Excerpt: A perfect marriage

The only newspaper monopoly in Canada worse than Postmedia’s in the West was the Irving family’s in New Brunswick. Four generations of Irving industrialists monopolized that province’s media and used it to benefit their business empire, which grew to employ one in every twelve working New Brunswickers and extended across Atlantic Canada into New England. The Irving name was everywhere in the Maritimes, adorning 700 service stations and a fleet of tanker trucks that delivered oil and gas.

What started out as one gas station in 1924 turned into a web of more than 300 privately-held companies engaged in oil and gas, forestry, real estate, retailing, construction, shipping, trucking, shipbuilding, and other businesses. By 2008, the secretive family was the second richest in Canada, behind only the even more secretive Thomsons, who were perhaps not coincidentally also a newspaper family. By 2022, the Irvings owned all three of the province’s daily newspapers, eighteen of its 25 community newspapers, and four of its radio stations.

The family’s stranglehold on media in New Brunswick has been the target of government inquiries dating back to the 1970 Senate report on Mass Media, which described the province as a “journalistic disaster area.” The 1981 report of the Royal Commission on Newspapers recommended breaking up the family’s chain, along with other regional newspaper monopolies. The 2006 Senate report on News Media described the Irving empire as “an industrial-media complex that dominates the province.”

Investigative reporter Bruce Livesey noted in 2016 that “the Irvings’ media monopoly has been a source of frustration for decades in New Brunswick, largely over concerns about what their newspapers omit – specifically any critical coverage of the Irvings and their companies.” Mount Allison University professor Erin Steuter, a long-time Irving critic, noted in a study that the family’s newspapers “routinely publish their own press releases as news stories.” 

A study in the Canadian Journal of Communication found that the family used its “considerable editorial and advertising clout to lobby the government, and to advocate for particular policies and regulations that support both its short and long-term business interests [which] include changes to regulations impacting energy markets as well as rules impacting the forestry industry.” One “hardy perennial of the editorial pages of the Brunswick News papers,” it noted, was “the importance of maintaining low power rates for large industrial users. Indeed, few issues have received more frequent mention in recent years. More troublingly, none of these editorials carried any disclaimer about the fact that the owner of the papers was . . . the single largest electricity user in the province.” 

The fact that oil baron K.C. Irving had been gobbling up the province’s most influential news media was actually kept a closely-guarded secret for a quarter century. After Irving bought the Saint John Telegraph-Journal, its Evening Times-Globe sister paper, and local radio station CHSJ in 1944, he retained their management and made no announcement of his purchase. Irving repeated the manoeuvre a few years later when he bought both Moncton dailies, the morning Times and the evening Transcript. A biography noted that Irving’s newspapers “shied away from any meaningful investigation of industrial pollution in New Brunswick” while maintaining a “long-standing conspiracy of silence about Irving’s business dealings,” including “secrecy about its own ownership.” Irving’s picture was never to appear in the newspapers, noted journalist Jacques Poitras, and if an oil spill or similar mishap involved Irving Oil, it was to be referred to as simply “a local oil company.” 

Irving quietly bought a minority interest in the province’s only other daily, the Fredericton Gleaner, in 1957 and again secretly took it over in 1968. This time, however, the purchase was dramatically revealed by New Brunswick Senator Charles McElman in a speech from the floor. Senator Keith Davey soon formed a Special Senate Committee on Mass Media to investigate it and the ever-tightening ownership of the rest of Canada’s media. It held hearings across Canada for five months and called 125 witnesses. It found that Irving controlled 92.7 percent of New Brunswick’s English-language daily newspaper circulation, which Davey’s 1970 report called “about as flagrant an example of abusing the public interest as you're likely to find in Canada.” 

The Combines Investigation Branch raided the offices of Irving’s newspapers the following year, along with his home and those of several of his executives, seizing almost 4,000 documents. Irving was charged with monopoly in 1972 by the Restrictive Trade Practices Commission, but he moved to Bermuda for tax purposes before his trial started, so the judge, prosecutor, and a stenographer had to fly there to take his testimony. Prior to his departure, Irving restructured his companies and transferred their control to his three sons. Irving was convicted at trial, fined $150,000, and ordered to sell both Moncton dailies within a year, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada in 1976. 

