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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – News subscriptions stall – Guilbeault parries Québec cultural demands – Bell’s proposal for local TV news

June 22, 2025

The 2025 Reuters Oxford Digital News Report was published this week, offering both global and Canadian break-out numbers.

It’s a trite observation that digital technology has turned media on its head, disrupting the advertising revenue that once paid our bar tabs for the consumption of media. The disruption has hit hardest in news journalism and stoked alarm about its knock on effect upon liberal democracy.

That’s probably why recurring polls and surveys tracking the arc of that disruption seize our attention, even if the trends are slow moving. For example, this year’s Rubicon crossed was that social media surpassed news websites as the leading access point for online news.

Cue the Reuters report, for my money the leading annual global survey. It tracks metrics on news consumption, platform preferences, news avoidance, misinformation, fear of misinformation, and “trust in media,” which is essentially a hybrid metric tracking legitimate skepticism of news journalism, alienation from public institutions, and audience polarization.

The global report also generates break out national numbers and additional polling for individual countries. Canada’s supplementary report on news consumption was written by University of Laval researchers Colette Brin and Sébastien Charlton.

Canada saw a 1% down tick in online news subscriptions from 15% in 2024 to 14%. In 2016 it was 9% but has been flat since getting a bump from the Covid pandemic and the 2020 US election.

Globally, the willingness of the local population to pay for online news ranges from 42% in Norway to nine per cent in Italy. Canada’s 14% is just slightly under the global water line of 18% of the adult population.

There was startling data that Canadians are world leaders in our readiness to shell out for foreign news subscriptions, clocking in at half of Canadian news subscribers. Together with Ireland, Canada’s sign up for foreign news sources is a global outlier.

But what really got my attention was a graph from the global study revealing that 71% of non-news payers say they can’t be tempted to subscribe through innovative options to bundle multiple news services, access more non-news content, or by pick-and-pay news content falling short of a full subscription. They just won’t pay for news, full stop.

As Hunter S. Thompson might have said, not paying is a matter of principle.

That suggests (excuse my confirmation bias) that in the best case scenario there is limited room to grow the subscription-model for Canadian news. The vast majority of Canadians are casual news consumers who will not pay to keep up to date on current affairs.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the free-distribution CBC, CTV, Global News, the Canadian Press and hundreds of community news outlets continue to post news online (see the graphic below, where CBC leads the pack among English speakers).

Should that change, I’m not counting on the news subscription model to bail out liberal democracy. It’s more likely (and this is also reflected in the Report) that Canadians will turn to social media influencers to deliver news, reliably or otherwise.

***

A couple of follow-up stories for you:

Last month the CAQ Québec government tabled its Bill 109, aiming to deliver seismic changes to the rock bottom consumption levels for French language music on global streaming platforms operating in Québec.

The tabling of the bill by Culture Minister Matthieu Lacombe was timed to coincide with Québec City hosting the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expression.

Unamended since its inception in 2005, the Convention is an aspirational international standard for sovereign nations willing to step into the commercial media market and push back against the domination of English-language and mostly American content.

Lacombe was looking for other countries to sign off on an upgrade to the Convention, specifically to match Bill 109’s claim to cultural diversity as a fundamental right of citizens backed up by regulatory efforts to move the needle on the consumption of domestic media content.

The Québec City meeting didn’t deliver for Lacombe. A few countries said yes, but more gave a muffled maybe.

The muffled included Canada’s federal government. Culture and Identity (and Official Languages) Minister Steven Guilbeault issued a statement that endeavoured to navigate the narrow channel between the cultural nationalism embedded in Lacombe’s bill and, on the port bow, the exclusive federal jurisdiction over broadcasting. Not to mention, Guilbeault’s boss the Prime Minister must be thinking it’s not an ideal time to piss off Donald Trump by making more announcements about regulating foreign streamers.

All this is happening on a parallel time track with the CRTC’s upcoming public consultation on regulating foreign music streamers operating in Canada.

Apple, which has more of a flair for corporate arrogance than you might think, filed a policy brief with the CRTC that sassed the Québec cultural groups who have asked the CRTC to build a stronger regulatory regime for music streaming. Said Apple:

Apple opposes the requests of groups such as ACCORD and APEM to obtain further information from online audio services in an effort to dictate approaches that supposedly will result in more streams of Canadian songs. Setting aside the remarkable fact that these organizations apparently think that they would be better at running the streaming services than the services themselves, these requests lead to a dead end. As Apple explained in its response to APEM’s application of more than one year ago, much of the information being requested is either not provided to Apple or does not even exist.”

American Big Tech disses Québec cultural leaders. Game on!

In addition to Apple, the world-leading music platform Spotify filed information with the CRTC culled from its annual report “Loud and Clear.”

The Spotify document claimed surging growth in musician earnings in the global market for French-language music. Musician earnings have doubled globally and in Canada since 2017 thanks to rising royalty payments to music labels. Spotify told MediaPolicy that earnings growth was experienced at all levels, from the poorest bands to superstars (but not broken out by language group).

The policy implication of Spotify’s claim is that it’s part of the supply-side solution to domestic music and that the demand-side of music consumption ought to be left to the unregulated market.

The earnings data reported by Spotify is 10,000-foot stuff. Royalty payments are probably 20% of total label and musician earnings, says the company. But without the streamers opening their books to public analysis it’s hard to say how well things are working out for individual bands, or in particular for Québec musicians who may be making money in the global francophonie but have less than 10% of their own domestic market.

The same data problem exists on the consumption side of the equation. Spotify has never contradicted the repeated claims made by Québec’s cultural groups that their third party data shows that less than 10% of streaming in Québec is in French and that French-language songs rarely crack the charts.

In response, Spotify says that half of Québec’s streaming audience “regularly” consumes French language music but chooses not to define “regularly” or provide its internal data on the proportion of English versus French language songs.

The coyness about data may come to a point in September when Spotify executives must appear before CRTC commissioners.

***

In last week’s post, MediaPolicy offered an update on the CRTC’s decision to extend news subsidies from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF) to the Global News network of local stations.

Some of the Commissioners were nevertheless unhappy with the funding gap remaining between 34 independent local stations and the 45 operated by “vertically integrated” media companies Bell, Rogers and Québecor. If you want more context, check out last week’s post.

