We have a number of tools in our tool box that we can look to use to support news media across Canada. We have the Online News Act, which will inject $100 million per year into the Canadian news media ecosystem. We've already seen that CBC is taking that money and putting it out into the smaller communities. It announced that a few weeks ago. It's putting 25 journalists' boots on the ground in the western provinces.
Our goal is for the CBC to be on the ground in local communities, because we know how important local news is. We've heard it from other people on this call, and we're going to say it again here. We feel that on the ground in the communities is how we build trust, and this is how we learn about each other.
If we don't have news invested in local communities, people tend to defer to national news, and national news tends to be more polarized. As a result of that, we're seeing people turning away from the news, because they don't want to hear about the polarized news; they want to hear what's going on in their communities. If you combine that with the disinformation and the misinformation that we're seeing online, we're seeing a growing mistrust in public institutions.
We think that the CBC has a responsibility to be in local communities to stop the tidal wave of misinformation and ensure that Canadian communities have a place to meet. If we're not talking to each other, then we're not meeting, and then that impacts our ability to have a healthy democracy.