Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to speak to the House today on the issue of newspaper concentration.
On February 15 of this year, based on a query by the House leader of the New Democratic Party, the Prime Minister said that the government would study the concentration of newspaper ownership in response to Thomson's announcement that it would sell off most of its newspapers.
On May 1, given that Hollinger announced that over 300 community papers and over 50 daily papers would be up for sale, I asked the Prime Minister what the progress of his study was. I was stunned to hear him say at that point that he really saw no need whatsoever for a study any longer because it seemed that the problem had cured itself. He said that if Mr. Black was selling his papers, someone else would buy them and there would be less concentration rather than more. The Prime Minister said that it would be better to wait and see what Thomson will do with his newspapers.
I would suggest that the government abandon its wait and see policy on newspaper concentration and act now to re-establish a healthy environment for Canadian and community owned newspapers. I want to tell the Prime Minister that there are alternatives to his wait and see policy but they have to happen quickly.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of hearing Tom Kent present to the industry committee an ongoing review of the Competition Act. Mr. Kent headed the royal commission in 1980 which recommended legislation to curb media concentration. That was 20 years ago. He said then and says now that the reason newspaper concentration is dangerous to democracy is, quite simply, that owners choose the viewpoint that rules their papers, that they in fact are the ideological masters of their papers. This is fine if there are dozens or hundreds of owners running hundreds of newspapers, a wide teaming forum of diverse views, but that is not the case in this country.
We have instead a spectacle of very few owners in control of all the papers. Two companies, Hollinger and Thomson, have a stranglehold on newspaper ownership, both weekly and daily. Lo and behold, something happened. We are not exactly sure what but some kind of economic force has intervened and newspapers are once again on the block and up for sale.
I would like to join with Mr. Kent and urge the Competition Bureau and the government to do something ambitious right now. The government should amend the Competition Act to allow the review of any purchase that would give a buyer more than 10% of the Canadian circulation of a newspaper owned either in English or French.
I would urge the government to create tax incentives that will assist community groups, institutions, co-ops and groups of investors to reinvest and rebuild community ownership of our means of expression, rebuild the diversity of opinion which is in fact democracy's oxygen and what we need to have a healthy citizenship.
I urge the government and the Prime Minister to make the necessary changes in the Competition Act during this very brief window of time that it has to actually cause some real change in the balance of ownership in our newspapers. I strongly recommend that the government act quickly so that we can re-establish a balance of diverse opinions in Canada.