The Irvings merged their two Moncton dailies in 1983 as the Times-Transcript, and after their father died in 1992, his sons closed the Saint John Evening Times-Globe in 2001. The family’s holdings were restructured in 2005 to give control of their four radio stations to son Jack, and by 2020 his Acadia Broadcasting had added another five in Nova Scotia and six more in Northern Ontario. The newspapers went to son J.K., who also headed the family’s forestry and transportation companies. Brunswick News had embarked on an expansion at the millennium, acquiring a dozen New Brunswick weeklies, half of which were published in French. Son Arthur headed Irving Oil. 

One thing the Irvings apparently could not stand was competition, judging by the cutthroat tactics they used to eliminate it. After Mark Leger quit the Telegraph-Journal to found the Saint John alt-weekly here in 2001, then expanded to Moncton in 2004, Brunswick News launched a similar newspaper called Metro Marquee that offered discounted or even free advertising. This predatory pricing forced Leger to sell out to Brunswick News, which closed Metro Marquee and expanded here into Fredericton. Despite promising not to, it watered down the alt-weekly’s critical content and demolished the wall it had kept between advertising and editorial. “The new owners exercised their editorial control immediately by cancelling the sex column,” noted Steuter, “and not long after the new editor was fired for running a cover story on breast feeding.”

That was nothing compared with what happened to Ken Langdon after he quit as publisher of the twice-weekly Woodstock Bugle-Observer in 2007 to start his own newspaper, the Carleton Free Press. Brunswick News secretly went to court and got a rare civil search warrant which allowed private investigators and forensic accountants to raid Langdon’s home in search of any company documents he may have taken with him. The searchers even examined the lingerie belonging to Langdon's wife, noted the New York Times. A court order that blocked Langdon from contacting Bugle-Observer advertisers, writers, readers, and distributors was lifted after a judge ruled that “Brunswick News Inc. cannot claim a monopoly over advertisers or its customers.” 

The first issue of the Carleton Free Press carried more than 15 pages of advertising, which soon grew to 20. The Canadian Association of Journalists awarded Langdon its 2008 President’s Award for contributions to journalism. Six months after it started, the Carleton Free Press had almost as many readers as the Bugle-Observer, which began to discount its advertising rates and slash its subscription prices “to try to drive the Carleton Free Press out of business,” noted the Toronto Sun. 

Langdon filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau alleging anti-competitive business practices and “abuse of dominance” by Brunswick News. “It’s hard for an advertiser to give you $500 for an ad when they can buy it for $200 from your competition,” he told the Canadian Press. The Competition Bureau looked into Langdon’s complaint but quickly dismissed it, saying it could not conclude that Brunswick News had “been engaged in the practice of anti-competitive acts or that there has been a substantial lessening or prevention of competition.” 

Predatory pricing could only be demonstrated, it added, if the dominant firm was pricing below its “average avoidable costs,” and it did not have such evidence. “Given that BNI is able to share resources such as printing, between several publications, their avoidable costs would be minimal.” While the Competition Bureau could not show that BNI’s behaviour constituted predatory pricing, its “need to focus our investigative efforts where they can be most effective in contributing to the prosperity of Canadians requires us to discontinue our investigation on this matter.” With an economic downturn starting, the Carleton Free Press ceased publication in October 2008 after not quite a year in print. A copy of its unpublished final front-page story, which chronicled its own demise, was obtained by the CBC. “Concentration of ownership and big money,” it said, “finally wore us down.” 

