saturated is the competitive landscape? What are the opportunities for scale? And so on.

We also tend to think about innovation as “tech.” There’s been plenty of that, with the above noted news outlets all hitting it out of the park by developing proprietary publishing software.

Another innovation theme that keeps emerging in media commentary is “the bundle.” That refers to the digital reimagination of the old newspaper formula of packaging news content together with an array of local information, buy-sell classifieds, pastimes, and invitations to community participation.

Village Media is a constant innovator on this score, as the Senator and I discuss in our report. Last week I stumbled upon a good e-newsletter on news innovation written by a German journalist Ulrike Langer, located in the US. Her latest is an interview with Richard Gingras, the former Google VP who now serves as chair of CEO Jeff Elgie’s board of directors at Village.

After describing the ways in which Village is putting together its content bundle, Gingras is at pains to describe Village as a “community impact platform” (or alternatively a “community operating system”) that includes news publishing in that bigger bundle.

Gingras also thinks that as AI tools automate writing and publishing, the “human element” (journalists?) will increasingly be directed at gathering information and forming the community bonds and sources to provide it.

In the course of the interview, Gingras let the cat out of the bag by revealing that the 27-location Village network is about to expand to 15 locations in the US with an American partner.

When I asked Elgie where and when, he replied in an e-mail that he isn’t ready to announce the move yet.

***

I will plead guilty to the charge of indulging, from time to time, in bitter sarcasm. Most often in response to the hubris of the Big Tech elite. You may have noticed.

Netflix is the object of my disaffections this week.

The studio-streaming colossus has some claim to my better angels and maybe your’s as well. After all, Netflix isn’t a social media platform that floods the digital airwaves with poisonous content.

Just ask Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos. According to him, Netflix is a benevolent force for good in the world. In a riff on the adage “what’s good for General Motors is good for America,” Sarandos dropped this pearl last week, modestly dubbed “the Netflix Effect”:

Over the last decade, Netflix shows and movies have consistently shaped what people read, buy, listen to, eat, wear and play. We’ve pushed old songs back up the musical charts, helped niche sports go mainstream, and boosted sales…Now we have a responsibility to keep that flywheel going. That’s why, while other entertainment companies pull back, we’re leaning in — spending tens of billions of dollars on content every year, investing in production facilities from Spain to New Jersey, and growing the entertainment industry through training programs that have reached over 90,000 people across more than 75 countries.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CBC’s missing $200M – The Six Billion Dollar news subsidy – The Hub says Yes to news subsidies – the nihilism of activist journalism – are paid news subscriptions enough for civic dialogue?

“Six billion dollars”

May 10, 2026

There’s no other way to say it. It was a goofy week for Canadian media policy.

On Tuesday, cabinet minister Marc Miller popped up at the Commons Heritage Committee. MPs wanted to hear from him before voting on the government’s main budget estimates for 2026-2027.

At last someone put him on the spot about the Liberals cutting nearly $200 million from the CBC just a few months after delivering on Prime Minister Carney’s signature election promise of adding $150 million to the $1.4 billion parliamentary grant.

In response to Conservative MP Bernard Généroux’s sardonic admiration of the government’s sleight of hand, Miller replied (in this Google translation):

“With all due respect, Mr. Généreux, I think one needs to better understand how budget estimates are made. We see an immediate picture of CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding profile, but that doesn’t factor into the subsequent bailout estimates. It’s a flawed equation to say we’re giving 150 to take away 200. This is part of the budget cycle.”

Silly Opposition MPs. Don’t they know about the double-tap of Supplementary budget estimates that often follow the Main Estimates?

By the way, the French word Miller used was “renflouement,” translated as “bailout” or “refloating.” Or perhaps it means “later, when we can make a favourably timed announcement of more money for the CBC in a Supplementary Estimate .”

The committee’s attention then turned to the government’s recent announcement in the Spring Economic Update that it will hold public consultations on extending the federal QCJO journalism labour tax credit to broadcasting companies. Making the government’s intentions known, the minister said, “it’s how, not if.”

One salacious policy hint he dropped: the government expects a discussion of a subsidy ceiling on the largest broadcasters in favour of smaller ones.

Then Miller said an odd thing (twice, so not by accident): the additional cost of the expanded program would be $6 billion dollars. That’s 100 times the cost of the existing QCJO program for print media.

By the time his interlocutor, Bloc MP Martin Champoux, followed up on that eye-popping number, Miller had left the committee room.

