Canadian Heritage Committee on May 10th, 2016

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I will call the meeting to order. I will be very formal today. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), this committee will do a study of the media and local communities.

Today we were supposed to have two sets of witnesses, but we right now have the Canadian Punjabi Post here to meet with us, and our New Pathway media group may come in a little later.

Normally everyone gets 10 minutes to present, so you as a group will have 10 minutes. You can split that time, five and five, or one of you alone can speak.

I will ask you to begin, Jagdish Grewal and Jagdeep Kailey.

[Jagdish Grewal, Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.]

Thank you so much, Chair, vice-chairs, and members of the standing committee. It's a great opportunity for me and my colleague, Jagdeep Kailey, to make the presentation today.

I would like to start with an introduction about my media house. The Canadian Punjabi Post was started in 2002. It became Canada's first daily newspaper in the Punjabi language. It also became the first daily newspaper in any language published from the Peel Region. It was also the first daily newspaper in the Punjabi language to be published from anywhere in the world outside of India.

Back in those days, it was seen as a daredevil's gamble by many. Through our hard work and persistence, we have turned it into a mainstream newspaper among ethnic newspapers in Canada.

With a daily readership of more than 35,000, it stands tall in terms of its reach and credibility. It is respected for its fair and balanced reporting. Canadian institutions, both government and non-governmental, look to the Canadian Punjabi Post to gauge public opinion among immigrant communities living in the greater Toronto area on matters of their interest.

It plays a pivotal role in creating stronger ties of immigrants with their new country, Canada, and also towards strengthening Indo-Canadian ties. We are the only newspaper in the Punjabi language in Canada whose editorial content is 100% Canadian. Also, it is the only newspaper to write an editorial every single day.

More than 25,000 copies are published five days a week. Its website is read all over Canada. We are followed by over 25,000 people and businesses on social media, including Facebook pages.

I also host a radio program that is beamed across North America on 770 AM. It is aired on prime time from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on all weekdays from Monday to Friday. Radio Khabarsar, which means “news talk radio”, stands out from other ethnic radio programs due to its matchless quality and rich content. It aims to serve the varied needs of the South Asians, particularly its vibrant Punjabi community settled in Canada. Like the Canadian Punjabi Post, the content of our radio program is over 70% Canadian.

Regarding access of local communities to information, Indo-Canadians are politically more active than any other visible immigrant community in Canada because of their exposure to strong and rich democratic experiences back home in India. That explains their hunger for news and the need for a large number of Indo-Canadian media outlets.

Political parties of all stripes do round tables and media conferences with the ethnic media throughout the year. It happens more during elections. With three major elections—federal, provincial, and local—happening almost one after another, it keeps the local ethnic media busy and the local population engaged.

Brampton has emerged as a political test laboratory in Canada. It is said that how Brampton immigrants behave during an election is how the rest of the immigrant communities will likely vote in Canada; hence, there's more value to the ethnic media outlets.

As for the consequences and impacts of concentration in the media, we act as a gateway for business and political organizations to get access to the immigrant communities. But for us, they would find it very difficult to reach this important section of the Canadian population.

However, as said before, Indo-Canadians in general and Punjabis in particular are politically more active than other groups. This has led to a mushrooming of media outlets in the Punjabi language. There are so many weekly newspapers, radio programs, and television channels that it is almost impossible to create an inventory of them.

You see a new channel being started every other day. It has become a crazy situation now and is not a healthy sign for responsible journalism. There is an utter lack of professionalism. People without any training or commitment are entering the ethnic media just because they see it as a tool to promote themselves. It makes them feel better, but it causes many problems in the community.

Over-concentration of media is having a negative impact on the social life of the community. To stay one step up from the other, the dirty and petty matters of the community are discussed in disgusting details in public. It has a heavy cost in terms of impact on the social well-being of people who consume this information.

Hard-core elements within the community exert overt and covert pressures on us to cover their news, the majority of which is very controversial and is dangerous as well. There was an attack on my life in October 2010 because I said no to some of the things they wanted me to say. This has happened not only to me, but to many of us. At least my case was profiled in the mainstream media, but in the majority of other cases, journalists are beaten, threatened, and forced to keep silent, which is a dangerous trend that is happening on a large scale. Political patronage to the hard-core is dangerous to us in the ethnic media.

Political pressure is causing fractures within and between the communities, which is not a healthy trend. An editorial in the Brampton Guardian last year is an example.

In regard to the impact of digital media on local information, the new generation of immigrants is using digital media in a big way to create a space for themselves. Canadian youth born to immigrant parents are making waves through the use of digital media. New immigrants coming to Canada these days are more inclined to use digital media than print media. However, as a large section of immigrants are still not tech savvy, there continues to be a strong demand for print media, and it still the way to go because of its acceptability and receptivity. Things will change gradually to make room for the digital environment.

How do we see the future and where is the industry going? OMNI Punjabi television, an initiative of Rogers, had to cut down its operation because it could not sustain itself under the rising cost of hiring quality journalists. Similarly, two daily and several weekly newspapers in the GTA themselves have died unnatural deaths. That explains why serious journalism among ethnic media is missing. The print newspapers are already facing serious difficulties in surviving because of dying sources of revenue. The same is going to happen to radio and television channels.

The federal government must think of supporting well-meaning ethnic media outlets on the same pattern as it supports the CBC. It could be on a much smaller scale, but help is clearly needed. There should also be an initiative for us to hire professional journalists through subsidy programs. In the absence of such support, there is going to be a crisis among the ethnic media industry, and this will be a devastating blow to immigrant communities and to Canada as well.

