Liberal taunting of journo was bad; the fact her industry didn’t fight back could be Canada’s dirty little secret

Plus! People will buy online subscriptions, radical media darling heads to Red Chamber and Quebecor bellies up to the taxpayer trough

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

We need to talk about Liberal MP Taleeb Noormohamed and his not so subtle reminder to the National Post that it wouldn’t exist without the benefaction of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.

Noormohamed, Parliamentary Secretary for Heritage - the ministry responsible for media welfare - did so via a post on X in which he told NP Comment senior editor Terry Newman: “Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary.”

I wrote at length about this for The Line and, being aware that there is some crossover among subscribers, I won’t repeat that, but here’s a summary, followed by an update and then we’ll dig a little deeper into government funding for media, trans activist extremism in the Senate and other juicy stuff.

As I wrote in The Line concerning the government’s willingness to put the squeeze on media, “Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.”

You can read it all here

But the most alarming part of this story isn’t that Noormohamed said what he said. That was appalling but predictable. What’s truly chilling is that he could flex his muscles, whip out his influence and intimidate what was once a free and independent press in this country and get away with it.

There were just a handful of media responses to his highly inappropriate but not unexpected behaviour. A week later, I could find no fiery or even gentle editorials condemning his statements. My Google search revealed just three news stories (Western Standard, True North & Rebel News) while none of the nation’s leading commentators cleared their throats to object.

Perhaps this is because media decided it was no big deal that an influential government MP was reminding them to keep in mind just who is paying their bills when they sit down to write. It could also be that they are bothered by it but don’t wish to draw the public’s attention to their new role as government dependents because they know it undermines public trust in them. Or, they have just given up on the idea of freedom of the press but want to keep it as their dirty little secret. Maybe all three. All I could hear was the silence of the lambs being led to the slaughter.

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Squabbling over how to divide up the $100 million Google promised to pay into a fund for news organizations continues and illustrates perfectly the problem with putting anything into the hands of the CRTC.

While it could not have been more clear that the Online News Act and Google both intended all of the loot - except for admin costs - to be distributed to news organizations, the CRTC opened the door to others who have swiftly responded to the sound of the dinner bell.

At issue now is whether some of the cash should go to help compensate consumer groups who intervene on CRTC consultations and hearings through a public participation fund, of all things.

Not surprisingly, News Media Canada - the newspaper industry’s primary lobbying organization - is appalled at the prospect. Others, such as UNIFOR, The Friends and Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB) say, sure, the participation fund should be topped up but through additional cash from Google.

Expect this to drag on for quite some time, which means it’s unlikely any of those with their begging bowls out will see a dime of Google cash until at least next year. Maybe never.

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David Clinton, author of Substack’s The Audit, is as vigorous a number-cruncher as there is. Recently, he dove into one of Canada’s oldest media subsidies, the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) - which was originally created to help the magazine industry cover postal costs.

One of the more interesting outcomes was his revelation that Quebecor Media has, over the length of the CPF’s history, “hoovered up” $121,000,449.

As Clinton puts it: “You’ve probably heard of the parent company: Quebecor. With a market capitalization of nearly six billion dollars, they’re kinda hard to miss. Besides the mobile, cable, and internet provider Vidéotron, they’re also in control of Groupe TVA. Groupe TVA, in turn, owns TVA Publishing Inc. who produce around 70 magazine titles for both English and French markets. Right now Quebecor is doing nicely, thank you. They’ve got plenty of cash, healthy earnings, and a solid profit margin of around 24 percent.”

Not a heck of a lot more needs to be said.

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It will probably take a while for eastern journalists to get used to Kris Wells, but if the experience in Alberta is anything to go by, he’ll be an absolute media darling.

A recent appointee to the Senate, Wells is a professor at McEwan University and Canada Research Chair for the Public Understanding of Sexual & Gender Minority Youth. He also - and this is where the media darling part comes in - absolutely despises anyone who disagrees with him on just about anything but particularly when it comes to hormone therapy and surgery for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria. He has established a reputation as being so vicious in his responses (media darling again) that few are willing to question him. He is, in my view, a bully. Others, like fellow nouveau Senate appointee Charles Adler and Mount Royal University poli sci prof Duane Bratt - another media dreamboat- think he’s just super.

And what’s not to love? Here’s one of Wells’s most artistic posts in which he takes a historic image of a Nazi executing a Jew and replaces it with a Christian executing a gay person.

Speaking of gay people, Eva Kurilova, is not a fan of Wells. I highly recommend reading her entire commentary but here’s an excerpt:

“I had the unfortunate experience of running into Wells in person when I attended a “2SLGBTQQIA+” stakeholder roundtable discussion last February. I was very taken aback by his unpleasant behavior, which I described at some length:

“At one point, [Wells] went off on a tirade against the minister, his voice growing louder and louder. I would say one could easily interpret it as yelling…. I requested to speak and, when it was my turn, I told the minister that it was emotionally manipulative, abusive, and disgusting to lay dead children at her feet and at the feet of the Premier. Wells leaned out and told me I could say that directly to him, so I did. He then proceeded to try to argue with me and I told him very firmly that it was my turn to speak. I elaborated on the fact that it was highly irresponsible to tell children, especially children already struggling with mental health issues at disproportionate rates, that their Premier and their government hate them and want them dead.”

Fair to say that, with the addition of Wells, Canada now has the most extreme far-left Senate in its history. And, probably, a dreamy new national media darling.

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A major argument made by those who favour direct government subsidies for media is that consumers won’t buy subscriptions. It’s true that most won’t. I mean, even when newspapers were a far more vital source of information than they are today, most people did not subscribe. The issue is really one of will enough people subscribe to sustain your product.

A new study from Oxford’s Reuters Institute shows that, in some countries, people will while in others, people won’t. As the chart below indicates, 40% of Norwegians, 31% of Swedes and 22% of Americans paid for online news last year. Canada’s number was a much more modest 15%, while the UK was DFL with 8%.

However, when it comes to the proportion paying less than full price,
Canada is second only to Poland (78%) with 54% on special offers like this one in Montreal:

More on this in the months ahead.

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The gap between how journalists want to present the news and how people want to consume it was illustrated for all to see in another study - this one published in Science Advances.

The research showed that readers prefer simple, direct headlines but that those who write those headlines do not.

The customer is always right. But it might be easier to lobby for subsidies than admit that. Or just be like me and write complex headlines.

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Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a former publisher of the Calgary Herald and a previous vice-chair of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).