Think tank pushes more bad ideas to help ‘fix’ Canada’s news media

Perhaps the PPF's most notorious effort was in promoting the five-year $595 million newspaper bailout announced in 2019, which was recently extended for another five years until 2029 with increased tax credits for publishers. The PPF helped to start the subsidies flowing with its 2017 report The Shattered Mirror, which proposed federal funding of $300-$400 million a year for what it called a "Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund." It painted such an exaggerated portrait of woe in the newspaper industry, however, as to bring guffaws from those who study it.

The resulting subsidies have done little more than help to keep hundreds of millions in debt payments flowing to the US hedge funds that own 98 percent of Postmedia Network, which publishes most of Canada's largest newspapers, such as the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald and Vancouver Sun. Postmedia now subsists mostly on government handouts, which have helped it send more than $500 million south to its hedge fund masters since 2010, as I showed in my 2023 book The Postmedia Effect. Postmedia has greatly increased its grip on our press in the past decade to collect more and more subsidies, taking over the Sun Media chain in 2015, the Brunswick News chain in 2022, and last year the SaltWire Network chain that dominates Atlantic Canada. It replaces local news in the papers it devours with paid propaganda for Big Oil and its CEO has ordered editors to make their content more favourable to Conservatives. Meanwhile, National Post columnists such as Conrad Black and Jordan Peterson spew hatred for our country and promote its takeover by the US.