If some Commissioners think that the Big Three are getting the short end of the stick on news subsidies, imagine what the telcos think.

Bell owns 35 local stations in its CTV and Noovo networks and, according to filings, loses $40 million annually on news.

Here’s Bell’s illustration of the news funding gap it provided to the Commission:

But being sensitive to how the big telcos are viewed by their admiring public, Bell isn’t having too much of a moan.

Instead, Bell’s ask of the Commission is that they be allowed to reassign the remaining $13 million of their cable division’s funding of community programming to their broadcasting division’s network of local news stations.

In return, Bell wants the Commission to repeal its 2016 regulations requiring the vertically integrated Big Three to allocate 11% of their programming budgets for conventional television to local news.

Also, Bell wants the Commission to remove minimum exhibition requirements for weekly hours of news programming.

***

The best podcast I listened to this week was four Americans debating trade, Trump and culture war, courtesy of Canada’s Munk Debates.

The New York Times’ Ezra Klein was on the panel and he was allowed to post the full length audio on his podcast.

Klein provided the intellectual content; Kellyanne Conway provided the MAGA hubris.

***

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

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – CRTC rules on local news funding – NPR and PBS closer to defunding – who is the media now?

June 14, 2025

The latest CRTC ruling (2025-133) on local television news has delivered a predictable outcome, but also the beginnings of an adult conversation about a broader CRTC strategy.

The Commission’s bottom line was that the CRTC-created Independent Local News Fund that subsidizes unprofitable local news production at sixteen stations not owned by Canada’s three major broadcasting groups will be extended to fifteen Global News stations. The ILNF’s $18 million annual kitty that is courtesy of a tithe on major cable companies is scheduled to be swollen by another $40 million from the Commission’s cash levy on online streamers.

The Commission was bound to reclassify the Corus-owned Global stations as “independent” once they were cut loose from Shaw Cable in the CRTC-approved Rogers-Shaw merger. Denying them admission to the ILNF would have been difficult to explain and now the streamer money makes the numbers work.

The level of ILNF subsidy works out to approximately 70% of news production costs, a dramatic figure, although it varies from station to station depending on how much they spend on news and how many hours they produce.

A CRTC rule caps any station owner in a single regional market from drawing more than 12% of the $18 million (now $58 million) fund.

In this recent ruling, the CRTC added an “entity” cap which restricts the 15-station Global News network to 45% of the available money, somewhat less than the majority share they would be paid without a national cap.

Those are the headline numbers.

There’s some unfinished business.

The Commission says its going to develop an incentive —details to come later— to reward local news stations for increasing their news coverage of underserved communities (read Indigenous, minority French and Anglo communities and equity-seeking groups).

As part of that ruling, the Commission has imposed a quid pro quo for receipt of ILNF cash: stations must post all of their television news content on their websites; whether its available for free or subject to paywalls isn’t clear from the ruling. Many stations already distribute their video content digitally for free.

So far, so predictable.

But three —three!— Commissioner dissents from the ruling suggest that a more wholistic vision of broadcast news funding is coming. And in fact a general rethink of news funding is one of the issues the Commission is reviewing in its current consultation on audio-visual broadcasting by television and streaming operators.

Ontario Commissioner Bram Abramson decided to speak his mind in a way you rarely find in Commission rulings, suggesting the tweaking of the ILNF to satisfy Global’s admission to the subsidy club is only an “interim” (read, “timid”) step with more to talk about.

Abramson makes the taboo suggestion that the Commission consider access to the ILNF subsidy by local stations owned by the three major networks, the 45 stations operated by the “vertically integrated” (“VI”) Québecor (5), Rogers (5) and BCE (35) that own both cable services and local stations.

Abramson’s view is that what’s more important than ownership of stations is the market they operate in, in particular the extent of local “news poverty,” meaning the availability of news from other local news outlets.

Québec commissioner Stéphanie Paquette weighed in on this as well, arguing that because the French language markets are dominated by Québecor’s TVA network, which is ineligible for ILNF money, that means the production of French language news gets shortchanged by the only-for-independents ILNF.

Going back to the establishment of the ILNF by the Commission in 2016, the “VIs’” local stations aren’t eligible for that Fund. But they are eligible for a different CRTC cross-subsidy that redirects cable company patronage of their own hyperlocal community stations to their own network TV stations. But depending upon how you do the calculations, that VI news subsidy is worth half or three-quarters of an ILNF dollar.

The CRTC’s standing justification for two sets of subsidy rules for VIs and independents is that the big three networks have greater access to pooled news resources as well as deeper pockets for capital investment.

There’s compelling policy logic to the Commission’s traditional approach, however the bright red line between the financial capacity of VI and non-VI television stations can get muddied in practice, particularly where some of the ILNF-eligible stations are owned by big media companies that don’t happen to run cable operations.

Stingray and Pattison come to mind. Each company closed television stations last month in the rural Prairies, Stingray in Lloydminster (population 31,000) and Pattison in Medicine Hat (population 63,000). The closure of the Pattison station was influenced by the capital cost of renovating the television studio that had sustained major flood damage.

The Jim Pattison Group is a multi-billion dollar, multi-industry conglomerate.

The other notable thoughts from the Abramson dissent were directed at free content. The Commissioner was of the opinion that the availability of industry cross subsidies ought to be subject to a public policy favouring the free distribution of news programming under the conditions of a “Creative Commons”: in other words, a general policy of favouring free news content.

The implications of that thinking are far reaching. Certainly Google and Meta have been making the same claim: that the public interest in accessing news content overrides the desirability of mandatory news licensing payments through legislation like the federal Online News Act, Bill C-18.

***

The Republican defunding of “biased” public broadcasting by PBS and NPR in the United States is on track after the House budget bill narrowly passed and was sent on to the Senate.

Judging from this New York Times report, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was able to mollify Republican holdouts with promises of reinstating some federal funding in the near future.

***

I attended a journalism conference recently where a focus on “essential standards of news reporting” inevitably turned into discussion about who is a journalist.

I’ll spare you my soapbox thoughts on the matter but I recommend an entertaining article in The Hub about online influencers straddling the line between partisan activist and journalist.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Aussies closing in on Meta – Prairie TV stations go dark – Spotify cites Canadian success

Sarah McLachlan will be a Canada Day headliner on CBC

June 7, 2025

Now that Parliament is back, and Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is re-seated for a second tour of duty in his portfolio, there may be speculation about whether the Liberal government will do anything to bring Facebook and Instagram back into the scope of the Online News Act Bill C-18.

