The La Presse headquarters on Saint-Jacques Street in Montréal. Photo by Chicoutimi/Wikimedia Commons.

The contrast could not have been starker between opposing sides of an important media debate this past week. Just as House of Commons committees in Ottawa were being double-teamed by anti-subsidies witnesses testifying to the perils of public funding for news media, a new international study has found subsidies to be an important determinant of news quality. The right-wing double-whammy first saw Sylvain Charlebois, also known as The Food Professor, testify last week before the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs as part of its hearings into “civic resilience” in Canada. Then Peter Menzies, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, which is right-wing think tank, testified the same day before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage as part of its inquiry into the state of the journalism and media in Canada.

Charlebois complained that Montréal newspaper La Presse dropped his long-running column recently after he criticized media subsidies on social media. He announced his departure on X a few weeks ago, but he took the opportunity to amplify it during his scheduled testimony before MPs on Thursday. “I had publicly expressed as a citizen on social media about how public funding for private sector media could potentially influence editorial decisions,” he told them. “The reason they used to dismiss me was troubling.” La Presse said in a statement that it could not allow a contributor to undermine public trust in the media, and that Charlebois had “publicly attacked the integrity, independence and rigour of journalists.”

Charlebois’ own integrity has been questioned over the years, raising the possibility that he is using his cancellation by La Presse to score political points. Calgary-based blog The Orchard noted in 2023 that Charlebois defended Loblaws without disclosing that he once received funding from its owning Weston family and that he has regularly defended supermarkets from charges of profiteering. “Charlebois can always be relied on to provide PR for Canada’s largest grocers,” quipped journalist Jeremy Appel. A 2024 investigation by the National Observer found that while Charlebois claimed he has no political agenda, observers noted how often his criticism of the since-repealed carbon tax bolstered Conservative talking points. “He has lent great credibility to the anti-tax movement to include food pricing,” said Katrina Miller, executive........

© Canadian Dimension