As you might expect, the Twittersphere went off like a Roman candle. Six. Billion. Dollars. Try to imagine Mike Myers’ Dr. Evil delivering that line.

Two days later, Miller ‘fessed up in an X post saying he misspoke. He had mixed up the $75M per year journalism labour tax credit for print media with the $1 billion per year budget for federal film and television productions tax credits (over the next six years, ergo the $6 billion figure).

Okay. Happens all the time.

So what might be the cost of a program for supporting broadcast news? Grabbing the nearest napkin and pen, I came up with a number somewhere between $82 million and $115 million. Let me show you my math:

To begin, the program cost of the federal labour tax credit is driven by journalist headcount based on 35% of journalist wages on the first $85,000 of salary.

Going to the best available source for headcounts, the news producer head count for the Google funds distributed under the Online News Act by the Canadian Journalism Collective, expressed as full-time equivalents working a 40-hour week, is 3,549 for broadcasting companies and 4,179 for publishers. Bottom line: the broadcasting headcount is 85% of print journalists, a figure I need for this arithmetic.

As for a hypothetical broadcasting program cost fixed as an 85% percentage of the known costs of federal print media subsidies, you need to first establish the combined cost of labour tax credit for print journalists at daily newspapers ($75M), Aid to Publishers for community weeklies and magazines ($71M), another program for free distribution weeklies ($13M) and the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) for 700 additional reporters in local media ($20M, although not all in print media). It adds up to $179M for print media journalists.

But there’s a caveat to that $179M figure: the payout in the Aid to Publishers and LJI subsidies are much higher than the 35% wage subsidy in the labour tax credit, although how much higher is difficult to pin down.

Rough guess of a final print media subsidy? Calculating the total print journalism program costs at an across-the-board 35% wage subsidy spits out a final number of $135M for print media journalists.

Next step: the broadcasting headcount is 85% of that $135M, leading to an estimated program cost of $115M for TV and radio news outlets.

But there’s one final adjustment to the numbers: the existing labour tax credit is scheduled to fall back from 35% to its original 25% next year, a 29% reduction. If that goes through, the $115 million for broadcasting support drops to as low as $82M. And if a ceiling is put on subsidies to large broadcasters, even further.

So, not $6 billion, no.

***

The next goofy thing is ironic, not funny.

I subscribe to The Hub, a commentary and news reporting website that is cerebral in its writing and conservative in its point of view. I listen religiously to its biweekly Full Press podcast.

On Thursday, publisher Rudyard Griffiths informed subscribers that he was abandoning The Hub’s years long refusal to accept QCJO labour tax credits or distributions of Google money under the Online News Act. I estimate the value of the two income streams to his publication at $60,000 annually. Griffiths cited softening advertising revenues and promised to park the cash in a reserve fund.

As he put it, “We are using that latitude to park any payroll subsidies in a segregated “rainy day” fund—available if we ever truly need it, but walled off from day-to-day operations so our journalism doesn’t become dependent on government money. If we ever draw on these subsidy dollars, we will tell you.”

There’s no need for “I told you so’s” here, although Griffiths has been vocal for years in his opposition to journalism wage subsidies, as well as passing judgement on those news organizations that accept them (“the soft, silent takeover of the nation’s press.”)

The Hub’s walk-back dittos the Western Standard which did it in September 2025, also stating it was doing so reluctantly.

As far as I know, this leaves just two news organizations who could qualify for the labour tax credits (which require ongoing publication of original news content) but make a point of refusing subsidies.

One is the hyper partisan Juno News. The other is the watchdog news outlet Blacklock’s Reporter which specializes in access-to-documents news reporting on the federal government and, it’s fair to say, offers no quarter to government and expects none.

***

Moving on, I was distressed reading journalist Shauna Rae’s winning essay for the Dalton Camp Award, juried by Friends of Canadian Media. I’m a long time member of Friends and a volunteer on its policy committee, but I don’t have any connection to the annual writing award that honours Camp, the veteran political strategist who died in 2002.

You can read Rae’s short piece and evaluate the message in her own words. To summarize, she is of the view that journalists should feel free to report the news as their truth, rather than the truth.

This is hardly a newly minted journalist creed even though I believe it is very much in the minority.