Many in New Brunswick rejoiced in early 2022 when the shock announcement was made that Postmedia was buying Brunswick News for $16.1 million. The Irving family was finally quitting the media business, Jim Irving announced in a news release, saying that the sale “represents an exit from the media business by J.D. Irving, Ltd.” Then it was pointed out that, under ownership by Postmedia, New Brunswick newspapers were likely going from bad to worse. St. Thomas University professor Michael Camp, a former Irving journalist, doubted that Postmedia would maintain all of its newly-acquired publications. “I regret very much that we're losing this local news presence,” he told the CBC. “I also feel badly for the people who will be displaced from their jobs. And I wonder about the future of journalism in New Brunswick.”

The one thing everybody missed, however, was that less than half of the purchase price was paid in cash, with the rest coming in the form of Postmedia shares. The more than 4 million shares the Irvings received put them among the company’s largest Canadian shareholders. It wasn’t so much a purchase as a merger, which was amply demonstrated when a second shock announcement was made a few months later that fourth-generation Jamie Irving would be named executive chairman of Postmedia’s board of directors when Paul Godfrey stepped down at the end of the year. 

That wasn’t even the final plot twist, as the 83-year-old Godfrey wasn’t really going anywhere either. A major shareholder himself from all of the stock options he had received while CEO, Godfrey would be staying on as a paid special adviser to the board and CEO Andrew MacLeod, which could include advocacy work with government. “I’m going to be there doing a lot of the same things that I’ve done in the past,” Godfrey told the Globe and Mail. “I realize a lot of people are going to think this is a retirement. I’m not retiring.” 

So Postmedia got New Brunswick, Canadians from coast to coast got an Irving to head their largest newspaper chain, and Godfrey got to stick around and steer home the third leg of his Postmedia rescue plan. There was certainly more work to be done. Despite the Liberal promise to introduce Australian-style legislation within 100 days to force Google and Facebook to bail out the country’s newspapers, the government was having trouble getting its planned Internet controls passed, so it was by no means a slam dunk. It had forced the Online Streaming Act through Parliament in 2021 by invoking closure to cut off debate, but members of the Senate, where the bill died with an election call, were more skeptical and in no hurry to pass it.

Excerpt: Project Ice

The last week of November 2017 should have been a fruitful one for John Hammill, with Christmas advertising pouring in to fill the pages of the newspapers for which he sold ads in the small Ontario communities of Orillia, Barrie, Collingwood, Bradford, and Innisfil. Hammill had just started his second year as regional advertising director for Postmedia’s six daily and eight weekly newspapers in its Northern Ontario region, having been promoted from publisher of its daily Orillia Packet & Times. 

Hammill’s workweek ended abruptly that Monday morning, however, after he heard the announcement that Postmedia and Torstar had traded 41 newspapers and were closing 36 of them. Within 10 minutes, he received a letter from Postmedia’s Human Resources department informing him that the company had sold the newspapers he worked for, and that the new owner would “not require your services.” Hammill deduced that the companies had co-ordinated the closures, since he had been fired by Postmedia although Torstar was the new owner. “I didn’t actually have too much of a problem with the swap then,” he later told the Vancouver-based website The Tyee. “I understand business.” 

At 147, the Packet & Times was almost as old as Orillia. “A bust of its founder stands in the library,” noted the Globe and Mail. The newspaper was closed “with a snap of the fingers,” added the Globe, and then one final insult was added. “The Packet didn't get a chance to put out a final issue bidding farewell to the community it served for all those years.” Hammill understood the transaction was just business and felt no need to go public with his doubts until he saw Godfrey’s interview on BNNBloomberg, in which the CEO claimed he had no idea that Torstar would close the newspapers it acquired from Postmedia. “That’s when I spoke up,” Hammill told The Tyee. “I must have seen the interview a dozen times.” 

Hammill contacted the Competition Bureau and contradicted what Godfrey claimed about all the closed newspapers losing money, revealing that they were instead making money. The closed Collingwood Enterprise Bulletin was doing “really good,” he said, while the Barrie Examiner was “doing okay,” and he was surprised they had been closed. Hammill wasn’t about to wait for the bureaucrats in Ottawa to bail him out, however, as he had a family to support. He had enough experience in the newspaper business to know that there was still a market for advertising in small communities such as his. Maybe it wouldn’t be in print newspapers, but he knew that he could sell ads. 

