How Ottawa failed to save journalism

Over the past nine years, the Trudeau government has papered over the cracks in our ailing news industry. It has subsidized journalists' salaries, bailed out struggling newspapers, upped its subsidy to the CBC; it even shook down Google for $100 million per year.

- JUSTIN LING CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST

Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, above, told Justin Ling that the federal Conservatives were to blame for poisoning public opinion against more aggressive action to help the journalism industry.

And yet, as I put it to Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge when we sat down last week, "things are worse than ever." The minister arched her eyebrows in response.

"You think?" she said.

I do. Canada is now awash in news deserts, where citizens have no access to quality local news. Fewer journalists roam city halls, provincial legislatures and Parliament.

Trust in the media is falling. The financial situation for the journalism business is dire and getting worse.

After sitting down with St-Onge over coffee, it's become clear to me that to save good, local, impactful journalism in this country, we either need to dramatically increase government subsidies or dismantle the online advertising oligopoly of Google and Facebook. Or, better yet, we can do both.

As Canadian politicians bicker between half-measures and nothing at all, other countries are pursuing ambitious plans that could fundamentally remake their digital economies and save their news industries. If Canada wants domestic journalism that can inform, entertain, challenge and provoke - it needs to do the same. If Ottawa doesn't step up, our media will fall apart.

'Huge power imbalance'

Because the decline in the news industry has been so gradual, it can be hard to appreciate just how much money has fled the industry over the past decade.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have vanished from the books of major publishers and networks.

They have had to cut costs, and reduce quality, to survive. Many have folded anyway. According to the Local News Research Project, more than 400 local news outlets have closed across the country since 2014.