It’s a call for “openly activist and participatory” (Rae’s words) journalism in the fight against privilege and power, in a binary world of oppressor and oppressed. It feeds directly into identity politics of racial and gender inequality and the dispossession and gross mistreatment of Indigenous peoples; identity politics in the sense that individuals are ascribed membership status as either oppressor or oppressed. Taken to the global stage, it underpins an anti-Israel news narrative.

Rae’s justification for activist journalists throwing off the shackles of objectivity is that no such thing as objectivity exists.

Objectivity may be the world’s biggest straw man. Outside of university seminars dwelling upon political theory I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, let alone a journalist, who posits the existence of objective truth. The overwhelming majority of journalists (that I’ve ever met) adhere to the journalist creed of “pursuing the truth” while practicing professional norms of fairness and accuracy in fact gathering.

But, fill your boots with openly activist and participatory journalism if you wish. It’s a free and independent press that allows Rae and any other journalists to wear the activist mantle if they choose. Their work will be judged on its merits.

What disturbs me so deeply—and I know this will sound harsh— is the intellectual nihilism behind the activist creed. It’s the idea that in the absence of indisputable objectivity that anything goes. It’s the idea that you can defend any news reporting narrative as fair and deserving of credibility no matter how closely it operationalizes the writer’s agenda for making change in the world.

Mostly it disappoints me because that’s not how change happens. And do we ever need change.

***

At the risk of making this weekly update too long, there is another item that I didn’t want to go stale.

It’s a survey conducted by the Media Insights Project on where Americans get their news and whether they pay for it. That has implications for how much emphasis we Canadians might put on public policy subsidizing paid news subscriptions as a reliable delivery vehicle for reporting on current events to a broad based democratic polity. It’s an issue that Senator Andrew Cardozo and I raised in our recent report, “Making News Media Sustainable.”

A key conclusion in the survey was “the majority of Americans — 7 in 10 — access a paid media service of some kind, even if they don’t pay for it themselves.”

We already knew that Americans pay for digital news subscriptions at a slightly higher rate than Canadians, which tends to fluctuate between 15% and 20%.

The public policy consequence is that such a low uptake on paid news subscriptions makes it hard to rely on the subscription business model as a comprehensive way of delivering news when so many Canadians are stuck on getting free news (there is data suggesting lower prices of digital news subscriptions don’t tempt people much).

The low uptake on digital news is mitigated by the fact that half of Canadians live in a household with access to a cable TV package that includes news channels (alas, news is a serious money loser for television networks).

The Media Insights survey’s conclusion that “7 in 10” Americans have access to “a paid media service” even if they don’t pay for it suggests that young people are watching cable TV or else making liberal use of a streaming password shared by someone else who paid for it. Thanks Mom and Dad.

The asterisk to that “7 in 10” statistic, and the limitation of the survey question’s relevance to news policy, is that it was about paid media services, not paid news media services. There’s this thing called Netflix, you know.

Still, it’s an encouraging set of public policy data on news consumption. Which reminds me to refer you again to the Cardozo-Law study where we recommend the federal government experiment with a generous news voucher program for news subscriptions.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – journalism subsidies for news broadcasters ? – Australia lowers price on Big Tech news levy – Age verification bill tabled in House of Commons

AI Image

May 2, 2026

On Wednesday I posted about the new report written by Senator Andrew Cardozo and myself on the future of subsidies for news journalism.

One of the not so surprising options we propose is to extend the federal QCJO journalism labour tax credits to news websites operated by broadcasting companies. The Québec provincial government did it in March with their labour tax credit that parallels the federal QCJO. (A correction: the Québec labour credit directly supports news broadcasting on television and radio).

Entirely by an accident of timing (promise!), on Tuesday the Carney government announced a public consultation proposing to extend QCJO labour tax credits to “audio and audio visual news production,” which is not quite the same thing as digital news websites operated by broadcasting companies, but close enough.

Law professor Michael Geist was out of the gate fast opposing public journalism subsidies being paid to major broadcasters, in particular the three owned by telco pantomime villains Bell, Rogers and Québecor. It’s fair to say, Geist won’t be alone on this.

I have a long winded rebuttal which I will save for later.

***

AI Image

The Australian government has taken the next step in responding to Meta’s refusal in March 2024 to reboot news licensing agreements under the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC). The 2021 NMBC legislation was the prototype for Canada’s Online News Act.

