I have a few ideas. First is to encourage the government, whether it be the federal government or territorial or provincial governments, to advertise locally. I think that's probably the number one thing that we've lost for sure. Bruce wasn't able to be heard, but we experienced major losses over the last five years. We had a pretty good run until probably about 2011-12, when it started to hit, and then it really hit hard the last year in Nunavut. There were some major drops in advertising revenue. I think probably for the first time in a lot of people's memories in our chain, we had to have layoffs last year.
I think the government has to start getting ready for this, or maybe it already has. I'm not sure. We're a few years behind in the north of what happens in the south. The more people who can't make a living doing local media, the more people there will be trying to find work. It tends to be older people. I've seen it many times in the south, my friends who have worked at local papers who don't have a job anymore because they're not digitally prepared.
I think training programs through EI or whatever you use to help people learn how to be digital journalists, digital media producers, would help. Another thing is encouraging MPs and other businesses by having tax credits for local advertising. I'm not saying this is strictly for newspapers. It can be digital too. If you look at the Canada periodical fund, I know it has some programs to do digital publications, but I would not say they're as strong in support for people to make that transition to digital as they are for subscription-based.
There's no support for a company that wanted to do a full distribution. There are major advantages for attracting advertising. Probably the cheapest way for you to do it would be to support free distribution, which would give that appearance and reality of a hard copy in everybody's hands. That's far more quantifiable than the tales of fraud that you're hearing even today about Facebook and Google, and the false numbers that are well beyond what is really being delivered to people who pay hard money to outside companies. If a dollar of Canadian money goes to Facebook, and only 50ยข is being delivered in product, it's not really a fair model, when you can physically hold every dollar in your hand.
Those are my thoughts on that.