Mr. Speaker, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, in an attempt to protect Canadian magazines, introduced legislation to limit foreign split-run publications.
Now, in a bizarre turn of events, the minister is creating a split-run policy for Canadian publications, taking away the favourable postal classification from a group of Canadian religious publications. The Catholic Register and regional catholic publications, the New Freeman of New Brunswick, the Prairie Messenger , and the B.C. Catholic all lost their favourable postal classifications because they use material from Canadian Catholic News, a news service they jointly finance. For the past 10 years, these publications have pooled their resources in order to report on national issues, something they could not afford to cover individually.
These catholic magazines are Canadian at their heart and soul. The Minister of Canadian Heritage should be a supporter of such publications rather than trying to kill them with friendly fire.
Canadian magazines are not protected by singling out catholic publications for destruction. I would ask the minister to reinstate these catholic publications under the publications assistance program.