To counter Meta’s exit from news licensing agreements, the Australian government announced in December 2024 that it would replace the NMBC with a News Bargaining Incentive (NBI). The key provision in the proposed NBI is a default cash levy on Meta, even if it tries to elude payments by banning local news. The NBI news levy would be reduced by any licensing deals struck between tech platforms and news outlets. It also would extend the levy net to catch TikTok, in addition to Meta and Google.

The calendar months have flipped by and it was not until this week that the Australian government at last announced the next step for the NBI, a public consultation.

The most newsworthy item in the announcement was the proposed price point for the cash levy: 2.25% of a company’s Australian revenues.

At first glance, that number suggests a climb down from an old levy rate of 4% of revenues that in 2021 generated $190 million in annual licensing payments by Google and Meta. The de facto 4% figure was identified by reverse calculation back in September 2023 by Canadian officials commenting on the monetary value of the 2021 Australian deals with Google and Meta.

Canadian officials said at the time that applying the Australian 4% target under our Online News Act would mean Canadian outcomes of $172 million from Google and $62 million from Meta. When Ottawa finally settled in December 2023 with Google for $100 million instead of $172 million, that converted the Canadian 4% into 2.32%.

Which is awfully close to the 2.25% proposed now by the Australian government.

But the lower Australian levy rate is still intended to produce the same $190 million contribution outcomes from 2021 because the legislation adds TikTok revenues and reflects the growth of Google and Meta revenues in the last five years.

Back in Canada, it’s unclear what Ottawa is going to do about the Meta ban on mainstream news (going forward I am calling it “Meta’s mainstream media ban” as it’s now clear that Meta permits certain Canadian news outlets to post on Facebook and Instagram provided these outlets sign off that they are not, or would not be eligible for federal QCJO labour tax credits or a share of the $100 million in Google money under the Online News Act. Effectively, this means the Meta news ban on Facebook and Instagram targets mainstream Canadian news organizations who produce original news).

This selective news ban gives the peripheral news organizations —whether they behave as honest news outlets or political activists — a leg up on mainstream media in the quest for audience.

The policy boomerang that smacks mainstream media in the mug, whether you blame Meta or the legislators of the Online News Act for the ban, results in the loss of audience exposure and click-through referrals to news websites.

But there are self-help strategies.

On this, Torstar President Angus Frame appeared before the parliamentary Heritage committee on April 23rd and offered some interesting information.

In the course of testimony about Big Tech in Canada, Frame said that since Meta imposed the news ban in August 2023 the Torstar chain of dailies and community weeklies has neutralized the loss of referral traffic.

I asked how and his answer, about leaning into web traffic generated by Google Discover and e-mail distribution strategies, is succinct enough to quote in its entirety:

There are always a bunch of variables in the mix, but the simple story looks like this:

In July 2023 (the month before Meta pulled out of news in Canada) our community sites generated 1.6M page views from Facebook referrals. This was typical for the first half of 2023 though the number had been declining since about 2018.

In July 2023 we generated 550K page views from newsletter click-throughs (people visiting from our own newsletters). We had 5.2M page views from Google.

Last month we had 1.55M page views from our newsletters, which almost completely replaces the views lost to Facebook. Google referrals were at 5.1M.

So the way that all came together is this:

-With the Meta ban, we shifted focus to optimizing for Google and in particular Google Discover. This gave us a good recovery heading into 2024 but it has since declined a bit with some reductions in Google traffic.

-Once Google was in better shape, we started to emphasize newsletter growth and newsletter effectiveness. This involved a number of tactics to get more people to sign up for our newsletters, to make sure our newsletters were landing in people’s inboxes properly and to optimize the newsletters (both design and story selection) for the best possible click-through rate. And that gets us to where we are today with newsletter traffic almost completely replacing the lost Facebook traffic.

And the newsletter traffic is better for us — we have a direct relationship with that audience, they come back to us more frequently and we can continue to grow that audience channel without worrying about algorithm changes or other things that can disrupt the strategy.

***

The Senate Bill S-209 that would introduce age verification to block underage access to porn sites and porn on social media apps has now made its way into the House of Commons.

The Opposition Conservatives always supported S-209 and Saskatchewan MP Rosemarie Falk tabled it in the House for first reading on Thursday.

Now that the Liberals have a majority in the House, don’t expect the bill to get far, even if they find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion on this one.

The door isn’t completely shut. Heritage minister Marc Miller was quoted in the Globe and Mail as saying S-209 “has merit,” the opposite of what the Trudeau PMO used to say.

