In February 2024, after Bell Media announced 4,800 job cuts across Canada, Premier David Eby spoke passionately about the need for people to get “accurate, impartial, reliable information in an age of disinformation and social media craziness.”

As a longtime news publisher, I know that 81% of Canadians turn to newspaper content each week for that accurate, impartial, and reliable information. So, we don’t have an audience problem. What we have is an advertising problem.

Since the founding of the Halifax Gazette in 1752 — government advertising had always been an important source of revenue for news businesses. It allowed us to invest in journalists who produce fact-based, fact-checked reporting that Canadians rely upon.

In more recent years, we’ve seen those government dollars disappear. By way of example, the federal government reports that during fiscal year 2022 to 2023, it spent more than $86 million on advertising. Of that, less than $1 million went to all print publications in the country combined.

So, where did those millions go? The answer is largely to American tech giants like Facebook, Instagram and Google, among others.

Canadians are rightly concerned about protecting our economy........

© BIV