The Minister will keep an eye on Australia.

The Australians’ 2021 New Media Bargaining Code served as Canada’s model for Canada’s legislation that compels Google to pay $100 million annually in licensing payments to online Canadian news organizations.

In both countries, Meta’s response to bargaining codes was to ban news content from Facebook and Instagram in order to avoid regulation. In Australia, that meant Meta refused to renew the annual $65 million (AUS) value of its expiring voluntary agreements with news organizations which earned it an exemption from regulation in 2021.

Australia’s Labor government caught everyone’s attention last December when it announced that it would respond to Meta’s actions by legislating mandatory licensing payments regardless of the company’s ban on Australian news.

If and when it is enacted, a “News Bargaining Incentive” would provide a default cash levy on Meta, Google and TikTok if those platforms refused to bargain with news organizations, irrespective of any ban on news content.

The Incentive would be set at a price in excess of the estimated value of a voluntary agreement with news organizations. In late January the Australian government announced that a pre-legislative consultation paper would be “released shortly” but an election intervened.

Now that the Labor government has returned to a majority Parliament in a surprise comeback that paralleled the re-election of Canada’s Liberals, the expectation will be that it releases a white paper and legislates as promised in “late 2025.”

None of that will take place in a vacuum as the American tech platforms will seek the aid of the Trump administration and Congressional trade retaliation. Their lobby organization CICA has released a statement that characterizes the Incentive as “arbitrarily” targeting “select foreign companies” just like the Digital Services taxes that 11 OECD nations have enacted to collect corporate tax revenues that are alleged to be evaded by Big Tech.

An overview of different national versions of a news bargaining code is offered here.

There are also various attempts at the state level in the US. The Californian version was a flop as Google’s modest financial commitments have been scaled down in lock step with the Governor’s budget cuts to its parallel subsidy program. However legislation has been tabled in Oregon, New York, Washington and Illinois.

***

Three independent Canadian television stations closed last month.

In mid-May, Stingray’s twin stations in Lloydminster (respectively affiliated with CityTV and CTV) shuttered. Ownership cited plunging revenues and audience.

Then last week Pattison’s Medicine Hat station also went dark.

It’s an attention-grabber for the CRTC which is poised to release a ruling later this week on revised cash allocations from the Independent Local News Fund (ILNF).

In a June 2023 submission to the CRTC, the umbrella organization representing 19 independent television operators —not counting the 15 Global News stations cut loose in the Rogers Shaw merger— reported that collectively they cover 70% of news production costs from $18 million in ILNF grants.

***

Just as the window closed on submissions to the CRTC on audio regulation, industry leader Spotify published a news release touting the success of Canadian artists on its platform.

The gist of Spotify’s claim is that Canadian artists are growing their earnings on Spotify by expanding their global audiences.

The Canadian news release cites Spotify’s annual “Loud and Clear” global report on musician earnings that was posted in March. The break-out of Canadian data hasn’t been published other than summarized in the June 4th news release.

Significantly, the Spotify report does not cite any changes to consumption of Canadian music in domestic audiences in Québec or the rest of Canada. As far as we know, the CanCon share of domestic market remains at 10% of the Canadian audience and, in the French language market, less than that.

***

If you’re making beer and cedar deck plans for Canada Day, it looks like a good CanCon line-up for the televised broadcast from Ottawa, Vancouver, Yellowknife, and Summerside. It’s on CBC.

***

If you would like regular notifications of future posts from MediaPolicy.ca you can follow this site by signing up under the Follow button in the bottom right corner of the home page;

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

Catching up on Media Policy: Canada dips in the World Press Freedom index after journalist arrests – Trump’s 100% tariffs on Hollywood

May 6, 2025

The annual World Press Freedom index is not something all national governments dread.

If you’re Norway (1st of 180 surveyed nations) or China (178th) you aren’t going to sweat what Reporters Without Borders, a Paris-based NGO best known for public campaigns against the murder or imprisonment of journalists, has to say.

But in between, maybe liberal democracies that think highly of themselves are in for a humbling moment.

This year, Canada’s global ranking is 21st, down from 14th because its index score, spread across five categories of political, legal, economic, social and safety considerations, fell from 81.7 to 78.75 out of 100 points. The US is 57th, France is 25th and the United Kingdom is 20th.

In who’s opinion, you might ask: in each of 180 nations, Reporters Without Borders asks local news journalism experts and practitioners to respond to a series of standardized “press freedom” questions that plumb the depths of journalists’ ability to report on the news without interference.

According to the RWB website:

Press freedom is defined as the ability of journalists as individuals and collectives to select, produce, and disseminate news in the public interest independent of political, economic, legal, and social interference and in the absence of threats to their physical and mental safety.

The Canadian report does not moot the debate over Canadian media subsidies and regulation, to the contrary across 180 nations strong public service broadcasting tends to drive higher scores.

The Index is as much a monitor of a healthy Press as freedom from state power. Broader social, political and economic factors that support or attack a free press play an important role in the scoring.

The editorial notes that accompany Canada’s score suggest that the police arrests of Canadian journalists covering volatile news sites —blockades, demonstrations and encampment clearings— drove down our ranking.

That concern also appears in Reporters Without Borders election-related statement that called for better training of Canadian police in their treatment of journalists as the top public policy priority.

RWB’s other recommendations included protecting the CBC from defunding, a ban on police spyware aimed at journalists, and a rebuilding of Canada’s “broken” access to government information mechanisms (the new Prime Minister having shown some interest in the latter).

RWB also noted the existence of “a patchwork of [media subsidies] policies” that beg for “a comprehensive and consistent strategy that helps enable the media to innovate and find news models of sustainability.”

The latter point was included in my own list of things for the next Culture & Identity Minister to do, posted last week: Miles to Go: the Media Policy work of the 45th Parliament.

In next year’s report, we’ll likely see an impact on ratings from CTV’s firing of Rachel Gilmore as a guest election fact checker because of trolling by right-wing actors.

***

This is my last post for a month thanks to our first real vacation since pre-pandemic times. It’s a bit of a science experiment: can four adults manage a two-year old while travelling? Should be possible.

