Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, bonjour.
On behalf of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council of Canada and its 850 members, I am appearing before you today to explain a few things that we have lost, at least for the last three years. It is a policy that started under the government of the late prime minister Trudeau, continued with Mr. Mulroney, and was followed by Mr. Chrétien and subsequent governments up until the most recent government, for the last three years. Then suddenly, the government advertisements to the ethnic papers were shut down totally, without an explanation or any reason for this policy change.
I want to tell you that Canada is a multicultural country, as declared by the House of Commons and accepted by the Government of Canada. As such, the various communities maintain the right to information in their own language, whatever it may be, their mother tongue. Therefore, the continuation of those publications is vital. They are helping Canada and also the government to spread the messages and the policies to the various people, new Canadians or old Canadians, who still continue to read the news in their mother tongue.
In the last three years, because of the change in policy, a number of publications have already shut down. It is a sort of crisis that affects not only the members of the ethnic publications but also the mainstream media, and this is a trend. The whole industry is in trouble, and we are trying to survive. If this trend continues, of course many publications are going to die. Some will probably try to come out for a very short period of time. The fact is that, either way, the one who is losing is Canada.
Please allow me to refer to some policies of other governments. The Italian government, for example, has a special budget every year for Italian publications outside of Italy. Every publication in the Italian language published in Canada receives x number of dollars each year from the Italian government to support itself. The same thing happens as far as I know with other governments and communities. By doing that, we allow the intervention of foreign governments into the business of Canada. Some are friendly, and some are not so friendly. The message that goes out is vital to the future of all of us as a country, as a community, and as a unified entity of the international community.
In the past, we had other problems. Through the system of distributing government advertising through Public Works Canada, they created a number of third parties that used to get 30% of every advertising unit for no reason, and that money was cut from the publishers in order to support the third parties that were looking after bringing in the advertising.
As a result, the very first time we lost I believe it was around $2 million. Five years ago, the last time, we lost another $1.5 million in Toronto, because the official agent that was getting those advertisements went bankrupt. Although the Government of Canada paid the money, that money never reached the members who carried the advertisement.
Today I'm not just asking you to restore the fact and start giving distributors government advertisement, or a portion that goes to our members, but it is also very important that your committee decides on the elimination of the third parties. The government has the ability to direct deal with every publication, which is going to be straight and clean business. No one interferes and nobody can get any profit out of this business, except the person who offers its services. This is the publication and the publisher, or the editor of the publication.
That is what I want to tell you. I wanted to bring those to your attention. Some of you know the industry very well and the problems we are facing.
I am ready to answer any questions. Thank you.