Mr. Speaker, when I look at who is complaining about the bill, it is largely editors. From my experience, editors never liked having staff make decisions in the newsroom. They thought the journalistic independence was protected by the editorial board, not by hard-working journalists. I disagreed with them every day I worked. That is probably why I ended up in politics and not in journalism to this very day.
However, when we deal with this industry, we should stop thinking about the folks we meet in the hallway and the conversations we have with the pundits. We should go to our home towns, knock on the door of a radio station at seven o'clock on a Friday night or go to a television show that is being put to air at four o'clock in the afternoon and take a look at the people on the floor of the newsroom: folks who are watching technology change faster than their paycheques are, folks who are watching editing technologies that are replacing editors, folks who are watching camera operators being replaced by reporters with videographers. The industry is shrinking as fast as the platform and the financial base on which they are standing. It is a very scary time in those places.
Those who have spent their entire lives in a newsroom the way I have, having spent close to 25 years largely in one news organization, have seen people come in as fresh-faced interns, become new hires, go on to become managers of the department and then watched the entire thing disappear overnight. They have mortgages to pay, kids' educations to take care of, needs in their families and aging parents to look after. When we watch that decimation roll through newsroom after newsroom, we need to give our heads a shake.
These measures, a charitable foundation, are to prevent the disappearance of some of these family-run businesses, to ensure they survive into the next decade; to ensure the subscriptions to these organizations are tax deductible so people making choices to support them get a bit of an incentive to do a little more a little more often and not run around the firewall; to ensure that when people are hired, they are hiring journalists, building the profession and ensuring young kids in school right now are not being trained for an industry that will not exist. We should think about them and what this bill would do for those people. Then they should get back to work protecting journalism independence by not going into newsrooms across the country and threatening journalists every day. I can tell everyone that I have experienced it from that party more than any other party in this place.