Hammill got in touch with Sault Ste. Marie-based Village Media, which published a string of online publications including SooToday.com, GuelphToday.com, BarrieToday.com and TimminsToday.com. Together with several other laid-off Packet & Times workers, Hammill and Village Media founded OrilliaMatters.com, which went live in early 2018, not six weeks after their newspaper was closed. 

Few held out hope that the Competition Bureau would step in to halt the trade between Postmedia and Torstar or the newspaper closures that followed. After all, it had taken no action when similar dealings went down a few years earlier in B.C., where the regional chains Black Press and Glacier Media had traded and closed dozens of titles, which accounted for a majority of the newspaper closures in Canada between 2010 and 2016. Of the thirteen paid dailies that were closed, merged, or changed publication frequency during that period, including the Nanaimo Daily News, nine were published in B.C. and owned by Black Press (six) or Glacier Media (three). 

The two chains also closed numerous long-publishing community newspapers they acquired from each other, with Black Press accumulating titles on Vancouver Island, where it soon owned them all, and Glacier Media adding newspapers in the Vancouver suburbs. “It is by now a familiar script,” noted B.C. Business magazine in 2015. “Through horse-trading, Glacier Media or Black Press . . . become the sole owners of a community’s weeklies. And then one of those papers shuts down.” When Glacier closed the weekly Westender community newspaper in Vancouver at the end of 2017, which it had acquired from Black Press in a city where it already owned the thrice-weekly Courier, it brought to 24 the number of newspapers lost to closure or merger following their exchange of 33 titles. 

The Competition Bureau had also taken no action after Postmedia acquired Sun Media in 2014, effectively merging the country’s two largest newspaper chains. Its ruling in that case was a watershed moment for newspaper competition in Canada. The deal itself was unprecedented. “This doesn’t just alter Canada’s print-media landscape,” observed the Globe and Mail, “it takes a bulldozer to it.” Postmedia, it added, had “thrown down the gauntlet to Canadian regulators, and forced the country to have a conversation that it has long avoided: How much are we willing to compromise the principles of a diverse and competitive press in the name of keeping it alive?” 

The Toronto Star noted that Postmedia’s sudden newspaper dominance wasn’t raising the concern it should have. “If the deal is approved by the federal Competition Bureau, one company will own almost all the significant daily papers in English Canada — with the exceptions of the Star, the Globe and Mail, Winnipeg Free Press and Halifax Chronicle Herald,” it pointed out. “In most cities, the choice for newspaper readers will be between Postmedia – and Postmedia.” 

The Bureau investigated the transaction for five months and somehow concluded that the Sun newspapers Postmedia acquired in Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa, and Toronto didn’t compete with its broadsheets in those markets. “Extensive documentary and empirical evidence demonstrated that the parties are not close rivals from the perspective of readers,” its ruling noted, “a finding that was supported by the views of market participants and by an analysis of the demographic characteristics of the parties’ respective audiences.” 

Besides, Godfrey had assured all concerned that Postmedia would keep the newspapers, and their newsrooms, separate. “We intend to keep Sun Media’s large daily newspapers in those markets where we overlap,” he told the Toronto Sun when the deal was announced in 2014. “Their readers and their advertisers in many cases are different from those of Postmedia.” The Sun reporter paraphrased Godfrey’s promise. “Sun Media will continue to operate independently with its own newsrooms and opinions, he said.” 

Part of the problem was that the Competition Bureau was empowered to examine only economic factors, which in the case of newspapers meant advertising and not news. Its governing Competition Act was “not intended nor designed to deal with the important question of ‘diversity of voices,’” the Bureau noted in a 2003 summary of its work in media industries prepared for a Senate inquiry into news media. 

The inquiry’s subsequent report was harshly critical of both the Competition Bureau and, in broadcasting, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission for what it called their “neglect” of news media. “One challenge is the complete absence of a review mechanism to consider the public interest in news media mergers,” it noted. “The result has been extremely high levels of news media concentration in particular cities or regions.” 

