Canadian Heritage Committee on Nov. 17th, 2016

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Larry Maguire]

Thanks, folks, for your patience.

I thought it was necessary to just call a meeting for a few minutes to inform our guests who are presenting today that there is a vote going to take place in Parliament. The bells are probably going to ring here in a minute. This is just to let our video conference members and the guests who are here to present this morning know that's the procedure that will take place. We won't have time to begin the presentations here at this particular point, so we will reconvene the committee as close to 12 o'clock as we can. I believe the vote is going to take place at 11:45 a.m. It usually takes us 15 minutes to do the vote in the House, colleagues. Therefore, we'll be back here about 12:15 p.m., Ottawa time. I just wanted to make sure that everyone knew what was happening.

Thank you very much, Mr. Clerk, for your help.

Our clerk, Jean-François, will be in touch with our guests here to keep them informed as to the timing and as to whether we can extend our time in the room past 1:00 as well.

With that, at this point we'll suspend the meeting until after the vote. Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

I'd like to bring the meeting to order.

On behalf of the committee, I would like to apologize to all of our witnesses for being so very late and for keeping you waiting for such a long time. Votes take precedence over everything else we have to do, so this was a real issue.

We will begin in a minute. I would like to ask the committee if we could have an agreement to stay until 1:30 to accommodate our witnesses. Do I have a nodding of heads? Thank you very much.

We have four witnesses: Mr. Crowfoot, general manager of the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta; Ken Waddell, from Neepawa Banner, the Neepawa Press and Rivers Banner; Northern News Services Ltd., with Casey Lessard and Bruce Valpy; and Mark Lever from The Chronicle Herald.

We will ask each of you to present for five minutes, and then we will go into an interactive question and answer session. I will give you a warning when you have only one minute left. Is that good?

You know that we are studying the accessibility of media in local communities throughout Canada. What has consolidation of the media done to impact that, positively or negatively, on all platforms, including digital? What has the digital world done to impact access to local news and Canadian stories across this country?

Hopefully we can hear from you, and maybe you can help us with some recommendations that you think will deal with this issue of access to local news.

I will begin with Mr. Crowfoot.

[Bert Crowfoot, General Manager, Aboriginal Multi-Media Society of Alberta]

Oki. Good morning.

I threatened to do this thing in Blackfoot, but I'll go with English instead.

The Aboriginal Multi-Media Society was established 34 years ago, in 1983. In the early days, our multimedia consisted of a radio show and a single newspaper, Windspeaker, which was devoted to the indigenous populations of Alberta. With the news media in general, the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society evolved, embracing new technologies and new opportunities. Newspapers went from typesetting to desktop publishing to websites, blogs, and social media.

Windspeaker evolved too, expanding its scope from provincial news to national indigenous news to fill the void created when 11 indigenous newspapers across Canada closed their doors that year. This void was created with the elimination of the native communications program in 1990.

AMMSA then developed a new publication, Alberta Sweetgrass, to fill the void when Windspeaker went national. Two publications under AMMSA's banner led to four, with Saskatchewan Sage and Ontario Birchbark, and then to five, with Raven’s Eye for British Columbia, with other specialty publications filling in the gaps of reader interest and need: Buffalo Spirit, a guide to indigenous spirituality and culture; and Windspeaker Business Quarterly.

Radio evolved from a show on the CBC station CFWE to a network of websites, YouTube channels, and a mobile phone app. People can now listen to our multiple radio channels from a smart phone anywhere in the world. AMMSA continues to bring our terrestrial signal into small and large communities alike and works continuously to improve signal quality in remote areas. Radio is also working to expand the organizational newsgathering service and to build on the work being done on the publishing side of AMMSA.

The pace of change experienced by all news organizations has been dramatic, especially over the last 10 years. In publishing, ink now takes the form of pixels. Newsprint is now computers, phones, and tablet screens. AMMSA can reach more people every day and faster than we did with the old biweekly print publication model.

While the changes have been exciting, they have also not all been positive. Readers have a voracious appetite for news without cost. They want it now, they want it at all times, and they want it free of charge. These needs put considerable strain on the financial resources of small market publishers. AMMSA is not immune, but the burden is compounded by the fact that our coverage area is widespread, remote, and isolated. Advertisers meanwhile puzzle over the effectiveness of the new digital model and struggle to invest their own dwindling advertising budgets in it.