The government should work with the CJF, the Canadian Journalism Foundation, or any other such initiative to support and strengthen our ethnic media.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

Now we will go to Mr. Yuri Bilinsky, managing editor of the New Pathway Media Group. He is video conferencing from Mississauga.

Mr. Bilinsky, you have 10 minutes to present. I'll give you a two-minute warning and then we will move to questions.

Thank you.

[Yuri Bilinsky, Managing Editor, New Pathway Media Group]

Thank you.

The access to information is an issue if we're talking about recent immigrants. That is probably the most affected social group in this respect, because many of them don't speak English well, and their language of choice is almost always their native language. It especially applies to the seniors, the more elderly part of the population. They look for three types of information: information about Canada as a whole, the wider community; information about their ethnic community in Canada; and information about their home countries. They obviously can find the information about the wider Canadian community in the mainstream media, but as I've said, there is a language barrier.

To move to the second question about concentration in the media, and about the concentration process, that doesn't help, because when there are fewer mainstream media outlets or community media outlets—we're talking about geographic communities rather than ethnic communities—they tend to cover ethnic communities less and less because there are fewer of them, and they have to cover the same array of issues. The issues of the ethnic communities fall through the cracks as this process develops. Obviously, the ethnic media, the cultural media, have to compensate for this lack of coverage of their respective communities.

But the ethnic and cultural media do not cover only their communities. We always try to cover the wider community, and even some international issues. A lack of funding and, as the previous speaker mentioned, an inability to have professional staff and professional journalists on our editorial teams seriously reduce the opportunity for us to cover wider issues. As I've said, a lot of people, especially from the recent immigrant population, still turn to community media for the coverage of these kinds of issues.

The impact of digital media is quite substantial. I would say that community media are affected less than the mainstream media because there is huge technological progress being made at the moment. There are some platforms and media technologies that are still not being used, but it's all developing as we speak.

Our media group is currently starting to tap into that market. We are trying to position ourselves to be able to benefit from digital media and from the access to people who only use digital media as opposed to the printed media and even radio and television. It's very difficult at this stage to estimate the extent to which we will be able to benefit from digital media and the digital media market. For instance, it's very difficult to tell whether we will be able to compensate with digital advertising for the loss of the printed advertisements while still preserving the printed version of our newspaper, because it is only developing.

At the same time, there is also growing competition in that market, and for the community media as well, not only in the mainstream market. A lot of people are seeing opportunities—and actually the need—to develop digital outlets, and sometimes very informal outlets such as Facebook groups. They are being created. In our community and ethnic market, they're only starting to be created. It's very difficult to tell how long they will be able to survive and how they're going to affect the older community media, which is also entering this digital market. As I said, it's only developing.

However, I would say that the competition in that digital market for the community media is probably going to be as intense, if not even more intense, than in the mainstream markets of print, television, and radio. From the perspective of the ethnic and cultural media, I can tell you that the competition is very intense. From the community's standpoint and the wider community's standpoint, I consider this competition a very positive thing, because more voices are being heard and that contributes to the wider discussion.

In terms of the economic viability, it's too early to tell, but as for the government's position, I think that looking at supporting digital media and newer kinds of media in the same way that the government supports printed media through the aid to publishers program is probably worth looking at.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Now we will go to questions, but before we do, as you all know—but I will remind you—we may have bells summoning us at 10 o'clock. We may not, but just be prepared. We may have to cut short whatever we're doing if the bells ring.

What we do have is a seven-minute question period from each person who is questioning you. That includes questions and answers.

Again, I will ask you to be very succinct in your questions and in your answers.

We begin now with Dan Vandal from the Liberals.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Thank you.

My first question is for Mr. Grewal.

Do you publish seven days out of seven?

[Jagdish Grewal]

No, it's five days out of seven. I started it as a seven-day publication but then had to cut it down to six days. Now I have five days of publication.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Five days, and your readership is 35,000 every day?

[Jagdish Grewal]

Yes, sir.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

I'm wondering if you could share with me your funding model, your revenue streams, for your newspaper.

[Jagdish Grewal]

The majority of my revenue stream is from local businesses. There are many businesses in the local community that run their ads in our paper on a daily basis. That is our main revenue stream. It's from local pizza shops, barbershops, and others. Local businesses are supporting these daily publications.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

What percentage would that be?

[Jagdish Grewal]

Almost 95%.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Okay, so that's sponsorships, local businesses....

[Jagdish Grewal]

Yes, sir.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Do you get any sort of support or financial help from any level of government?

[Jagdish Grewal]

No. There are only some advertisements from the federal and provincial governments, and that portion, I can say, is less than 5%. I get 2% to 3% from corporate ads, such as Rogers or Bell or other ads like that

[Jagdeep Kailey, Associate Editor, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.]

Also, the fact is that it's not government advertisements, it's the political parties who give us their advertisements.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

Okay. What is your annual budget for running your newspaper?

[Jagdish Grewal]

It's close to $100,000 a month.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

So the annual budget would be $1.2 million?

[Jagdish Grewal]

Yes.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

How many staff do you have?

[Jagdish Grewal]

I have five staff in my office here in Canada and eight overseas in India.

[Dan Vandal, Liberal, Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB]

What sort of web presence do you have on the Internet?