Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Last summer, the Lake Report, which serves Niagara-on-the-Lake, a community of nineteen thousand in Southern Ontario, had a rare opportunity. The paper’s reporters were invited to a small gathering with Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, who was stopping by a farming cooperative in town. Poilievre is generally press-averse, partial to friendly platforms—his own YouTube and Instagram channels, Jordan Peterson’s podcast. The Lake Report pounced, sending both of its reporters. They asked first thing about how Poilievre would handle the government’s support of local journalism. “He started bashing it,” Richard Harley, the editor, recalled. Poilievre spoke about his plans to do away with public funds for Canadian media, on which the Lake Report relies. “This would be a dagger in the industry of news, especially for smaller papers,” Harley told me. “It would be devasting for us.”
So when Justin Trudeau resigned recently as Canada’s prime minister, and Poilievre entered the spotlight as his likely successor, Harley knew what was coming. The election will take place on or before October 20; already, Poilievre has revealed an aggressive agenda, with the press in his sights. Most notable has been his vow to slash the federal allotment for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation by a billion dollars; this year, the network received about 1.4 billion, representing most of its budget. The funds Poilievre would sustain are supposedly meant for Radio-Canada, the CBC’s French-language arm: “The government should only do what people can’t do for themselves,” he told the Toronto Sun, by way of explanation. “Canadians can get English-language media in abundance, more than they could ever consume. That is not true in the French language.” The CBC rejects that logic, however; both language presentations draw from the same newsroom resources. “Removing CBC’s public funding would mean the end of independent public broadcasting in Canada,” a CBC/Radio-Canada spokesperson told me. “Radio-Canada could not exist without CBC and vice versa.”
Politicians have attempted to cut back on how much federal funding goes to the CBC before—at times successfully, as in the case of Stephen Harper, Trudeau’s predecessor, who in 2012 slashed 115 million dollars over three years. (The budget was later restored.) Some revenue comes from ads, subscriptions, and other commercial activities. But what Poilievre proposes would be the most dramatic assault on the CBC in its history. “I see the CBC as maple syrup for Canada,” Kim Kierans, a veteran of the network and now a journalism professor, told me. “We use our tax dollars to fund health and education and to fund public broadcasting because we see them as a public good.” (CBC analysis shows that Canada ranks eighteenth out of twenty Western countries for the percentage of government expenditures to their public broadcaster. The United States is in last place.) Within the country, there are criticisms of the CBC’s leadership and organizational structure, as well its opinion coverage; Kierans, too, believes the network needs to change. Even so, she said, “Let’s have a national conversation before somebody takes an ill-informed action.”
Poilievre would also undercut the Canadian press by other means. Unlike in the United States, where privately owned media dominate and there is a sizable philanthropic network for journalism, Canada’s press ecosystem—both for-profit and nonprofit—largely depends on public support. Poilievre wants things to work differently: “Let the media make money winning eyeballs and earlobes,” as he put it in a recent interview.
Beyond the CBC, the government bolsters journalism through the Canadian Periodical Fund, which provides start-up grants of a few thousand dollars to independent outlets. In 2019, Trudeau formed the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI), providing support for four hundred local newsroom jobs in underserved communities across the country through 2027, at which point it will be up for renewal. Both of those programs are liable to come under Poilievre’s knife; he has claimed the latter sponsors “regurgitated propaganda paid for by taxpayers.” Outlets can also apply for designation as a “qualified Canadian journalism organization,” through which the government subsidizes employee salaries; those who pass muster can then register to receive the tax benefits typical of charities, which are more difficult to form in Canada than in the US. Poilievre has suggested that he would replace the current, need-based tax credits with others that are revenue-based. “It is the least progressive way to fund news,” Dru Jay, the president of the board of directors at The Breach, a national investigative nonprofit, told me. “Because you’re not incentivizing journalism. You’re incentivizing moneymaking—which is incentivizing corporate consolidation.”
In addition, Poilievre is targeting the Online News Act, aimed at extracting money from tech giants that feature Canadian journalism on social media; he has stated his intention to revisit the terms, calling it a censorship tool. And during tough times, Canada has provided media industry bailouts, in sums of as much as 595 million dollars; he is unlikely to deliver one of those. “It is in the same way the government subsidized oil companies, car companies, and others, but for us these years of government funding have allowed us to get stronger in every way,” Linda Solomon Wood, the CEO, founder, and editor of Canada’s National Observer, an investigative reporting outlet focused on climate change, told me. “We won’t go backward from there.”
There are limits to what Poilievre can do, in practical terms: in the case of the CBC, the Online News Act, and the tax credits, legislation would have to pass with parliamentary approval. “I haven’t heard of a plan in which they come to work the day after the election and there are locks on the doors,” Kierans said. “There are union contracts. There are legal requirements when you’re closing down a company of any sort, and this is a crown corporation.” A number of Canadian publications—Canada’s National Observer, The Breach, The Narwhal, and The Tyee—say that government funding constitutes less than 20 percent of their annual revenue; they receive a substantial amount from readers. “We wouldn’t go out of business, but we couldn’t grow as quickly,” Jeanette Ageson, the publisher of The Tyee, a provincial nonprofit digital publication in British Columbia, told me. “We would probably retrench and go into stabilization mode, become more cautious. It would be harder for us to bring on new journalists.”
But other newsrooms would have tougher fortunes—and so would the audiences they serve. “I don’t think it is a binary of state-funded media or private media—for many communities, it’s going to be a publicly funded media or nothing,” Ageson said. “People will be left to their own devices. Something will fill the void, and it won’t necessarily be accountable, professional media.” Marc Edge—a Canadian journalism researcher and activist, whose latest book is Tomorrow’s News: How to Fix Canada’s Media—told me that if Poilievre follows through on his campaign promises to the press, it would be “an extinction-level event.”
For many small towns—including Niagara-on-the-Lake, home to the Lake Report—the market may simply not be there to support robust journalism without government help. “Those LJI reporters are our only two reporters in the newsroom,” Harley said. “Losing them would mean me having to do everything.” He added: “It would keep going but with less coverage—and less coverage means fewer eyes on what politicians are doing.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