There is also concern over rural, remote, or isolated communities that suffer connectivity issues. Some communities are not connected to the Internet at all. Even if communities continue to have access to Internet services, extreme poverty may preclude individuals from enjoying it. Community members may not have computers in their homes, and if they do, the cost of Internet service may be wildly beyond their means.

Computer literacy also lags behind the mainstream in many indigenous communities. These are barriers that go beyond geographic isolation, and they marginalize indigenous people and their communities further from the important news and information that affects them.

Our perspective is important. What remains consistent over time, however, is the desire of our readers and listeners to have their own selves reflected fairly in news coverage. They want their issues and concerns discussed from the position of their own world view. They want value placed on their history, their cultures and traditions, their perspectives.

Since AMMSA was established, our publications and radio programming have helped bridge the gap of understanding between indigenous peoples and Canadian society. This was long before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission told us that such understanding between peoples was imperative.

We take our direction from the elders, however, who tell us it is even more important that indigenous peoples learn about and understand themselves through an indigenous lens, not the distorted lens of the non-indigenous perspective, amplified by mainstream news.

The world view, cultures, and traditions of indigenous peoples are rarely accurately portrayed by mainstream media, and reports often take a pan-indigenous view of aboriginal people in Canada. They make no distinction among nations, further skewing understanding of indigenous communities by Canadian society from coast to coast to coast.

News of indigenous peoples by mainstream publishers is, in general, focused on the activities of indigenous peoples that run contrary to the initiatives, values, and perspectives of Canadian populations. There is no coverage of potlatches or powwows, coming of age ceremonies, Indian rodeo, activities like fishing, beading, or weaving; and no coverage of what fills out our knowledge and understanding of value-based indigenous communities.

Mainstream reporters don't often get to develop relationships with nearby indigenous communities to gain the comprehensive knowledge about indigenous people that comes with those relationships. That's why it is so important that indigenous publications and radio be allowed to flourish, because those relationships are established.

Indigenous news publishers—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Mr. Crowfoot, I'd like you to wind down. Maybe we can get to some more points during the questions.

[Bert Crowfoot]

Okay.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you.

[Bert Crowfoot]

—are in the community in good times and bad.

As far as media concentration, the proliferation of indigenous news media occurred in the 1980s and the 1990s but over recent years there has been a decline. As production costs soared and technology changed, it became a financial hurdle to many of those regional indigenous media organizations. Within the last few years, advertising revenues have been harder to come by. We scaled back our services to reflect a new and greatly diminished economic reality.

The launch of APTN in 1999 as a national news provider has been a welcome alternative to mainstream news. A lot of important stories are still not being covered.

Media concentration—

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you, Mr. Crowfoot. I am so sorry.

[Bert Crowfoot]

That's no problem.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Now, Mr. Waddell, for the Neepawa Banner. You have five minutes, please.

[Ken Waddell, Publisher, Neepawa Banner, Neepawa Press, Rivers Banner]

Thank you.

I'm Ken Waddell from Neepawa, Manitoba. It's a town of about 4,500 people, serving an area of about 10,000 people.

I've been involved in the newspaper business and publishing for nearly 50 years, but full time since 1989, when we started the Neepawa Banner from scratch, in competition with the Neepawa Press, which had been in business since 1896. In 2010, that newspaper sold out to a major corporation that also wanted to buy our paper, but I refused to sell, and five years ago, they sold their paper to me and my family.

Information for local communities has to be accurate and presented in a verifiable, accountable fashion. That is why local media is so very important. Information has to be trustworthy, and the only way to ensure that happens is with local accountability. Is the information reliable? Is it verifiable? If information is not reliable and verifiable, it is at best useless and at worst dangerous. In the newspaper business that means that ownership, or at least the role of publisher, has to be locally based. Regardless of the size of the community, the publisher has to be local.

Concentration in the media has been very bad for local communities, both large and small. The corporate shareholder agenda is too easily subverted into chasing maximum quick cash and away from providing news and information. The publisher has to be prepared to risk and to invest in staff, facilities, and equipment, and keep boots on the ground to make sure that the information is gathered locally. If a paper isn't growing, it is dying.

Digital media are a set of tools that help us in the newspaper business. Certainly, we use websites, Facebook, and Twitter, and we often release our stories onto our website and Facebook even before the print edition hits the streets. Despite this, print remains the foundation of our business model. We have three papers. We are the largest, the second largest, and the sixth largest papers in southwestern Manitoba.

Local newspapers are alive and well if they stick to their name: “local” and “news”. I might also say “paper”; that's the only way of verifying the news and keeping it verified, because you can change anything you want on the website.