Another problem with the Competition Act was that it required the Bureau to allow any merger or acquisition which provided efficiencies of operation that outweighed any detriment to the public. “Even where there is a finding that a merger would likely substantially lessen or prevent competition,” noted the Bureau in its 2003 review, “the Competition Act specifically directs that the merger be allowed to proceed if it would also likely result in gains in efficiency that are greater than and offset the effects of the lessening or preventing of competition.”  

The relevant section of the Competition Act had lain dormant for almost 30 years, however, until a Supreme Court of Canada ruling came down in 2015 just as the Competition Bureau was investigating the Sun Media takeover by Postmedia. The ruling in the case of a hazardous waste merger in northern B.C. provided an ill-timed precedent that disempowered the Competition Bureau. This spotty record of anti-trust enforcement in the newspaper industry did not inspire much hope that the Competition Bureau would intervene in the Postmedia-Torstar trade and closures, but it could not ignore the whistleblower evidence provided by Hammill. 

The Competition Bureau soon pursued search warrants, describing in court documents how lawyers for both companies had been working on Competition Bureau official Pierre-Yves Guay to call the investigation off. “A lawyer for Torstar e-mailed Mr. Guay to request a phone call with both companies’ lawyers,” according the documents. “Mr. Guay replied by e-mail that this would be ‘highly inappropriate’ and scheduled separate calls instead the next day.” The Competition Bureau claimed that Hammill’s evidence indicated “prior negotiation, agreement or arrangement” between the companies related to the closings. 

As a result, its investigators said they believed the companies had “entered into a conspiracy” because their agreement specified which employees would be terminated when the transaction closed. The court documents also pointed to press statements made by Postmedia executives that both companies were unaware of the other’s plans to close the papers as “inconsistent with actions taken by Postmedia and Torstar and with the terms and conditions set out in the transaction documents.” 

After search warrants were granted, Competition Bureau officers raided the offices of both Torstar and Postmedia in mid-March, along with those of Torstar’s Metroland chain in Mississauga and its Hamilton Spectator. The search of Metroland’s headquarters found documents which referred to the deal as Project Lebron, presumably after the basketball star, but on Postmedia’s end it was code-named Project Ice.

“Given the pattern of facts laid out by the Competition Bureau,” the Globe and Mail concluded, “the best course of action may have seemed to be: Do one thing, say another, and bet that no one ever found out.” 

The news wasn’t all bad for Postmedia in 2018, however. In his annual economic statement that November, Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced $595 million to subsidize reporting, subscriptions to digital news services, and charitable tax deductions to non-profit news media. The bailout brought jubilation from the newspaper lobby, especially from Godfrey, who called it “a turning point in the plight of newspapers in Canada” so significant that it even warranted the donning of track shoes. “I tip my hat to the prime minister and the finance minister,” he said. “They deserve a lot of credit. Everyone in journalism should be doing a victory lap around their building right now.” 

Less than a week later, Postmedia released information to shareholders in advance of its annual general meeting which showed that Godfrey’s annual compensation for the fiscal year topped $5 million. In addition to his $1.2 million salary as CEO, Godfrey was awarded $1.2 million in bonuses, $2.4 million in stock options, and other compensation that brought his total remuneration to $5.04 million. Andrew MacLeod, who had been promoted a year earlier to president and chief operating officer, received $2.2 million, or more than double his compensation the previous year, while the total for Postmedia’s top five executives came to more than $10 million. 

Postmedia announced early in 2019 that Godfrey, who was about to turn 80, would step back from management and serve out the remaining two years of his contract as executive chair of its board. As expected, it named MacLeod to replace him as CEO. The bailout did not mean total victory for Godfrey’s leadership of Postmedia, however, as some unfinished business still hung over its head in the form of the Competition Bureau investigation. “We remain confident that this will ultimately result in an exoneration,” MacLeod said.

