Madam Chair, members of the committee, thank you for this invitation today.
The comments that I am about to make in the next few minutes are based on our expertise in the last 15 years. We have conducted a lot of analysis and research and made a lot of observations on the media ecosystem. We have also conducted two studies for the Conseil provincial du secteur des communications of the Canadian Union of Public Employees on the regions as a whole and on local information in various communities.
Taken together, our observations tend to demonstrate that the amount and type of local information becomes a major social, political and economic barometer of a region. In other words, a region’s state of health is significantly expressed through its media. We often see that the more active and dynamic the media, the more economically and politically dynamic the regions.
Those involved in society, whether politicians, the public or the media, often wrongly believe that the importance of a societal phenomenon is directly proportional to its media coverage. The more the media talk about a topic, the more important it is thought to be. That is not true, but it is what people believe. As a result, we have seen over the years that regions as a whole tend to disappear in the media ecosystem.
In the last 15 years, all regions of Quebec have lost 88% of their speed and weight in Quebec’s overall media ecosystem. At the beginning of the century, about 8% of Quebec’s daily media content dealt with the regions. Today, in 2016, it is less than 1%. So content specific to a region tends to disappear. More and more, the same content appears throughout Quebec, from Gaspé to Gatineau, over the entire province. We have seen that those specifics have tended to disappear completely and the regions have tended to disappear gradually from the media ecosystem. That is what is happening in Quebec.
We have also conducted research and analysis on cultural communities elsewhere in Canada, including on francophones outside Quebec.
To give you an idea, according to Statistics Canada, francophones outside Quebec make up more than 3% of Canada’s population, but they do not make up half of 1% of the news on all Canadian issues.
Let me give you some points of comparison. In media terms, francophones outside Quebec receive coverage that is the equivalent of the horoscope in Canadian media. Expressed in terms of an average hockey game in Canada, francophones outside Quebec receive about five minutes of coverage. Essentially, in terms of the media, francophone cultural communities outside Quebec are gradually disappearing from the media ecosystem.
Let us remember what we said earlier: people believe that the more a topic is talked about, the more important it is. They believe that, when a topic is not talked about, either there is no issue or the issue is over and done with. So, like a number of communities, the regions are gradually disappearing from the media.
When we analyze in detail the media that serve local information the best, we make some fascinating discoveries. The primary medium, the one with the most influence in the media ecosystem, is generally television. Television plays a very important role in transforming and influencing the public, in changing ways or in having very short-term effects. Television generates 13% of all news in Canada on a daily basis. However, with local information, television generates only 5% of local content.
Unfortunately, television is one of the media that serves local communities least well in terms of local information. There are fewer and fewer local stations; there are fewer and fewer staff, and we see what we call the “McDonaldization” of the content, meaning that the same content is provided everywhere, in all regions.
We have even noticed that, with local information on the major national networks, there will need to be a national hook for a region to be covered. In other words, if they want to cover the Gaspé, there has to be something of interest to the people in Montreal, otherwise there will be no coverage. That serves to weaken the representation of the regions and the communities in the entire media ecosystem, both in Quebec and elsewhere in the country.
There you go.
Thank you, Madam Chair.