As noted, news has to be accountable and verifiable. Newspapers are like a three-legged stool. Those three legs are: reliable, verifiable news; a strong editorial opinion section; and advertising. We can gather the news. We can put in the editorials, but we can't do the advertising.

Advertisers have to realize the consequences of where they place their ads. It doesn't matter whether it's businesses or whether it's government. If you're going to place your ads on the website, remember that the website producers and Facebook and YouTube and all these things, are not going to be supporting your local hockey club or donating to the local hospital. It ain't going to happen. It's especially important to realize that.

Facebook doesn't usually hire local people or spend at local businesses or support local sports and community organizations. If business and governments cut off the advertising leg, the stool will fall over and Canada's communities will fall over with it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Mr. Waddell. That's very compelling testimony.

From Northern News Services, we have Mr. Lessard.

[Casey Lessard, Editor, Nunavut News/North, Northern News Services Ltd.]

Thank you for inviting me and my colleagues to discuss our experience in Nunavut.

Bruce and Mikle can answer questions about our experience in N.W.T. Bruce is our managing editor, and Mikle Langenhan is our associate editor for Kivalliq News with two newspapers in Nunavut. They're joining us today from Yellowknife.

My name is Casey Lessard. I was recently made editor of the Nunavut News/North. Nunavut News/North celebrated its 70th anniversary last year. It first covered all the Norwest Territories, and now we do distinct papers for Nunavut, N.W.T., as well as the Yellowknifer and community newspapers in Kivalliq and several towns in N.W.T..

I don't need to tell you that the community newspaper industry is in transition. For the vanguards in our industry, print is already a legacy product, as you've heard from Bert Crowfoot. On the flip side, we had a similar experience to what Mr. Waddell is talking about. For the longtime players, there was an uncertainty about whether their businesses could survive outside of a business model they understood.

I see in many small towns in southern Canada that newspapers don't even have a website or a Facebook page. This uncertainty is happening because a lot of people love print. I do too. The businesses that support us want metrics. They want proof that their money is working today. For us in the north, our bread and butter was once government advertising, but the N.W.T. government was the first to move away from print advertising, and Nunavut's government followed last year. Both still do some advertising, but it's a huge loss compared to what we had even four or five years ago.

It's a risky proposition for us and for other community newspapers to make a transition to digital. There is far less money in the game for the small players, the ones without the big chains backing them up. Our chain has eight newspapers, serving more than 70,000 residents. In Nunavut we have about 37,000 people who are spread out over one-fifth of Canada's land mass. We're a medium-sized chain covering a big space for a small number of people.

We still believe we are the voice of the small communities, but Facebook and CBC can now make the same claim. It's not exactly a level playing field to compete with them, though, from a financial standpoint.

Our overhead is extremely high. It includes rent for small offices in two communities in Nunavut costing about $5,000 per month as well as staff housing exceeding $10,000 per month total. Flights are expensive. For me to come here to Ottawa cost $2,500. For me to go from Iqaluit to Yellowknife is $3,800. Travel within Nunavut is also very expensive. At the extreme, a round-trip flight from Iqaluit to Grise Fiord would cost $5,000.

We translate as much as we can into Inuktitut, and our sister newspaper, Kivalliq News in southwestern Nunavut, is fully translated each week by Mikle, who is on our teleconference. The federal government's assistance through the Canadian periodical fund helps us offset some of these costs, and we do appreciate it. There are many ways it could be improved to help in our transition to digital.

I know some of the people in this room have prestigious degrees. Nunavut is a territory where few people have the ability to leave their own communities, let alone dream of attending university. A massive proportion of Nunavut's Inuit population, whom we serve, is on social assistance. The territory has Canada's lowest high school graduation rate and the highest unemployment.

The population we're trying to reach is 85% Inuit. They struggle to afford Internet access, the same access that keeps them in contact with family and friends. You'll often see people gathering at the library for the community access program waiting for a computer to use the Internet. The Internet is extremely expensive and slow.

For the people on the street, we are a bargain at $1 a week. We are the place people turn to find a new job or read news about their friends and relatives in their language. I see our pages cut out and posted on walls at schools and hamlet offices whenever I travel throughout Nunavut. You can't put a metric on what that means to people.

There are ways our industry is surviving. Free newspapers, special editions, and sponsored content are a few of them. In the end, we need to find a way to make money digitally before we lose the capital that community newspapers have built as a trusted source of local content, as Mr. Waddell said. We need programs that help build the digital infrastructure to help us grow our digital audience and to help our industry's veterans continue to tell the communities' stories.

