You may be wondering why minority community media should be treated differently from other media.
The role minority community media play is protected by part VII of the Official Languages Act, as it is an essential service and very often the only source of information for the official language community it serves. It is the voice and a reflection of communities that are often isolated, in remote regions or even in urban settings. It is a symbol of attachment to a community, of a development tool of community cohesion and of identity-building that contributes to communities' growth and sustainability. It is a key platform for Canadians to express themselves freely. It is an indicator of the vitality of official language minority communities used by government authorities.
The negative effects of the advent of social media at the expense of traditional media escalated to an emergency a few years ago for many media. You are surely aware that the federal government's decision to invest in advertising on foreign digital platforms to the detriment of domestic traditional and digital media has been devastating. What is even more worrisome for us is that those platforms are not state imposed. By making that decision, the government certainly did not take into account its direct and indirect impact on our economy. For small official language minority media, which are primarily isolated in remote regions or in an urban minority language setting, the impact of the government's decisions can easily be multiplied by 10.
In June 2017, our consortium was relieved to see the report of the acting commissioner of official languages. In her report, she agreed with the organizations that submitted complaints in 2015, according to which Public Services and Procurement Canada, the Department of Canadian Heritage, the Privy Council Office and the Treasury Board Secretariat did not take into account their obligations under part VII of the act in their decision to cut community media advertising.
It should certainly not be forgotten that, until complaints were filed with the Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages in 2015, government advertising revenues for official language minority community media had been melting before our eyes from year to year.
As of fall 2017, bolstered by the final investigation report and the acting commissioner's recommendations, and more importantly convinced that the affected departments would want to work with our consortium to implement win-win solutions, we have begun a series of meetings with a number of government representatives to move the file forward.
We wanted to propose an aligned action plan that would engage a number of affected departments through an interdepartmental approach. We have noted some openness at the Department of Canadian Heritage and have begun working with them. As for Public Services and Procurement Canada, we ran into a brick wall. Those in charge would accept no responsibility and sent the ball back into the court of the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Privy Council Office.
In December 2017, Public Services and Procurement Canada even published a bogus study on minority language Canadians' media habits, which was ordered immediately after the acting commissioner's preliminary report was submitted, in September 2016, without consulting the community or the members of our consortium, as required by the Official Languages Act. This study has been criticized by many official language minority communities, both francophone or anglophone, owing to questionable methodology and worthless or invalid data, which will have cost Canadian taxpayers $200,000.
We were told about this study in September 2017, and we ordered the department officials not to publish it and to comply with the Official Languages Act by redoing the study—this time also consulting the members of our consortium. Yet those officials did not see it fit to accommodate our request and made their study public, as planned, in December 2017.
You are probably also aware of the recommendations made by your colleagues from the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates. They carried out a study entitled “Reaching Canadians with Effective Government Advertising”, the report on which was submitted in December 2017.
In that report, the committee identified a number of anomalies in the way Public Services and Procurement Canada had managed the government advertising file. So it issued a series of 10 evidence-based recommendations, including this one:
The Government of Canada increase advertising purchasing for weekly, multicultural and community newspapers and other local media, so that the government meets the directive that communications are responsive to the diverse information needs of the public.
From December 2017 to January 2018, we tried to conduct a national awareness-raising campaign with the ministers and deputy ministers in charge, but with no success.
The decisions over the past 10 years have resulted in the slow death of official language minority community media.