I couldn’t leave without commenting on Donald Trump’s latest announcement of a 100% tariff on Hollywood’s movie production outside the U.S.

It will be a popular move in the US. Hollywood is making less audio visual content globally and in the United States owing to a number of factors, most noticeably budget cutbacks in response to the saturation of the subscription streaming business.

Canada is Hollywood’s biggest non-American supplier of movies and television shows: half of Canada’s $9.58 billion in annual production is for American shows and much of our Canadian content is widely exported to the American market for second runs. The employment hit could be substantial, as this screen capture from the CMPA’s Profile report reveals:

The obvious Canadian counter-tariff is a 100% surcharge on American-made shows exported to Canada. Those would hit Canadian broadcasters filling their schedules with American programming (Corus, TVA, CTV, Bell Crave, etc) but also Netflix and the other American streamers who sell to Canadian subscribers.

It’s not likely that Hollywood asked for the Trump tariff: the studios rely upon the high-quality, competitively priced production centres across Canada, but mostly Toronto and Vancouver.

The tariff disrupts their supply chains and their budgeting, not unlike the Trump tariffs hitting the auto industry.

A White House spokesperson walked back the President’s announcements within hours —-“no final decisions“— suggesting a WTF phone call from the Motion Picture Association.

Shortly afterwards, Trump’s “Hollywood ambassador” Jon Voight made a public statement suggesting that his recommendations to the President had been to boost tax incentives and subsidies for domestic production, negotiate international co-production treaties, and apply tariffs in some situations.

At the CRTC, the Motion Picture Association and the US streamers have put almost all of their strategic capital on securing a minimal commitment to offering Canadian content because the studios spend so much money making American movies in Canada.

That strategy is now in shreds.

A recommended article on the tariff is by Barry Hertz in the Globe & Mail.

***

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

Miles to go: the Media Policy work of the 45th Parliament

May 1, 2025

The federal election is over and the CBC is still standing. That’s a milestone achieved, for now.

This next Liberal term of government will probably run light on media policy compared to the last four years of legislative turmoil that swirled around the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11, the Online News Act Bill C-18, the future of the CBC, and Online Harms Act C-63, the latter bill being split into two parts and then wiped off the Parliamentary agenda by the election.

If media or cultural issues appear front and centre of public attention during the 45th Parliament, it will likely be a result of trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

The exception is the CBC: the reinvigoration, rebranding, reinvention or re-whatever of the public broadcaster is a winning file for the Liberals and long overdue. The Carney campaign promised more money, more secure long term funding, more local news and more anything to counterweight online misinformation and foreign interference.

The money —a promised 11% increase of $150 million to the Parliamentary grant — will be in the budget bill. The rest must find its way into law through amendments to the Broadcasting Act. That means getting in and out of the procedural swamp of a Parliamentary committee (the new “Culture and Identity” committee) where there is no reason to expect the Conservatives or the Bloc to hand the Liberals a “win.”

It’s going to take a strong minister to get this CBC overhaul done. In March, the Prime Minister appointed Steven Guilbeault as Culture and Identity minister, doubling up with his Quebec lieutenant duties.

Guilbeault is the wrong guy for the job at this point in history. This seems harsh and counterintuitive in many ways. He’s done the job before (2019-2021). He’s smart, decent, competent and temperate. And he is fluently bilingual. So what’s not to like?

The minister’s number one job in this Parliament is the CBC make-over and selling it to English Canada.

That requires gut-instincts about culture and popular attitudes that you can’t easily learn on the island of Montreal. To be pragmatic about the political task at hand, the face of the CBC’s redemption in English-Canada, particularly the west, cannot be the much vilified environmentalist Guilbeault, no matter how unfair that tag may be.

There are other candidates that fit better: fourth-term Toronto MP Julie Dabrusin knows the cultural file as Guilbeault’s former Parliamentary Secretary, she’s bilingual, and if it matters to anyone she was born and educated in Montreal.

The other media policy file that may move forward is a retabled online harms act. You may recall that when the Liberals put forward C-63 last year it contained a raft of amendments to the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code and a separate regulatory scheme that would require social media platforms to establish their own binding content codes that manage the online harms to kids, revenge porn, fomentation of hate, and incitement of violence or terrorism.

The Conservatives have no interest in the content codes other than to politicize them as censorship. The Tories have their own version of an Internet crime bill that focusses on harms to children and jailing the perpetrators.

If the Liberals have any sense they will ditch the anti-hate criminal amendments which will just chew up the Parliamentary agenda with public debate over jailing free speech. But they should go full steam ahead with the content codes: it’s a winning file and the Liberals can probably get the support of the Bloc to get it through committee.

Outside of Parliament, the battle at the CRTC over implementation of the Online Streaming Act is going to peak in the next few months.

In the next few weeks the Commission begins hearings on three major policy files covering the first-time regulation of video and audio streamers, as well as online distribution chokepoints. Also, the US streamers’ legal challenges to the initial “five per cent” cash contributions to Canadian media funds will be heard in Federal Court in mid June.

Assuming the court upholds the Commission’s levies, it all points to a crescendo of policy pronouncements and trade confrontations in the fall and winter of 2025-26.

Because of this, all other media policy files will probably get ignored.

One such file is the Meta ban on news distribution over Facebook and Instagram, the very unfortunate outcome of the Bill C-18 battle that hurts journalism start-ups and news websites in smaller communities. Pierre Poilievre’s campaign proposal was to just cave to Meta, which the Liberals are unlikely to do and in any event that would just be an invitation for Google to demand the end of its $100 million in annual licensing payments.

(On that point, the Google-appointed Canadian Journalism Collective released the first instalment of a list of eligible news outlets this week).

There is no principled way to solve this policy puzzle, which means it might be solved in trade negotiations.

Another file that needs attention but won’t get it is an overdue redesign of the federal QCJO subsidies to news journalism. The opportunity here is to do some good policy work that doesn’t require legislative amendments and Parliamentary bandwidth.

Lastly, now that we have a new Prime Minister maybe we can get the Liberals to reconsider their ill-tempered and ill-considered support of password sharing on news subscription websites in the government’s litigation with Blacklock’s Reporter.

The government has convinced itself (and a trial level judge) that it’s siding with the angels by giving an expansive and elitist interpretation of the “fair dealing” or “research” exception to copyright: it simply does not match up against the common sense reality of running a paywalled news business.