But Miller appeared to pour cold water on the bill anyway, simultaneously saying that age verification would not be in a Liberal online harms bill while referring the issue, along with the idea of a blanket age ban on social media, to his expert advisory committee.

As part of the debate over child safety and social media, expect the troubling privacy and compliance issues to keep bubbling up to the surface.

There are anecdotal reports of Australian teenagers circumventing the new social media ban in that country.

As well, the technical issues of privacy breaches keep arising, as they just did in Europe. The hacking of adult viewers’ age verification data is a problem that gets bigger depending on where the digital gatekeeping of age verification happens, from the narrow access to online porn sites to universally accessed social media or device operating system sign-ins.

***

Here’s a few things to read that follow up on issues followed in MediaPolicy:

The Paramount sneeze and the Canadian cold: The possibility that a soon-to-be- sanctioned merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery will sideswipe Bell Media, by cancelling HBO’s exclusive Canadian distribution through Crave, is further off in the future than previously thought. The Globe & Mail‘s Barry Hertz got Bell to talk.

Canadian book publishing: Hugh Stephens has reviewed Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature. Stephens offers his skepticism of Stursberg’s “draconian” proposal for state intervention into the Canadian book publishing market. Knowing Stursberg, he wouldn’t flinch at “draconian” but would argue that drastic measures are required after 40 years of federal neglect.

CanCon: Cartt.ca is publishing Brad Danks’ seven-part series on the future of Canadian content in a small domestic market and a global streaming audience. So far there are two instalments and if you find the first one a little abstract, the second (“why Canadian media keeps missing the upside”) makes his arguments with brevity and persuasion. I won’t give away more than that.

Journalism standards: Are you a Canadian journalist? Colette Brin of Laval University is shaking your tree to get involved a survey supporting a study on whether there are consensus standards for news coverage that we should be articulating for the industry. If you don’t help, consider your dissenting privileges revoked!

***

Lastly, a magnetic documentary to watch.

CBC is streaming Canadian filmmaker Ric Esther Bienstock’s two-part “Speechless,” profiling the pitched ideological battles staged on American university campuses and inside faculty lounges.

The film got a meh from Globe reviewer Kelly Nestruck, but I found it both riveting and kind of terrifying (after having tuned it all out for years for just that reason).

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

A sustainable Canadian news media: what is to be done? A new report.

April 29, 2026

Today, Senator Andrew Cardozo released his new report “Making News Media Sustainable,” co-authored with yours truly, on future policy options for supporting Canadian news journalism. It’s about subsidies.

Our project is to put forward new ideas. For discussion. The working assumption is that public support of private journalism is here to stay in one form or another, so what can we offer in terms of continuous improvement? The Senator already put forward his ideas about public support for the CBC in a 2024 report here, so this new report focusses on public support to privately owned news journalism.

Some of our ideas will roil the waters. Just to choose one, we suggest that federal news subsidies should be reduced or eliminated to heavily indebted news organizations (i.e. Postmedia) that are using public money, in whole or in part, to pay off their controlling owners and creditors.

There are other ideas that you might call technocratic, invoking the subtle art of policy design, such as offering news organizations an opportunity to go paywalled, or to stay paywalled, and forego journalist salary subsidies in favour or more enticing subscription tax credits offered to citizens. To work properly, the federal government would have to launch a seriously generous news voucher program for citizens, whether or not they pay taxes.

Another idea, that we lean on pretty hard, is that the federal government end its arbitrary exclusion of broadcasting companies from accessing subsidies for their news websites that are indistinguishable from the digital operations of print publishers. By coincidence, yesterday the Carney government announced in its Economic Update that the Finance Department will launch a public consultation “to seek the views of Canadians and stakeholders on extending the Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit to audio and audiovisual news production.”

We give a lot of attention in the report to the under appreciated history of innovation success in Canadian news journalism, both with respect to digital technology and content strategies. There have been many successes to admire or replicate, both from start-ups and legacy news organizations. One policy idea that emerges from that experience is public funding of innovation-related expenses, such as IT staff salaries.

We also applaud the gaining traction of non-profit news journalism. It is no silver-bullet to cure all that ails the beleaguered industry. But it clearly can be tapped for greater potential.

One of the challenges to change-management in our sprawling news industry is that we lack a cohesive public policy for supporting news journalism. Policy initiatives have been ad hoc, reactive, and initiated under overlapping jurisdictions of federal government, provincial governments, and the federal regulator, the CRTC. Unsurprisingly, there is no central institute equipped to collect and analyze a broad and deep well of industry data that might guide the best decisions for supporting journalism.

