Here at Pattison Media, we first got into the business of local television in 1987, when we acquired our Kamloops station. Both Kamloops and Prince George are much smaller markets than Hamilton, each with approximately 100,000 people. I trust you can appreciate that providing local news to markets of this size, with advertising as the only commercial revenue, has never been easy. However, what we at LITS all have in common is that our past challenges pale in comparison with the challenges we face today.
When Pattison bought Kamloops, the Internet effectively didn't exist. When Cal's company took over CHCH-TV—we're only talking about 2009—total revenues for TV stations in Canada were $2.1 billion. Today they are $1.5 billion. This might not sound like a big drop, but realize that after inflation, it represents a 50% drop. For LITS, this 50% drop has resulted in the closure of five local stations to date.
How did this happen? Did we forget how to run TV stations? Did we lose our relevance or our collective competitive edge? No, I don't think so. What happened is that Internet advertising grew from $1.8 billion in 2009 to a whopping $20 billion today. Let that sink in. Over the course of a couple of decades, Google, YouTube and Facebook, platforms that have almost zero content costs and infinite advertising inventory, grabbed almost 75% of Canada's advertising market. We didn't lose this advertising because we have nothing to offer Canadians; we lost it because U.S. tech giants figured out how to monetize Canadians' attention in a way that costs them virtually nothing. The implications are huge. They go well beyond the impact on LITS and our ability to provide local news.
The relevance to this set of hearings, however, is blindingly simple. If Canada wants to maintain a Canadian-owned and controlled broadcasting ecosystem, something this committee insisted remain a policy objective in its review of the Online Streaming Act, and if we want a truly sovereign nation—a democracy in which Canadians make decisions based on facts and considered analysis, not fake news and foreign influence—we have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it.