Canadian Heritage Committee on Feb. 15th, 2024

[Michael Coteau, Liberal, Don Valley East, ON]

Well, maybe I'll take this opportunity to say thank you to all of our guests here today.

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Michael.

I'll go to the Bloc Québécois and Martin Champoux for six minutes.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I want to thank all of our witnesses today. These meetings and discussions are very important to me and to all the committee members, not to mention to the people who work in media, especially news. It is very tempting to bring up a slew of issues that we really want to discuss, given the seriousness and scale of the crisis. It has been impacting everyone in the news sector in Quebec and Canada for years. My sense is that we are turning our attention to the situation 10 years too late.

Mr. Gonez, I want to start by telling you how much I appreciated your opening remarks. Your comments were sensible and reasonable, and you bring a healthy perspective to the discussion. I want to give you a bit of reassurance: I think your company and those like yours are an essential part of the discussion around the future of the media. That discussion cannot happen without the involvement of pioneers in the digital media space. I want you to know that.

Now I'm going to turn to you, Mr. Chamberland. We worked for the same company in the 1990s. You were at Radiomédia and I was at Astral Media. We never crossed paths, but your reporters did the news segments for my radio shows, so we do have that connection.

All that to say that we have a few decades of experience under our belts. We've seen the landscape change. You opted to focus on local radio with Arsenal Media. To some business people, that may sound like a crazy gamble, the state of radio being what it is. You, however, decided to put your faith in local radio and its future as a viable sector.

You recently purchased seven of Bell Media's stations. The committee will actually be meeting with Bell Media representatives in the coming weeks. We probably won't show them quite as much appreciation as we are inclined to show you, given that you just saved a number of local stations. I gather that the news was also reassuring for the people who work at those seven stations.

Would you say the stations are in good shape? Do you plan to grow them locally? What does the future of those newly purchased stations look like?

[Sylvain Chamberland]

Thank you for your question, Mr. Champoux.

Obviously, we bought the stations to grow them, not to keep them as they are.

That said, the stations are in good shape. We've bought stations that were in worse shape. Initially, we bought a lot of stations that were on the verge of going bankrupt or technically bankrupt, and we were able to turn them around. In this case, though, the stations are in good shape.

I want to echo something Mr. Gonez said, which I found interesting. Obviously, we are humble and take great pride in our stations, but I do want to make two or three other points.

It's true that radio is boring. It's a bit square. For me, though, radio is still the literal lifeblood of news and information in Canada. That's the first point.

Second, I was careful to point out that we have digital platforms in each of our regions, and that is fundamental. Generally speaking, they replaced the local paper. Our platforms get a good bit of traffic. We have more than 100,000 subscribers, and $60 million to $70 million views each year.

I want to add something important. Meta has been talked about a lot, and I'm not trying to say that I am for or against the bill. I do want to say, though, that Meta has no effect on us. Why? Because, for the past 10 years, we've been focused on building a relationship with our listeners and readers. We boldly took the initiative of going after them one by one.

When I see everyone panicking all of a sudden, I think to myself that they should have known. This isn't the first time Facebook or another platform has changed its algorithm. BuzzFeed disappeared overnight, as did media company Diply in Canada. Every media company has to own up to its responsibility. I somewhat agree with Mr. Gonez on that. Media companies need to take responsibility and work to build their relationship with their audience. I watched the absolute shock of most traditional media companies, as they came to the sudden realization that they had to go to the source. Of course they have to go to the source, but that's always been the case. That is the responsibility of media companies.

If they send a listener, viewer or reader to a competing platform, it's natural that they would lose that person to the other platform permanently. That is media and business 101. I do think that, overall, the players were incompetent and failed to grasp that basic concept. What happened? They sold their souls to the devil and sent people to competing platforms, rather than betting on themselves and focusing on their own platforms.

At Arsenal Media, our ecosystem is in good shape. Yes, we are going to save jobs. Yes, we are going to grow our stations. We've built an ecosystem that has not just digital news platforms, but also online stores.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 30 seconds.

[Sylvain Chamberland]

Our structure ensures extremely robust media.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

The industry, or whoever holds the national forum that we want to organize on the basis of this study, would say that traditional media have a future in an ecosystem that will probably need to shift to the digital world in the short term.

[Sylvain Chamberland]

Undoubtedly. The shift to a digital platform should have already taken place. La Presse took the plunge a long time ago. That newspaper has been on a digital platform for 20 years. That said, in addition to the digital platform—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Chamberland....

[Sylvain Chamberland]

It's over, isn't it?

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You can expand in the next question. Thank you very much.

[Sylvain Chamberland]

Oh, okay.

[Martin Champoux, Bloc, Drummond, QC]

I saw that but didn't say anything.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Nice try, Mr. Champoux.

For the New Democrats, we have Niki Ashton.

Niki, you have up to six minutes.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you very much to our witnesses.

My first question is directed to Ms. Paradkar.

We've heard a lot from the right about how journalists are unwilling to criticize the government. I believe they're wrong. If we want to look at the hesitancy to be critical of power, we need to be looking at corporate consolidation, the oligopolies that exist within the media landscape in our country and the shrinking of the number of voices that are willing to be critical of power.

You've spoken out against Israel's brutal bombing of Gaza. You faced an organized campaign of harassment that has impacted your work. If we're going to talk about journalism being under attack in the country and how we can support good, accurate journalism, we cannot ignore this reality.

We need journalists who are going to speak up about what is happening in Palestine and Canada's role there. We're talking about an intense bombing campaign that has left roughly 30,000 Palestinians dead, mostly women and children. We also know that, on average, five journalists or media workers are killed a week, the highest rate of journalist deaths since the Committee to Protect Journalists began recording this over 30 years ago.

