According to a new report by the CCPA, almost 2.5 million Canadians live in a postal code with one or no local news outlet, twice the proportion in 2008. Photo by Jon S/Flickr.

It may take decades to dig ourselves out from under the mountain of misinformation, disinformation and plain old BS offered up by Canada’s newspaper industry and its enablers in pursuit of the hundreds of millions in federal bailout money, tax credits and forced subsidies it has pocketed in the past few years. If we can ever spot the truth through so much propaganda, that is. The federal government’s stated rationale for introducing the Online News Act in 2022, which aimed to force Google and Meta to pay Canadian newspapers hundreds of millions a year for linking to their news stories, included that “more than 450 news outlets have closed since 2008.” The number came from highly-questionable data provided by the Local News Research Project (LNRP) at Toronto Metropolitan University, and like Pinocchio’s nose it just keeps growing and growing. By last fall, the number had grown to 525 local news outlets closed in 347 communities across Canada since 2008, according to a LNRP report tabled in the Senate.

These figures would be alarming if accurate, as Canada’s newspaper industry in 2011 included just over 1,000 community newspapers and about 100 dailies. What is truly alarming is how LNRP data diverge so markedly from the annual inventory taken until recently by industry association News Media Canada. The LNRP first came to notice in 2017, when a think tank report cited its data and claimed that 225 weekly and 27 daily newspapers had been lost to closure or merger in more than 210 federal ridings since 2010. The Public Policy Forum’s report The Shattered Mirror was influential in the $595 million news media bailout announced the following year. A federal Department of Heritage report published later in 2017, however, plotted NMC data and instead concluded that the number of community newspapers had “remained steady.” The number of dailies has undeniably dropped sharply, mostly because about two dozen free commuter tabloids have closed for lack of advertising, and partly because some dailies have dropped a publication day, usually Mondays. A spate of closures........

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