The fact that Blacklock’s is editorially a thorn in the side of the government is the bad energy behind all of this. It’s a vindictive abuse of state power, made possible only because Blacklock’s is not the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star. It’s time for fresh government eyes on this.

***

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

Et tu, Pierre: the Tories’ surprise media policy

April 26, 2025

Something I didn’t see coming in the Conservative platform on media, but should have, was Pierre Poilievre repudiating three years of trashing-talking government subsidies to news journalism.

Just released, the Poilievre platform proposes to more than double the funding of the federal Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), from $20 million per year to $45 million. That potentially adds a further 400 journalist jobs in local print media markets across Canada. The locations of those markets line up nicely with Conservative Party ridings in rural areas and outside major metropolitan areas.

The reaction in some conservative circles to Poilievre’s announcement could be described as vein-bulging disbelief. They had half expected a federal news voucher policy, like the Liberals’ now expired reader tax credit. But this?

In The Hub, a conservative publication that rarely allows daylight to show between itself and the Party, Sean Speer fumed the LJI funding was “a massive concession to the Trudeau agenda and a fundamental failure of conservative politics.” The remarks were made on a podcast, so I am not sure whether the word “conservative” was supposed to be capitalized.

The Hub Publisher Rudyard Griffiths chimed in that the federal government controls news content through the LJI, a serious accusation but without a basis in fact.

The Hub’s dismay with Poilievre’s position on subsidies should be put in context.

If elected Prime Minister, Poilievre will defund the English language services of the CBC with its 2,000 journalists.

Oddly in consideration of his repeated castigations, Poilievre’s platform is silent on the federal $65 million QCJO subsidies to about 3,000 print media journalists, dispensed at 35% of salary.

He has promised immunity to Meta for liability under the Online News Act, which puts at risk Google’s compliance with their commitment to pay $100 million per year compensation to news outlets employing 9,000 journalists (at about 15% of salary).

He has also promised $20 million to fund “Indigenous journalism” without providing specifics.

The Hub’s feeling of betrayal by Poilievre runs deep. In the past few months the publication has gone out of its way to celebrate its refusal to take federal subsidies or compensation from Google, proclaiming its disdain for this financial support as part of its marketing campaign for more paid subscriptions.

What’s not well advertised is that two years ago The Hub publisher Griffiths sought and obtained official designation from the Canada Revenue Agency as a “QCJO” news publisher and, more recently, the seal of approval from the Canada Journalism Collective that is administering the Google money.

I asked him about this apparent contradiction and he confirmed that The Hub has the designations, but spurned the money. A month ago The Hub very publicly donated its $22,000 in Google cash to a charity.

As for the QCJO designation, he says The Hub wanted it for the purpose of Press credentials and never applied for the salary subsidy or reader tax credit program. As for seeking and then giving away the Google money, he said The Hub wanted to follow its application through the CJC process so it could verify the integrity of the distribution.

The Hub’s argument with subsidies is about the independence of the press from government, a non trivial concern of course, but the relevant discussion is “independence” from the many vectors of power in our liberal democracy, not only government but big corporations, sponsors, political parties, billionaires, readers demanding ideological conformity and powerful local families.

The Hub‘s success in winning official status raises the concern of how best to administer QCJO designation when it results in the certification of a news outlet so utterly committed to a northstar political party, one that may be governing Canada come Tuesday morning.

That concern is usually shrugged off by those who point to the historic practice of print media mixing its news reporting with politics through opinion journalism and explicit party endorsements. It got us where we are today, so why worry about the close ties between some media and their political champions?

One way to stop worrying about those political allegiances is found in program design for the subsidies. One of the best ways for a news outlet to prove its bona fides of good journalism is through its committment to original and accurate news gathering as the main course in the journalism meal, with opinion as the dessert.

The QCJO criteria for designation has always required that news outlets engage in original news gathering with a fairly high bar for professional standards. The weakness of those rules is that lack of a high bar for volume of news gathering, requiring only that news gathering be carried out on “ongoing basis.” The “ongoing” is left to eyeballing by a certification committee after a news organization has submitted details of its self selected “best three weeks” of news reporting.

If an outlet like The Hub with its acres of opinion writing and occasional news story can get QCJO designation, the bar for frequency of news reporting can’t be very high.

In fact Griffiths told me that as a non-profit he nevertheless decided against seeking the charitable status that would allow him to issue tax receipts to donors because the rules of the government’s less known “RJO” program for non-profits sets the news gathering bar at 51% of published content, a test he says he could not meet.

And then there is accuracy in news reporting, another thing that demonstrates good journalism and, when not done well, undermines public trust.

Recently, The Hub has repeatedly described federal subsidies to news journalism as totalling “$425 million per year.”

Included in that figure is the $100 million Google money as an “indirect” federal subsidy, a highly editorialized way of describing government-enforced news licensing payments between private parties.

More seriously, its “$425 million” figure includes $154 million from the Canada Media Fund, a media fund that spends all of its money on Canadian television dramas, documentaries and children’s programming and exactly zero dollars on news journalism. That’s a hugely misleading reporting error.

There is yet another way to demonstrate good journalism: keeping a safe distance from corporate influence. News organizations of all stripes have a chequered history on this, frequently allowing advertisers and sponsors to pay for content in one way or another. Nevertheless “advertorial” that is written and paid for by a sponsor, clearly marked as non-journalist content, is generally accepted and long tolerated.

But the arms length independence from corporate money can get squishy.

The Hub published an article in October that opposed the federal government’s Online Streaming Act, also contested in a “Scrap the Streaming Tax” public campaign launched the previous month by the American Digital Media Association (DiMA) against the CRTC’s ruling that music streamers pay five per cent of revenue to Canadian media funds.

DiMA’s member organizations Spotify, Apple, Youtube and Amazon are notorious news subjects in their opposition to the CRTC’s implementation of the bill and DiMA’s campaign art was used by The Hub to illustrate the content of the article.

DiMA even paid for the article, a fact that was acknowledged at the bottom of the article but still, in my opinion, constituting a repudiation of independent journalism.

***

While I’m on about The Hub, they posted a terrific podcast in their Full Press series hosted by Harrison Lowman and starring independent journalists Tara Henley and Peter Menzies. The topic was the notorious “shit show” of Rebel News turning the election debate press conferences on their end on consecutive nights.