And our closing advice in the 100-page report: the policy solutions for news journalism may not be one-size fits all. We have an array of Canadian news markets where consumers seek or passively consume the news of the day: national, regional, local, by language, by content silo, by platform preference, etc.

The biggest conundrum, the one that reveals our deepest policy conviction in writing the report, is the enormous gap between the number of Canadians who will pay for news (about 20%) and those who won’t. That 20% number is stubborn: even hypothetically lower paywall prices don’t seem to budge it very far.

All Canadians vote (well, 68% of those eligible in the last federal election), whether they consume news or not. As the loss of advertising revenue to Big Tech platforms has destabilized news organizations that distribute trustworthy news for free and without a subscription, the threat of a news consumption deficit becoming a democratic deficit is something that only the naive would avoid looking straight in the eye.

Finally, we have a lot to say about the connection between public trust and public subsidies to news journalism.

We don’t subscribe to the idea that a penny of subsidies means a pound of distrust: the healthy and unhealthy skepticism expressed around the world about news media is powerfully influenced by many things other than subsidies and, for example, is far more profound in the United States where there is precious little subsidy of news journalism. Regardless, care must be taken regardless by making greater efforts to make the gatekeeping of Canadian news subsidies arm’s length from the government.

The report begins with a brief executive summary. It’s followed by a landscape review of subsidy programs, a comparison to policy initiatives in non-Canadian jurisdictions, and then an extended series of policy issues inviting you to engage in the debate over what is to be done.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

When you’re the last to know.

AI Photo Illustration

April 25, 2026

We, the people, were the last to know.

On Thursday, CBC president Marie-Phillipe Bouchard told Heritage committee MPs the $150 million increase in the public broadcaster’s parliamentary grant for 2025 was “temporary.”

In fact, she said in response to a question from Bloc MP Martin Champoux, “we knew it was temporary.”

Bouchard’s answer is a revelation because, until the Carney government published its Main Estimates for the 2026-27 federal budget, neither the Prime Minister nor the author of the 2025 federal budget that included the $150 million, Finance minister François-Phillipe Champagne, told the public that the new CBC money was temporary.

Announced this February, the 2026-27 budget projection cuts $192 million from the public broadcaster.

The Prime Minister, who promised the $150 million in his April 2025 election platform as a downpayment on a larger funding increase, also told voters on the campaign trail that that in addition to the $150 million “we expect that in the coming years, we will continue to increase that funding until it can be compared to that provided by other public broadcasters.” (On budget day November 4, 2025 a carefully worded press release avoided the characterization of either a temporary or permanent increase).

And while Canadians might have taken the Prime Minister and the Finance minister at their word, it seems the CBC president knew otherwise. “We knew it was temporary.”

A follow up question from the Bloc’s Champoux, a former journalist, might have been “when did you know it was temporary?” And who told you?

But the question never came. Conservative MP Bernard Généreux followed up, but only to rib Bouchard over the Liberal budget cut and how perhaps the CBC had more to fear from the government than would-be CBC defunder Pierre Poilievre.

Liberal backbencher Bienvenu-Olivier Ntumba then asked Bouchard about the impact of parliamentary cuts on Radio-Canada. The CBC president replied that some staffing resources shared equally between French and English language services would be affected if cuts were “significant.”

The government’s main budget estimates have scheduled a $192 million cut to the CBC budget, representing the repeal of the $150 million increase from the 2025 budget. An earlier $42 million boost under the Trudeau government in 2024, renewed in the 2025 parliamentary grant, was also repealed for 2026-27.

Heritage minister Marc Miller appears before the committee on May 5th (update: now rescheduled to May 7th).

***

In our last MediaPolicy post, we reported on the stale news — I was on vacation, okay? — that the CRTC had reversed itself and agreed to provide a three cents per subscriber increase to the parliamentary news service CPAC.

Minutes before or after I hit the publish button on that post, CPAC CEO Christa Dickenson announced the termination of CPAC’s evening news show. The $2.8 million boost to her $13 million budget from the CRTC rate increase wasn’t enough to stabilize finances, according to Dickenson. The cancellation of the show meant 12 staff layoffs, including show host Michael Serapio.

An online hue and cry followed in response to the CPAC announcement and Heritage minister Marc Miller joined in with a tweet suggesting that the CRTC’s delay in implementing the Online Streaming Act was to blame:

As I retweeted at the time, oh my.