There's a lot of capital that could just go down the drain of the people who don't have the current skills. That's all I have to say, unless you have any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Mark Lever of The Chronicle Herald, you have five minutes, please.

[Mark Lever, President, Chief Executive Officer, The Chronicle Herald]

A very sincere thank you for your invitation and the opportunity to share insights and thoughts about the state of the Canadian media landscape. Specifically, I'm pleased to be here on behalf of The Chronicle Herald to bring perspective to the challenges facing daily newspapers, like ours, across the country.

The Chronicle Herald was incorporated in 1875, but our roots can be traced back to 1824. We are the last remaining independent daily newspaper in the country. We've been telling the news of the day and shaping the narrative of the province of Nova Scotia since before Confederation. In our nearly two-century history, we have borne witness to the birth of this nation and told the stories of the world wars of the 20th century in their tragedy and in their jubilation. We are the one cultural institution whose history is so entwined with the province's that the two could hardly be separated.

Sadly, the fight today is for our own survival, with changes in media consumption habits, coupled with the introduction of disruptive competitors without adjacent legacy costs. Here I will name the obvious new media entrants like Facebook and Google, but I would also add Canadian disrupters like the government funded CBC. They have all substantially fragmented audiences and stripped advertising revenues.

The proliferation of media today hasn't changed the basic journalistic mandate, which is to report on those in power to provide citizens with the information they need to make their own judgment, to report on the needs of our communities, and to provide support to us all by shedding light on critical events.

Joseph Howe, a founding father of Canada's free press and the publisher of the Novascotian, a direct precursor to The Chronicle Herald, famously commented about the role of the journalist:

...when I sit down in solitude to the labours of my profession, the only questions I ask myself are, What is right? What is just? What is for the public good?

The sentiment is clear. Journalism's role in our democracy remains pivotal. It is fundamental. We are a rich and vibrant country made up of thousands upon thousands of communities. It is journalism at the grassroots that binds us together and helps to weave a coherent story of our nation.

Herein lies the rub. Without the storytellers weaving together communities throughout this nation, we become either atomized individuals or nameless and faceless masses without coherent connection.

Social media platforms aren't focused on the kind of content that is important to a free and democratic society. They're concerned about volume of content and filling data feeds with entertainment, clickbait, and low-quality commentary. Just yesterday, Oxford Dictionaries announced its word of the year: post-truth. They define it as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”.

The Brexit and Trump votes are two events in the past year driven by this phenomenon that has rocked the world. Newspapers, with reporters in communities throughout Canada, are the food supply of our democracy, but this food supply is in serious risk of running out. The media business model is changing.

Worldwide, only about 9% of people pay for content. The subscription model, while still critically important to support the work of journalists, has never been relied on to shoulder the entirety of the burden. Advertising, once the revenue lifeblood of newspapers, historically accounting for two-thirds of total revenue, has been reduced to programmatic purchases of audience segments and affinity groups.

Furthermore, we have experienced dramatic changes in spends from our government partners, at a rate greater than industry. Our provincial and federal governments have reduced their ad spends in our products, presumably with an increased emphasis on advertising with foreign corporations such as Google and Facebook, with neither ties to our communities nor any investment in producing the journalism we rely upon.

I'm disheartened to tell you that my newspaper has experienced a 54% drop in the combined provincial and federal government ad spend over the past three years, from $600,000 in 2013 to just $280,000 this year. Just like every other newspaper in Canada, The Chronicle Herald is grappling with changes in consumption trends and advertising changes.

People are often surprised to learn that, despite years of decline in paid circulation, our reach is larger today than it has ever been. People are consuming more content, and the need for local, fact-based journalism is so vitally important.

It's not that Canada has stopped supporting journalism. The CBC receives nearly $700 million a year in federal funding. As always, the heavy lifting of journalism has fallen to those in the trenches and those in the communities, and that means to newspapers.

It's staggering to note that according to the global analytics company comScore, more than 88% of all Canadian digital advertising revenues are now stripped away by large foreign-owned and controlled social media sites.

Journalism is vital to our democracy. It is the foundation of rational public discourse, and it begins in each and every community in our country. CBC is a tremendous public institution and one in which every Canadian should take justifiable pride. But the CBC alone is no more capable of weaving together the stories of our nation from Cape Spear to Vancouver Island to Ellesmere Island than Facebook is capable of reporting on the needs of Canadians or breaking the news to provide citizens with the information they need to exercise their franchise.

