Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the committee for the invitation to appear today.
The study you have under way examines journalism and media in Canada, including—I want to focus on the words of your motion—“issues of fairness and competition”. This is where I want to focus my remarks.
First, I'll say a brief word about The Hub by way of background. I'm its publisher and co-founder, with my colleague Sean Speer. This month, we marked our fifth anniversary as a digital news and commentary start-up. We're pleased that in the last 12 months, there were over 28 million engagements with our platform, predominantly by Canadians from coast to coast. At 300,000 monthly downloads, our podcast feed is one of the country's largest, dedicated to the issues this committee cares about: Canadian politics, economics and public policy.
We think that growth tells all of us something important. There's clearly a real public appetite for new voices and new perspectives in the national media mix. We're proud that we built our national audience through private grants, subscriptions, advertising, sponsorship and events. Unlike virtually all of our peers, large and small, we have not utilized government subsidies to fund our news journalism and public commentary. To this extent, we believe The Hub's continuing success is a powerful proof point that high-quality journalism and serious policy analysis can thrive independent of government subsidies.
However, this may not remain true for much longer, not only for the few remaining non-subsidized outlets but ultimately for the Hub. This brings me back to the topic of fairness and competition, which is at the heart of your study.
By refusing to use subsidies to fund our journalism, we compete on an uneven playing field. To state the obvious, the labour tax credit is not tied to any meaningful performance metric. It is allocated on a journalist head count alone. This conveniently rewards incumbents that have had decades to build subscriber bases to sustain their newsrooms. This is great for them; I congratulate them. Start-ups, meanwhile, have to build their audiences from scratch. They have to go from zero to one, 100 and, in our case, over 30,000 subscribers. They have no subscriber base to fund the newsroom in a way that would qualify them, were there meaningful support in the first place when they start out, as we started out five years ago.
Adding insult to injury, large incumbents engage in predatory subscription pricing. You've all seen it. It's one dollar for six months or one dollar for a year. They do this knowing that taxpayer supports will make them financially whole at the end of the day. Inexplicably, this payroll tax subsidy scheme is also anonymous. Recipients are not disclosed. This means that outlets like The Hub, which believe that journalism not funded by government largesse is a key selling point to potential readers, cannot differentiate themselves on the very issue of press independence because of the anonymity of the subsidies and how they're given out.
Think about that for a moment. At The Hub, we've come to accept the reality that, despite undermining public trust in the media—I can speak to that; I have hard data on it—freezing incumbents in their dominant positions and stifling innovation among new digital start-ups, these once temporary government supports are now permanent, and they are likely to continue to expand. Between the Canadian labour journalism tax credit and the local journalism initiative alone, Canadian taxpayers are spending close to $100 million a year on news subsidies.
Let me offer four quick, practical reforms to make better use of this money.
First, end anonymity. If the media industry believes, as it says all the time, that transparency is the basis of public trust in all institutions, including the government, it should apply this standard to itself. Canadians deserve to know which outlets are receiving public money vis-à-vis the labour tax credit and how much.
Second, stop subsidizing the head count. If you're going to subsidize the press, reward outlets for growing their audiences, not their overhead. Tie a meaningful portion of the credit to reaching engagement and subscriber growth. Reward outlets that Canadians are choosing to read, like The Hub.
Third, require a code of conduct. Outlets taking subsidies should declare them openly and regularly in their mastheads, on their websites and in their annual reporting. They should be discouraged from using their own platforms to lobby for more government money. This is now pervasive across much of mainstream media. It's a conflict of interest, and it further erodes public trust.
Finally, I'll conclude with this: Mandate that payroll subsidies go to funding journalism, not cash payouts to owners and bondholders. The Canadian Journalism Collective already requires this of Online News Act funds. The same rules should apply to the labour tax credit and be tightened to require mandatory financial disclosure by recipient outlets of exactly how they are spending the public's funds on their news and journalism operations.
I'll stop there. I look forward to your questions.