By linking the CPAC layoffs to a live CRTC file dealing with requests to deliver financial relief to “services of exceptional importance,” the minister seemed to be saying that the independent regulator ought to giddy up and deliver it to CPAC.

That special funding was requested by CPAC on July 2, 2025, citing its services of exceptional importance including the now eliminated evening shows, and is still under consideration by the Commission.

Miller’s impatience with the languid pace of CRTC decision making on implementation of the Online Streaming Act is shared widely, for good reason. But now the Commission’s eventual decision on funding services of exceptional importance will either be a yes (submitting to its minister) or no (defying its minister).

A footnote to this story: on the same day that Miller was tweeting about CPAC, the CRTC followed up its increase to CPAC’s subscriber rate with a two cent increase for TV5, the French language news service.

CPAC’s Dickenson appears before the Heritage committee this coming Tuesday, April 28th.

CPAC CRTC Statement July 2 2025 Download

***

One of the better kept secrets in minister Miller’s thoughts is what he has in mind by appointing a special advisory committee on the future of Canada’s audio visual industry.

The ministerial appointments are mostly not the usual suspects and stakeholders, bending instead towards active industry executives, producers and investors.

The committee’s mission is framed by the minister in high level language:

The Government of Canada is reviewing how it supports the audiovisual sector. The current framework for federal audiovisual support was built for a different era and needs to evolve so Canadian stories can thrive, both at home and globally. The goal is to make sure that federal support remains effective, efficient and transparent, and that it can support the full spectrum of Canadian voices and stories. The work includes reviewing audiovisual policy and institutions.

Parsing that brief statement, change is certainly in the wind, but what? Presumably, committee members asked the Minister for something more detailed when they were recruited. It’s a good bet they aren’t signing on for a mere reorganization of government departments Telefilm, CAVCO, the National Film Board or the Canada Media Fund.

The CanCon-funding Canada Media Fund immediately expressed support for the minister’s “modernization” agenda. This suggested that the CMF, jointly governed and funded by the federal government and Canadian cable companies, knows what that agenda is. Asked for comment on its understanding of what in Miller’s agenda it is endorsing, the CMF replied “the CMF shares the Minister’s view that the current framework was built for a different era and needs to evolve.”

The rest of us, we’re on a need to know basis.

In the absence of more information, it is reasonable to speculate that the Liberals are going to re-launch something like the dead-ended 2016-17 federal policy review conducted by Heritage minister Melanie Joly that dismissed pleas for what became the Online Streaming Act in 2023 and instead called for more government support of exported Canadian content and a Canadian spending commitment from Netflix.

If you want to get a flavour of what an export strategy might look like, I recommend Ken Whyte’s latest Substack post which admires how Korea has remodelled its cultural production policies since the 1990s. (Coincidentally, Whyte served on Melanie Joly’s advisory committee in 2017).

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Liberal majority means business for Heritage MPs – Rebel News is back on the policy menu – Buddy cops are back

April 18, 2026

The new Liberal majority in the House of Commons puts the Carney government in command of Parliamentary committees, including Canadian Heritage.

That clears the path for the Carney government to bring forward its much (much) awaited online safety bill. It also green lights a bill to implement the Liberal election platform on the CBC: changes to the public broadcaster’s governance and the establishment of long term funding that is insulated from the federal budget cycle.

The Liberals have not enjoyed majority control of House committees since prior to the 2019 general election. Their signature media legislation in the 2023 Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act of the same year needed support from the Bloc and the NDP to overcome Conservative filibusters in committee.

The lack of a committee majority also plays out in the cultural war prosecuted by the opposition Conservatives, especially against the CBC.

Only this fall, the Conservatives got their wish to turn the Heritage committee into a forum to fuel an attack on the CBC, with the Travis Dhanraj controversy as its fodder.

Without control of the committee, the Liberals had to compromise by agreeing to a series of new committee hearings on “the state of the journalism and media sectors,” less than a year after the committee completed a report on “The Holding of a National Forum on the Media.”

The new hearings offer an oddly bifurcated narrative that features the Conservatives inviting witnesses to disparage the CBC or allege bias in mainstream media while the Liberals summon a string of private news organizations eager to endorse existing federal subsidies or advocate for more of them.

In other words, the committee has been stuck in performative gear instead of legislative mode.

