Thank you very much for the opportunity to meet you.
Some of you, of course, I've known for centuries, although you're not as old as I am, and for some of you, I'm glad you're the new blood of Canadian politics.
The National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada represents about 800 publications from all over Canada and about 150 producers of TV and radio. The organization has a history of about 30 years. We are working for the benefit of the members of the organization, as well as making sure that Canadian interests are also served by our members.
To add to whatever the previous speakers said, I want to bring it to your attention that I sit on committees of the United Nations about media. I want to tell you there is no such thing as receiving from government official recognition in terms of being a journalist. In fact, for someone to be a journalist, it is not even required that they finish university or high school. They have done so because of the differentiations between the western world and some African countries, where sometimes journalists do not finish high school, and they are recognizing them as journalists—and I mean the United Nations. I want to bring that to your attention, because this plays a vital role in the development of the ethnic media and ethnic journalism.
Over a period of years, in 2009 and in 2013, we organized educational seminars with the help of some institutions in Toronto. We brought in people from all over Canada. That was, of course, with the support and help of Canadian Heritage, to which I want to express one more time our thanks. Another thing I want to bring to your attention is that, until five years ago, the so-called “publishers support” was aimed only at the mainstream media, either francophone or anglophone. The ethnic press was totally out of this.
Finally, in that period of about five years, I met the then minister of Canadian Heritage, James Moore, who also used to be a member of the media before his public life with Parliament. I explained to him the challenges and the difficulties we were meeting, and he accepted that, and for the first time, five years ago, thanks to James, this fund was expanded to also include ethnic media publications.
In the very first year, they put it at about $1 million for the ethnic media. Let me tell you that at that time the amounts the fund was carrying were about $67 million for the magazine industry and about $23 million for the non-daily Canadian papers. From all of that fund, they gave us only $1 million.
Finally, because my members didn't know what exactly they were going to meet, they tried to get into the fund, and they got only $700,000 in total. For the rest, as always, there was a gap of $2.5 million, which was going directly to Rogers' publications such as Chatelaine or Maclean's. Maclean's was receiving $2.5 million in support, if you can call it that, and my members were receiving $8,000 or $9,000.
Last year, this fund went up for the magazines to $53,404,285. For the non-daily papers, they distributed $15,433,313. From those amounts, we received $700,000 for the ethnic magazines—for some of them, I put it around—and about $700,000 for the non-daily papers. The rest, about $70 million, again went to the so-called mainstream media.
Last year, we discussed this situation time and again with the authorities at Canadian Heritage. In a multicultural society, this does not seem to be very fair.
I'm doing this job. I'm a journalist, and I've been a publisher for 50 years. As a matter of fact, I don't have a house. Many others can't have.... I don't know how I survived over the period of 50 years. We discussed that. Canadian Heritage finally came out and said they would try a survey to see what exactly they were going to do. A survey was done by Canadian Heritage, and the Carleton University school of journalism conducted the survey.