Canadian Heritage committee  I think one of the challenges we see is on the attractiveness of the profession going into it. If you talk to the J-schools around the country, it's not one of the high priorities for really high-achieving students, and the reality is that it is hard to break in. What was interesting, though, is that, as you know, we are one of the administrators of the local journalism initiative program, and we had a meeting recently with the other administrators, where one of the common themes was the difficulty of trying to find journalists in rural and remote areas to fill those positions under the local journalism initiative.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, it could. One of the things again that the Australian model provides and one of the things that we're looking for in any model is the ability to negotiate collectively. Currently, as an industry, we're not allowed to negotiate because of competition rules. We can't negotiate fees with the digital players.

Canadian Heritage committee  The thing is, in digital media, we're very interested in this, yet one thing we have to be clear about is that, for many of our members, digital is not relevant. They are essentially print publications and the way you're going to communicate with those communities is through print publications.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. Obviously, while Australia is a country of similar media landscape and similar political landscape to Canada, any model would have to be adjusted to local context. What we like about the Australian model is its simplicity. We don't want to get into a situation where government is taxing and allocating stuff to media, because we've heard from a number of people, particularly a number of deputies, that that's not a way we'd like to go.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think it's difficult. As I said earlier, it costs a lot of money to produce quality news. We're finding that nobody wants to put an ad in a newspaper on Monday; traditionally it has been the lowest readership day. The economics of distribution on Monday simply doesn't work. The alternative and the challenge that newspapers face is, if they aren't working, where do they cut?

Canadian Heritage committee  No. We found that...different provinces have different.... Ontario and Quebec really stepped up in terms of print advertising and consistent, effective campaigns. I would say that, certainly in Ontario and Quebec, the government put...daily in the dailies and weekly in the weeklies and very much with an emphasis on print.

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't have a direct number on it. I think it was in the neighbourhood of $2 million to $3 million. For most newspapers, it was one or two ads in the course of the campaign.

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't think it was enough, obviously. Was it enough to communicate effectively? I'm not sure. When we look at what a number of the provinces did, here in Ontario and Quebec, they had formal campaigns when every day or every week they ran ads in the newspapers to provide information to readers about the pandemic.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think in this campaign they did run ads across the country. One of the things we always hear is that community newspapers are difficult to buy and it's complicated and people don't like doing it, but I think the government pays a lot of money to agencies to do that, and they should do it.

Canadian Heritage committee  We're filling it with information. I think that's the issue. We had been operating without the ad revenue. During the campaign one of the things we tried to do was work on a system of a programmatic ad network to compete with Google and Facebook. We've set that up, we're running it and we're hoping the federal government will work with us on that because it's a way of buying equivalent numbers or views across Canada in the program advertising market using Canadian sites.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you for inviting me to speak today. My name is John Hinds, and I'm the CEO of News Media Canada. We are the voice of Canada's news media industry. We represent over 600 newspapers and news media publications in all provinces and territories. Our membership includes daily and weekly community newspapers and news sites, and ranges from the largest urban daily to small community newspapers in rural and remote regions.

Industry committee  That's interesting. I think the reality of the marketplace is that there is that balance. People are out there marketing their brand. Whether they're a newspaper...they put stuff out on social media to draw people in. That's how they get subscribers and everything else. There's always that balance.

Industry committee  Well said.

Industry committee  As I said before, I think there are some models on that. I think the publisher's right of the EU would be the most effective, in the sense that it would give you complete control to negotiate with the other groups if you want. A hot news exemption would be the same thing. It would protect your content from fair dealing right off the bat for a period of time.

Industry committee  We're seeing I think some hopeful developments in the EU. We've seen both Germany and Spain, and to a lesser extent Italy, come forward with various protections. Now it's moving to an EU level. There's the new EU directive where they're discussing the publisher's right. It's interesting, because we've seen there that as soon as that discussion enters the public realm, as a result there's a much more collaborative approach by some of the aggregators.