What can we do to create a climate where these voices are heard, where journalists don't rely on the passive voice to describe the death of Palestinians, where journalists don't have to fear losing their job for accurately reporting the horrors of war and genocide?

[Shree Paradkar]

It's a very sober time for a lot of people who have histories of trauma, and it is a complex subject that I recognize has caused a lot of pain for multiple communities in Canada and around the world.

In terms of being able to criticize any side or speaking up for Palestinian rights in the face of what the ICJ has called a plausible genocide, if I had solutions for how to make that happen, I think it has to come from a full societal push towards justice, which involves not just media companies but also politicians and unions. It's about keeping an eye on what justice is and how to separate pressure groups from media, not allowing any interference in the process of gathering information fairly and accurately on any side of any conflict. That has become a challenge.

Right now on this particular issue, there is often a Palestinian exception to many free news gathering practices, and I have been stunned by the silence in my industry. I have been stunned by the silence in the medical industry, among academics. I don't have the answers to why that is so. It is a much more complicated response than I think I can give you here, but it is very concerning.

One of the pleas I make is for Canada to invest in a free press. That is the only way forward. Canada has the potential to be a world leader in being completely free, pluralistic and independent in its press. We have the potential. I think it's going to require a lot of introspection at individual and collective levels for us to make it happen.

I'm sorry I don't have any specifics to give you here, because it's too complex to condense.

[Niki Ashton, NDP, Churchill—Keewatinook Aski, MB]

Thank you for sharing that.

In the time I have left, I want to direct my other question to Ms. Payne from Unifor.

Unifor represents 12,600 media workers across the country, and we know that thousands of the workers you face are facing immense difficulty right now. We in the NDP stand with them.

You spoke of Bell Media's latest devastating announcement. Meanwhile, Bell's CEO made $13.59 million in total compensation in 2022. For the CEO of Rogers, it was $31.52 million.

At what point is corporate greed costing thousands of Canadians their jobs and millions of Canadians access to good-quality journalism?

[Lana Payne]

Thank you, Niki. That's a great question.

We have a huge problem here. These companies have special privileges in our country. They are awarded special privileges. They get access to broadcast and have almost a monopoly in some areas, as in the telecommunications sector.

At the same time, I would say that this is a social contract that they should be feeling right now. Part of that means we don't go through this; we don't have thousands and thousands of Canadian workers being laid off and a media landscape in wreckage. They have a responsibility to expand that and connect Canadians through these services.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

You have 20 seconds, Ms. Payne.

[Lana Payne]

It is really important to consider that, outside of what they're paying their CEOs, they are sending millions and millions of dollars a year in increased dividends to shareholders—all of this money. These are choices these corporations are making. There could be different choices, choices to employ Canadians in good jobs and deliver excellent journalism. It's up to all of us, including government, to make sure those companies live up to these responsibilities.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Ms. Payne.

I'll now go to our second round of questions. It's a five-minute round.

For the Conservatives, we'll start with Mr. Gourde.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for coming.

Like all Canadians, I'm concerned about the future of all our media. However, I find it inspiring to hear from people such as Mr. Gonez, who chose to launch his start‑up, which has now become a company. Mr. Chamberland's account also gives me a glimmer of hope. Business models are being redefined.

Let's start with you, Mr. Chamberland. You didn't have a chance to finish what you were saying earlier. It really interested me. There was a possible solution involving a business model that seems promising for the future. It would help maintain and perhaps even reinstate journalism jobs.

I'll let you continue.

[Sylvain Chamberland]

Thank you, Mr. Gourde.

I have two points to make.

First, we have the ecosystem itself. I think that things will become harder and harder for non‑diverse media companies. However, I think that things will be easier for media that have a range of properties and capabilities. I think that Mr. Pattison showed this a long time ago in western Canada, for example. The Newcap era in the east also comes to mind. These media owners were part of a conglomerate that supported development. It isn't necessary to be part of a conglomerate, but I think that things will be harder for non-diverse companies.

I have more things to add. We're getting a bit lost here, so I'll focus on news and support for this area.

I keep saying that the news in the regions doesn't receive the necessary support. The regions have far fewer media outlets and far more media deserts. One thing to really consider is that the major urban centres receive far too much funding. When the government acts as a client, for example for advertising purposes, it always invests far too much money in the major regions, at the expense of the outer regions.

Money should be shifted, on a per capita basis, to the various regions across the country. It wouldn't cost anything. However, this isn't happening. Right now, there's too much investment in the big cities only. I have nothing against big cities. That said, they can't receive 95% of the budget.

I'll give you a concrete example. Last year, we received $16,000 in advertising from the federal government for all 18 of our radio stations. What's $16,000, you might ask? It's better to have it than to owe it, I agree. However, $16,000 for 18 stations isn't much, given that the budget was probably somewhere between $130 million and $170 million.

The government's lifestyle advertising should be aimed at all Canadians, not just a specific segment of the population. However, reaching all Canadians means venturing into the more remote regions. The web isn't the only way to do so. In some regions, people don't even have Internet access. They have only radio access. The radio signal can be picked up anywhere.

All Canadians must be included. That's the most important thing. Everyone talks about fairness, representativeness and so on. If you want to be fair and representative, you must speak to all Canadians, everywhere, on an equal basis.

[Jacques Gourde, Conservative, Lévis—Lotbinière, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chamberland.

I still have a little time left.

Mr. Gonez, we heard that you needed journalists. What qualities should journalists bring to your type of company in the future?

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Kevin Waugh]

You have 35 seconds.