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Excerpt: The bailout campaign

It was perhaps fitting that Edward Greenspon would head the Public Policy Forum think tank. After all, he had won its Hyman Solomon Award for Excellence in Public Policy Journalism in 2002, following which he was immediately appointed editor of the Globe and Mail. The PPF had been founded “to develop ideas for making government work better” by former career public servant Arthur Kroeger, who retired in 1992 after having run six government departments during a 34-year career in Ottawa. 

National Post columnist Terence Corcoran attended its 30^th annual awards dinner in 2017, which he calculated produced “at least $1 million in new funds the PPF can use to generate endless papers and reports providing ideological backing for Trudeau-style economic interventionism.” That year’s gala was the first presided over by Greenspon, who quickly passed the baton to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who served as master of ceremonies. “In others words,” noted Corcoran, “welcome to Canada's undrained national policy swamp.” The kicker came when Trudeau presented an award to Canadian-born but London-based Dominic Barton, a managing partner at McKinsey & Company. The global management consulting firm was notorious for the tactics it counselled companies on, most notably downsizing and offshoring. According to a 2013 history of the secretive firm, it may have been “the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs than anyone, anywhere, at any time in modern history.”

Greenspon‘s first major project for the PPF began in mid-2016, shortly after he assumed its leadership. The Heritage committee then holding hearings into media and local communities was supposed to tour Canada that fall to hear from Canadians first-hand about the state of local news provision, but sufficient funds were not available in its budget. That function was instead farmed out to the PPF. “We’re not, if you will, hired by the government,” said Greenspon. “But we’re doing this in co-operation with the government.” 

The PPF’s review, according to the Canadian Press, revolved around three questions: “Does the deteriorating state of traditional media put at risk the civic function of journalism and thus the health of democracy? If so, are new digitally based news media filling the gap? If not, is there a role for public policy to help maintain a healthy flow of news and information, and how could it be done least intrusively?” A half-dozen roundtables with “invited experts” were planned, as was polling designed to determine “how Canadians view the news media and its role in democratic society.” A concluding symposium was scheduled for the fall.

The PPF’s report The Shattered Mirror was thus eagerly anticipated when it was released in early 2017. Its dozen recommendations for improving news provision included extending to digital media the tax rules that favoured other Canadian media when it came to advertising, and taxing foreign ad sales to Canadians. It urged that Canada’s charitable giving laws be changed to allow news media to become non-profit entities and thus receive tax deductible donations. It proposed federal funding of $100 million to start a Future of Journalism and Democracy Fund, with continuing funding of $300 to $400 million a year coming from a sales tax on foreign media selling digital subscriptions in Canada and from removing tax deductions on foreign digital advertising. 

The Shattered Mirror warned that with bad news for the industry piling up, the news media’s “march to the precipice appears to be picking up speed. This slide may not produce the kind of crisis point that stops policymakers in their tracks, as the implosion of the auto industry in 2008-09 did, but the pace is unrelenting and the downward slope ever steeper.” Newspaper industry association News Media Canada “quickly distanced itself from the report,” noted the Globe and Mail, stating that its recommendations would not do much to help build sustainable new business models. “What I don’t see is the money going to news outlets that are currently covering their communities, building out digital platforms and adapting to the new business realities,” said NMC chair Bob Cox, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, who had been night editor at the Globe and Mail under Greenspon. 

Reaction to The Shattered Mirror was otherwise mixed, noted iPolitics, with the Canadian Association of Journalists supporting several of its proposals but taking “no immediate position” on the rest. The media union CWA Canada similarly welcomed the report’s call for non-profit news media to qualify for charitable status “in order to encourage local, non-profit ownership of newspapers rather than the destructive, predatory hedge fund disaster that is Postmedia.” 

Out on the west coast, however, retired talk show host and provincial cabinet minister Rafe Mair smelled horse manure. “It’s clear that The Shattered Mirror has nothing to do with democracy and good journalism and everything to do with bailing out an industry that’s facing obsolescence,” he wrote in his book Politically Incorrect, which was published shortly after his 2017 death. National Post columnist Andrew Coyne called the report “irreproachably responsible, admirably high-minded, and profoundly wrong” in arguing for nature to instead take its course. “This is not a case of market failure, but of industry failure,” he wrote. “Most of the industry’s problems are self-inflicted, a series of bad choices in response to admittedly massive changes. But even if that were not the case, there is nothing whatever to prevent readers from paying for what we produce, if they so chose. They are simply choosing not to do so.” 