One of the legislative issues that we can expect to hear more of, possibly packaged into an online safety bill, is Senate Bill S-209 which just passed Third Reading in the upper chamber. It now goes to the House of Commons, provided it is sponsored by an Opposition or government MP.

Previously covered by MediaPolicy, S-209 would ban underage access to online pornography through the implementation of age estimation technology. While porn sites are clearly targeted, the bill also authorizes a government regulator to scope in social media apps such as Elon Musk’s X where children can access pornography for free.

This policy furrow has already been ploughed by legislation in the UK, Europe and 25 American states. In addition, many countries have imposed outright social media bans.

The recent Liberal Party policy convention voted for a total ban on underage access to social media and Heritage minister Marc Miller was quoted by Canadian Press as saying he was taking the proposal “very seriously.”

The sponsor of S-209, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, told MediaPolicy that she was gratified her bill passed the Senate unanimously in a voice vote, her third try over five years and three parliamentary sessions.

When she first tabled the bill in 2020, age estimation technology was in its infancy and its development since then —and implementation in other countries— has dulled the edge of privacy concerns expressed by critics.

Miville-Dechêne said that support from parents and grandparents kept her going and described S-209 as a “magnificent victory” for child safety.

Her previous bill in the last Justin Trudeau parliament also passed Third Reading in the Senate in 2024 and had support in the House from opposition parties as well as, according to Miville-Dechêne, a significant number of Liberal MPs. But the bill faced the implacable opposition of the Trudeau PMO.

This time will be different for S-209, she said, and she would be happy to see the House either take up the bill or for the government to fold it into its own online safety bill.

***

If things get boring in media policy, there’s always the chance that Rebel News will make it less so.

In December 2025 the CRTC published its letter to Rebel News explaining that the Commission could not entertain Rebel’s application filed in August 2025 asking for a share of Google’s $100 million in mandatory licensing payments under the Online News Act. The role of gatekeeping the fund is assigned by cabinet regulation to the news consortium chosen by Google to distribute the cash, the Canadian Journalism Collective.

The CJC confirmed to MediaPolicy that in spite of the CRTC ruling Rebel News has not asked them for recognition or money, raising the inference that Rebel was more interested in being denied by the CRTC than the Google cash itself.

Rebel also applied for federal journalism labour tax credits in 2021 but was denied by the CRA’s independent committee on a number of grounds, both with respect to its lack of original news reporting and its not meeting recognized standards of fair reporting. A federal judge upheld the CRA committee.

Most recently, the Quebec Press Council threw out a public complaint against Rebel and its controversial Quebec reporter Alexandra Lavoie on the grounds that Rebel is not a really a news organization.

The Conseil panel ruled that Rebel’s true identity is a political action group, not an independent news organization, evidenced by its registration as a federal lobbyist and with Elections Canada as a third party political action group seeking to “influence” elections.

The Conseil’s written decision includes a gratuitous aside about Rebel News being “an activist organization with ties to far-right circles,” however the key passage takes a “pith and substance” approach to characterizing Rebel:

Although it does not describe itself as an activist organization, the entity itself promotes its activist side, as demonstrated by its purported “Code of Journalistic Ethics and Professional Conduct,” which states: “We may launch crowdfunding campaigns, letter-writing campaigns, or petitions to support people affected by the events we cover.” This has nothing to do with journalism.

By advocating for its political and ideological interests, Rebel News cannot cover the news independently and thus cannot offer its readers and listeners an accurate picture of reality. Its contributors, whom Rebel News calls “journalists,” are therefore not working in the public interest, but rather in the interest of its political causes.

The Rebel News platform cannot be considered a news outlet as defined by the Quebec Press Council, since it is not a publication of a “journalistic nature.”

The Conseil is a self governing assembly that has no coercive powers over news organizations but unlike the English-Canadian National News Council the Conseil accepts public complaints about news organizations that don’t belong to it or pay dues, such as Rebel News.

***

On May 7th, the Raptors may still be in the NBA playoffs and the Blue Jays may be back over .500.

But what MediaPolicy is holding its breath over is the reprise of Bon Cop, Bad Cop on Bell Crave.

The franchise has already produced two dramedy cop buddy movies that feature cheeky bilingual repartée and good humoured riffs on the cultural stereotypes of French and English Canadians.

***

COMMENTS ARE WELCOME. But be advised they are public once I hit the “approve” button, so mark them private if you don’t want them approved.

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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