It got going on the first night when a Rebel News reporter chose to ask the only non-Christian leader why he wasn’t speaking out against “ongoing attacks against Christians” and Church burnings, a provocatively staged but nonetheless legitimate question.

But the second night was when it all went to hell and the press conference became so unruly that the election commission cancelled it.

The Full Press podcast has some very intelligent commentary on the whole mess, very relevant to the Internet-induced era of wide open journalism.

***

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

2025 Federal Election platforms leave a lot to the imagination

April 22, 2025

Today the Conservatives became the last political party to publish their “full platform,” which in 2025 seems to be a euphemism for “not nearly as full as before and very late.”

The 30-page Conservative document is down from 160 pages in the 2021 edition. The Liberals have chopped their 2021 page length from 86 pages to 55. That means less real estate for each policy section, including culture, arts and media.

Perhaps because of brevity, the Conservative document is a challenge to decode.

Of course, the Tories say upfront they would defund English-language CBC and permit it to carry on as a “non-profit supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue and licensing revenue.” They expressly exempt Radio-Canada from defunding and in fact promise “to maintain all funding in support of Quebec and Francophone culture.”

The Conservatives would also “repeal Liberal censorship laws.” Since there are none, we’ll just assume that’s a reference to the entirety of the Online Streaming Act which Pierre Poilievre has long promised to reverse.

The Conservatives would “restore Canadians news on Meta and other platforms.” That either means repealing the Online News Act and returning $100 million to Google, or simply granting Meta an exemption from the Act so that it will agree to end its Facebook and Instagram bans against most Canadian news outlets. The CPC reference to “other platforms” is unclear, as there are no other Big Tech companies banning Canadian news.

The Conservatives say nothing about undoing the Liberals’ federal “QCJO” subsidies for journalism salaries at private Canadian print news outlets, but it’s doubtful they’ve had a change of heart about abolishing the $65 million annual program.

Nevertheless the CPC platform proposes to double government full funding of journalist salaries in the Local Journalism Initiative federal program, from $20 million to $45 million annually. A further “$25 million in support of Indigenous language media” is promised, although there are no details beyond that.

The Conservatives also promise to “fund the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those generations and their stories live on.”

Not to quibble, such state-commissioned documentaries would not be “the first.” The phrasing of the promise raises the question of whether the federal cabinet would be directing one of the CRTC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, or private broadcasters to make patriotic content. That might be a first.

The Liberals have a light cultural platform when compared to previous election platforms. They restate Mark Carney’s recent campaign promise to increase CBC funding by 11% and commit to long-term stability in funding.

Other than that the Liberals promise to “increase funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board.” For those of you that don’t track these things, in practice “increasing” funding often turns out to be adjusting budgets to keep up with inflation.

What’s noticeably absent in the Liberal platform is the government’s Online Safety Act, Bill C-63, which died on the order table in February. Perhaps it fell to the editor’s red pen.

The NDP did not publish a single platform document but provided a series of issue-oriented documents, none of which dealt with the culture, media or the arts; traditional NDP policies.

The Greens and the Bloc Québécois published lengthy documents with detailed cultural proposals that I won’t attempt to summarize.

The Bloc is the only party to propose extending tax rules that provide corporate tax relief to Canadian businesses that advertise in legacy Canadian media to the placement of ads online.

Here are the party platforms (except for the NDP):

Change CPC Download

Canada-Strong LPC Download

Choisir le Quebec BQ Download

Change Vote for It Greens Download

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Carney’s CBC platform – Rogers renews NHL deal – Google’s Richard Gingras joins Village Media

The latest from Canada Post

April 5, 2025

On Friday the Carney Liberal campaign announced its CBC/Radio Canada platform.

The headline is a promised increase of $150 million to the existing $1.4 billion annual Parliamentary grant.

The Liberals’ messaging is that the CBC must be better funded to complete its mission of strengthening local news while neutralizing misinformation.

This is the same pitch that Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge made in February when she proposed doubling CBC funding to strengthen Canada’s news media in counterbalance to American-controlled and Big Tech-dominated media.

The Carney campaign is on board and signalled a long-term goal of increasing Parliamentary funding to close the gap with the per capita financing of public broadcasting in the UK, France, and Europe.

Carney also indicated he would pursue St.-Onge’s proposal to enshrine long-term funding in the Broadcasting Act instead of it remaining subject to the budget cycle.

Perhaps a surprise is that the Liberals have no plan to attach the new money to CBC exiting the advertising market.

Carney’s disinterest in St.Onge’s proposal to direct the CBC to stop selling advertising on its public affairs programming may be a pragmatic concession to the fact that the CBC’s $275 million yearly intake of ad revenue still exceeds his proposed budget increase of $150 million.

As far as I know, there is no public figure identifying how much of the CBC’s $275 million in ad revenue is connected to public affairs content. In its 2021 election platform, the Liberal Party promised $100 million annually to the CBC for withdrawing advertising from news and public affairs programming but the platform was never implemented.

***

The business journalists of the land have already done a thorough job covering the renewed $11 billion, 12-year hockey rights deal between the NHL and Rogers for Canadian audiences.

In a world of escalating costs for sports rights, it’s not surprising that the price doubled since first inked in 2014. The consensus view is that Rogers badly needs Canadian NHL teams to go on deep playoff runs over the next decade if this deal is going to pay.

Rogers owns the Toronto Maple Leafs so it follows that a national broadcasting policy supporting Canadian companies should require the Leafs to win the Cup every year. I am sure you agree.

Two, more serious, reflections on how this deal fits in with broadcasting matters:

First, it’s important that it was Rogers (or any Canadian broadcaster) that secured this multi-year deal given that Apple, Amazon and Paramount are always sniffing around for major league sports rights.

Second, the renewed deal makes it possible to continue the strange accommodation between CBC and Rogers that has been well covered in the media, especially David Shoalts’ 2018 book, Hockey Fight in Canada.

In 2014, Rogers outbid both Bell and the CBC for the public broadcaster’s national hockey rights. (CBC was never seriously competitive in the high-stakes auction).

But the story had an ugly epilogue. The CBC was awarded the consolation prize of broadcasting Saturday night national hockey as an extra platform for Rogers. For free. The advertising revenue for those CBC broadcasts went entirely to Rogers while CBC even agreed to pay its own production costs.