For Canadian stories to continue to be told from coast to coast to coast, we'll have to look toward other models. Government partners can and must play a role in this transition.

I thank you for your time and attention. I will be happy to take any questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Hedy Fry]

Thank you very much, Mr. Lever.

Now we're going to go to the second part of this session.

We will begin with a question and answer. There will be seven minutes for the question and the answer. I'm going to ask everybody, as I always do, to be as succinct and quick as you can be, so that we can get as many questions and answers in as possible and have an interactive discourse here.

I will begin with Mr. Samson from the Liberals, for seven minutes.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thank you.

I'd like to thank all of you very much for sharing the information you shared. It tells some nice stories. The keywords I've been interested in, of course, are “Canadian content” and “local content”, and you've explicitly spoken of these. I thank you very much for that.

I'd like to address my question to Mr. Lever from The Chronicle Herald. Of course, I'm from Nova Scotia, so I'm always concerned when we have a strike and have people out of work.

I'd like to know, based on the situation you've been living through—and I understand it's not easy and that there are two sides to every story—how do you feel about journalism? Also, because certain ones are on strike and the expertise is not at the table, are you able to deliver local and Canadian content as you would like?

We would like to have the Chronicle back as it was, so how do you see things unfolding? Can you expand on that, please?

[Mark Lever]

The folks on strike in our newsroom undoubtedly see me as the enemy, and I would like to say that I am taking the stand as the last line of defence for Canadian journalism. Given the changes in our landscape, we cannot afford to sign contracts we can't live up to.

We've been very lucky at The Chronicle Herald. There is a shortage of employment for journalists in the country, and we've been able to hire great young, talented journalists to fill the void. Nobody wants to bring our journalists back more than I do, but there are certain financial agreements that I can't enter into, with the uncertainty.

Believe me when I tell you that our newsroom at 120-strong is much better than a newsroom at 30, but 30 is all we can afford today. Also, the changes that are happening in the landscape that I tried to describe, in what was supposed to be a 10-minute presentation.... I think I would have addressed more journalistic issues in that than in the five-minute presentation that I had to edit on the fly, and without an editor I don't know that I did it justice.

I need to assure you that we are working hard to end this strike, but we are a business without any form of outside funding. We're a family-owned business and cannot rely on and go to the market for more money. That's the nature of it; we can't sign an agreement.

I'd love to bring people back. I thought I had a deal on November 4, to update you completely. We had worked for three weeks and we thought we had a deal, but it went sideways. We're working hard behind the scenes to try to end it.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

As a Nova Scotian, of course, we want to see success—and there's no question about that—and we want both parties to find a resolution.

Do you find that what's been happening in the last six-plus months has a major effect? You have talked about advertising and the drop in print for everybody, but given that you're not fully running as you were in the past, do you feel you might become bogged down and lose some of the opportunity that might come up to make your business more prosperous?

[Mark Lever]

No, I don't. We've been able to punch above our peers across the country, the urban market newspapers that are owned by chains, both from a national ad perspective and a local ad perspective, despite the strike. Do I think we'd be stronger without a strike? Unquestionably. Can I afford to end the strike, with the prospect that things would be better around the corner, and sign an agreement that we can't afford? The answer is no. It's tough. It's gut-wrenching. It's a terrible decision.

I know that my testimony today will be cut up by the striking members of the union and used, but I'm compelled to be here today to speak on their behalf as well as our business's behalf, about things in the landscape. I believe that the government has at its disposal an ability and a capacity to help.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thank you.

Mr. Waddell, you spoke about.... I'm not sure I captured fully what you said, but I found it quite interesting that the company tried to purchase your paper, but in the end you ended up purchasing theirs. Can you expand on that? If there's a successful path there, we'd like to know more, some of the key points that allowed that to happen. What's your opinion on that?

[Ken Waddell]

The Neepawa Press, as I said, was started in 1896. By 2009 or 2010 the private owners—and there had been several over the years—decided to sell to a company called Glacier Communications, which owned dozens and dozens of publications, mostly in western Canada. They wanted to buy ours as well because they knew that to have them combined would give them some strength.

I didn't like the idea. I didn't like how they ran newspapers. I still don't. I've made it quite clear to them in writing and otherwise. They ran the place into the ground. They thought they would push me and my family out of business, which didn't happen.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Why not? What do you think—

[Ken Waddell]

We know what they're doing, and they don't.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Tell us about it because we need to know. We all need to know about the successful path.