Scholars who studied media economics in Canada found that The Shattered Mirror exaggerated the plight of newspapers and the threat of foreign Internet giants with selective data, exaggeration, and glaring omissions. It also glossed over some fundamental problems afflicting the newspaper industry, they pointed out, preferring to blame its woes instead on Google and Facebook. One critic called it “the funhouse mirror” for its exaggerations and found the report notable for what it didn’t include. “The PPF report is silent on the problem of U.S. hedge funds owning Canada’s largest newspaper company,” he wrote, and promoted “the Big Lie that has surrounded newspapers for years – that they are losing money and thus dying.” 

Dwayne Winseck of Carleton University was another scholar who took issue with data presented in The Shattered Mirror. He called it “badly flawed,” because it “cherry-picks evidence and gooses the numbers” to make its case. “The case that the authors of The Shattered Mirror make about the severity of the crisis of journalism is impressive at first blush,” wrote Winseck in an 11,000-word blog entry. “Ultimately, however, it is neither convincing nor credible.” The Shattered Mirror’s claim that between 12,000 and 14,000 journalism jobs had been lost since the 1990s, noted Winseck, was flawed because it relied on headlines and union data that “do a great job chronicling jobs lost but a poor one at keeping track of those gained.” Statistics Canada data, he pointed out, “depicts a wholly different picture,” showing that the number of full-time journalists in Canada actually increased from 10,000 in 1987 to 11,631 in 2015. “Once again consistent with a pattern, the authors ignore this data completely.” 

Winseck saw in The Shattered Mirror a “willful refusal” to deal with media industry structures, which were “wholly ignored” in the report. “These examples are not innocent,” he charged. “They are part of a process of ‘threat inflation’ with the aim of buttressing the case for the policy recommendations on offer.” While exaggerating some threats, such as the online advertising dominance of digital giants Facebook and Google, the report downplayed one major problem, noted Winseck. “The Shattered Mirror also gives short shrift to the idea that media concentration and the structure of the communication and media industries might be a significant factor giving rise to the woes besetting the news media.” 

The Shattered Mirror at least earned Greenspon a new client, one with more media clout than he could have ever dreamed of. He was soon part of the newspaper lobby, which hoped to reap a government bailout. A draft version of NMC’s $1.375-billion bailout proposal that went out to stakeholders for comment in 2017 was printed on PPF letterhead and carried its logo at the top alongside that of NMC, but the final version oddly made no mention of Greenspon’s group. Perhaps it wouldn’t have looked good if the PPF were seen to be promoting an issue on which it had so recently produced a government-funded and supposedly independent report. 

NMC was careful, however, to acknowledge in the press release announcing its proposed Canadian Journalism Fund that the PPF had “brought together the industry, unions and digital only publications in both French and English to forge this proposal.” The bailout proposal’s rejection by the federal government a few months later wasn’t the end of the matter. It only meant more work for Greenspon. 

The coalition was hardly a secret, having been noted on the website iPolitics in mid-2017 by Carleton University journalism professor Paul Adams, a former CBC and Globe and Mail journalist. “Since the report came out, PPF has maintained a working group, including representatives from big media chains, media unions and luminaries like former CBC vice-president Richard Stursberg.” The newspaper lobby even announced itself in a Globe and Mail op-ed published that September. “The Public Policy Forum brought together about 40 news organizations and unions to propose solutions that would support employment of reporters and investment in innovation without sacrificing media independence or shutting out new competitors.” 

Soon the pages of Canada’s largest dailies, and even some of its smallest weeklies, would be filled with columns and editorials urging government assistance for the press, many of them authored by the newspaper lobby’s founding members.

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