In the deal with CBC, Rogers obtained a truly national distribution of its broadcasts (its six City-TV stations can’t match the CBC network of 27 local stations), the better to monetize its rights so it can pay the NHL.

By broadcasting Rogers’ games for free, the CBC got relief from filling a gaping hole in its prime time TV schedule with costly alternative programming. Rogers predated on that vulnerability.

In the end, the public broadcaster has less revenue to pay for non-sports programming. The NHL gets paid. Rogers gets windfall revenue at the CBC’s out of pocket expense. And, considered from this angle, Canadian taxpayers are subsidizing Rogers and the NHL.

***

This week in Canadian news journalism’s Inside Baseball…

Richard Gingras has joined Jeff Elgie’s Village Media as Board chair.

That’s a big-time free agent signing, as they say in baseball.

Gingras was for many years Google’s global Vice President for News. That made him the point-man for Google’s efforts to defeat legislation in Canada, Australia, Europe and (successfully) in the United States; legislation tithing Google to pay mandatory licensing fees for news content linked on Google Search.

Google continues to argue to this day that the presence or absence of news content makes no difference to its 90% market share of global search.

Canadians will remember the Google public campaign —including a short lived news throttle—during Parliamentary debates over the Online News Act Bill C-18 and then its renewed threat to throttle news permanently after the legislation was passed. As New Zealanders are now discovering, that’s still page one of the Google playbook.

Gingras remains a senior advisor at Google.

Village Media is, like most Canadian news outlets, a recipient of Google cash. But Elgie has been vocally opposed to the compulsory nature of C-18. Also Elgie was part of the Canadian Journalism Collective’s coalition of small independents that won Google’s favour to become the administrator of Google’s $100 million in C-18 payments to news outlets.

Just prior to Village Media’s announcement of his Board appointment, Gingras published an elegant rumination on the importance of journalism in liberal democracy that I would tack on to a recommended reading list along with Sean Illing’s Paradox of Democracy and Yuval Harari’s Nexus.

The mercifully shorter piece by Gingras tracks the argument made by Illing and Harari that liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction.

By this they mean that liberal democracy’s centrifugal strength and centripetal weakness is in each case our unfettered freedom of expression, the essential ingredient to a democracy that protects rights and minorities but also the opens the door wide to demagoguery and the populist tyranny of the majority.

Gingras has a few things to say about the role that journalism can play in saving liberal democracy.

One way is for journalists to “practice the discipline,” to pursue objectivity in news reporting in the same manner that we expect judges or police officers to pursue objectivity in their own public roles.

Another way is for community news organizations to build citizen engagement that keeps the focus on civil dialogue and tolerance, the key to respecting the rights of citizens.

On this point he shouts out the work of Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa’s Rappler and Village Media’s emerging media project Spaces.

In an interview I had with CEO Jeff Elgie last year he described Spaces as a cross between Facebook and Reddit, a volunteer-moderated chat board for local communities with sub-chats such as things to do, local history, welcoming new Canadians, and local walks and photography.

Gingras and Elgie think Spaces is the next big thing, so I am eager for the Toronto Space to launch.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy: why we’re so funny – no Netflix taxes anymore – a Québec media merger ?

March 8, 2025

I have video clips to recommend.

If by some miracle you missed CBC host Jeff Douglas’ reprise of his 2000 “I am Canadian” video, I think you will enjoy “We are Canadian.” (click above).

Also, Friends of Canadian Media released a new campaign video this week: “FU__ the CBC.”

Yes vulgar, but the humour works (says me, who once considered calling this blog “I call bullshit.”).

Maybe it’s our Canadian superpower to punch above our weight in comedy, thanks to a guileless working class humour that has inspired 22 Minutes, the McKenzie Brothers, Corner Gas, Red Green, Trailer Park Boys, Shorsey, et cetera, et cetera.

Have fun.

***

One of the weirder things on Donald Trump’s trade list is Canadian GST paid on subscriptions to US streaming services. Yes, that GST.

As of this week, one less Canadian pays GST on a Netflix Canada subscription. I cut the cord this week. Sorry Ted, call Donald.

That provides me with a segue to recommend a 30-minute video explainer on tariffs and trade from Centre of Future Work whiz Jim Stanford (click below).

Economist Jim Stanford

Trump’s media trade hit list goes beyond the federal sales tax. MediaPolicy posted a few months ago about the Digital Services Tax that so torments the President and his Tech oligarchs.

Since this trade war will end in a trade negotiation, Canada needs to establish its own Canada First agenda (I claim trademark on this, Pierre).

Previously I wrote about the Canadian cultural exemption and this week I posted about an old idea that is new again; extending corporate tax deductibility laws governing analog media into the online space.

***

Back in August, the Montréal digital news daily LaPresse and the six Québec regional outlets operating as the non-profit Coopérative Nationale de l’information Indépendante (CN2i) announced they were exploring “collaboration,” talks that might lead to merger.

There’s no outcome to those discussions as yet: but Pierre-Karl Pélédeau’s Québécor made a dramatic intervention last month by publicly expressing frustration that an exclusivity and confidentiality agreement between La Presse and CN2i was keeping Pélédeau from pitching a superior offer.

CN2i newsrooms are staffed by 145 journalists and Le Devoir reporting on the private talks speculates that these reporters (but not their non-editorial colleagues) might wind up in a merged La Presse newsroom. CN2i and La Presse already share editorial content and customer service.

There are old ties that bind. Up until 2015, La Presse shared a corporate roof under the Desmarais family’s Power Corporation with the six CN2i dailies in Ottawa-Gatineau (Le Droit), Trois-Rivières (Le Nouvelliste), Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean (Le Quotidien), Québec City (Le Soleil), Sherbrooke (La Tribune) and Granby (La Voix de l’Est).

CN2i wants to go all-digital by 2026, making it a natural fit with LaPresse. It’s a sign of the times that in a media-mad francophone environment, with extra provincial subsidies stacked on top of federal aid, the regional dailies are looking for synergies and scale to remain viable.

Québécor can offer synergies too: in addition to broadcasting properties, it operates Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec. Pélédeau wants to make CN2i an offer but has been told nicely to cool his heels.

***

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

Catching up on MediaPolicy – CBC’s Gaza coverage – New poll on Canadian TV content – Blue Rodeo works its ass off

CBC report from December 2023

March 1, 2025

This week MediaPolicy posted a report on a complaint filed directly with the CRTC by Honest Reporting Canada and the CIJA citing the CBC’s news coverage of Gaza as systematically anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. I don’t offer an analysis of their as yet unrebutted allegations.

But as audience complaints normally go first to the office of the CBC Ombudsperson I took the news item as an opportunity to provide examples of how the Ombud has navigated a steady flow of pro-Israel and pro-Palestine allegations of bias and bad journalism. It’s educating stuff.

By revisiting my earlier post here, I want to add another Ombud review that I overlooked.

It was a pro-Palestinian complaint about the CBC’s televised profile of the late Yahya Sinwar (before he was killed in combat by the IDF).

Sinwar was the Hamas mastermind of the October 7th massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians, 250 hostage kidnappings and the solicited Israeli hunt and kill operation that resulted in perhaps 50,000 dead Gazans, innocents and terrorists alike.

The allegation was that the CBC report unfairly rendered Sinwar as a sinister and “psychopathic” figure without a matching effort to portray Israeli leaders and actions in a similar vein. (The “psychopath” label was applied by an Israeli journalist, not the CBC, the commentator acknowledging the term was too crude to be useful).

I found the Ombud’s response to the complaint compelling.

Most of all I appreciated his reminder that accusations of “one-sided” coverage need to be taken in the context of the CBC’s body of reporting work, not just one story:

Your third primary complaint was that doing this story represented a double standard, that Israeli officials were not scrutinized or described in similar ways as Yahya Sinwar. In this case, I must pause and say that in my experience, people’s perceptions of media coverage are greatly influenced by their own point of view on the issues at hand.

In recent months, I have received hundreds if not thousands of complaints from people who would second your assertion that CBC privileges the Israel perspective and undermines the views of Palestinians. But I have also received hundreds if not thousands more from people who want to know why pro-Palestinian views and claims are accepted without challenge, and Israeli officials are challenged and doubted at every turn.

I am not trying to turn your review into a broader thumbs up or thumbs down on CBC’s coverage of the Middle East. But I am saying that there are endless examples in that coverage of Israel being criticized, challenged or questioned. And that while you are entitled to conclude that the profile of Yahya Sinwar is evidence of a double standard, I do not share that view.

Although there may not have been precisely the same type of profile done about Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli leaders, there have been many reports over time that have included highly critical commentary about them. It was the fact that CBC had done so little reporting on Yahya Sinwar that made this profile valuable to the audience.

The strength of the CBC’s Ombud’s open door policy for audience complaints is its thoughtful and educational analysis of good (or bad) CBC journalism, both as a body of newsroom reporting work and story by story.

I won’t litigate in this space my personal support for Israel, or the caveats to that support, because this blog is about MediaPolicy, not Middle East policy.

But since October 7th I have perceived a widespread ignorance and lack of education about a hundred years of conflict over a contested homeland.

As in all things, we must do own research, a lot of it in this case.

***

The CRTC’s hearings on regulating video content kicks off on March 31st. It’s just published a third party research report that will add polling and focus group feedback to the public record.

The commissioned report was authored by the Ottawa-based Phoenix SPI that has also done work for the federal Privacy Commissioner.

The Phoenix drill-down is about audience views on Canadian programming, more specifically the genres of drama and news. The report combines a 1200-person poll with responses from 90-minute focus groups. The polls oversampled from rural, northern and official language minority communities. The focus groups targeted the same communities but also urban residents and members of equity seeking groups.

The polling numbers sometimes conflict with previous data culled from other sources. For example, outcomes from the Phoenix poll identify a higher market domination of video consumption by streaming platforms (73% of Canadians) with only 44% on cable television (whereas CRTC and Statistics Canada record about a 60% coverage of Canadian households). Whatever the correct figures are, the market dominance of US streamers should drive an even greater sense of urgency at the CRTC.

Since the Commission wants to know what kind of video programs Canadians “primarily watch,” it learned in this Phoenix poll that the leading genres are serial comedy/drama (68%) and news (61%). Happily, those are the CRTC’s top priorities for extra attention in content funding and distribution.

The poll also generated numbers on which objective and subjective elements of a revised definition of a Canadian television program were seen as important.

The poll appears to support the Commission’s bent towards the participation of Canadian producers, talent and crews ahead of identifiable Canadian themes, although it’s a nuanced difference and not black and white:

There was focus group feedback on Canadian programming that came out a little garbled.

Canadian shows were appreciated as good quality, dismissing the stereotype of CanCon mediocrity. Feelings of pride, connectedness and a certain disdain for the sensationalism and narrative choices of US programming were pointed out.

But then a significant number of voices downplayed the importance of filming Canadian content on location in Canada. This “apparent contradiction” suggested that only quality Canadian content mattered to the participants, not shooting location. The US streamers might take some encouragement from that, but tens of thousands of Canadian television workers will not.

As for news programming, the poll offered surprising results on the choice of video platform, ranking online sources (combined text, video and audio) far ahead of television. This flatly contradicts recent polling. The discrepancy may end up being important to policy choices made by the Commission.

In the end, these polling numbers on news journalism paint a familiar picture:

Canadians rank “trust” as the overwhelming priority in choosing their news sources and give high approval ratings to their news outlets for accurate reporting. In the focus groups, the most commonly trusted news source was CBC/Radio-Canada, followed by the mainstream private media. In fact the participants “considered public broadcasters more trustworthy because they are publicly funded as opposed to privately owned.” Haven’t heard that for a while, have you?

Canadians have a tepid approval rating for the overall news ecosystem that includes both the sources they choose (and presumably trust) and those they don’t.

***

In the fall of 1985 a friend of mine dragged me to the Horseshoe Tavern in downtown Toronto to see a band I had never heard of. “You have to see these guys,” he said.

The band, Blue Rodeo, was unbelievably good. Rock-country fusion, just my thing. ‘Why are these guys still playing the Horseshoe and how have they not got a record deal?’ I wondered.

Forty years, sixteen studio albums, eleven Junos and a lot of bar venues later, the group is the subject of a new documentary streaming on CBC Gem, Lost Together.

“Blue Rodeo showed that other model,” offers band friend and former NOW publisher Michael Hollett. “Just work your ass off in Canada and you can have a great life as a musician.”

***

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

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