Canadian Government Refuses to Respond to Journalist Not Subsidized By Government

You can ask questions of the government, but if you’re not paid by the government, good luck getting a response.

Oh boy, I get to talk about the news desert causing link taxes again. One of the criticisms I’ve had (along with other critics) about the Online News Act (and the subsequent bailouts) is that it creates dependency on the part of news outlets. Are you really going to criticize the government when your paycheck depends on them? Probably not – at least in ways that would make the government very uncomfortable. So, as a result, this does affect the ability of journalists to hold government to account.

In 2024, the fear that government wields too much power over journalists became reality when the Quebec government threatened a newspaper with pulling funding because the newspaper in question published a politically inconvenient story. Yeah, so much for the independent press.

Of course, threatening to pull subsidies from a newspaper isn’t the only way that the government can exercise control over the media. Another way that government can suppress journalistic activity is to refuse to speak to them in the first place. This one hits pretty close to home because one of the things I noticed very quickly when starting up Freezenet is that people I thought I could reliably ask questions to suddenly stopped responding to my messages. Over the years, I’ve requested interviews and comments from a huge variety of people and organizations only to never receive a response from all of the above. It literally got to the point where it was pointless to even send out these requests because no one ever responded. Some of that has to do with a competing news site in the past telling others to never respond to my inquiries, but in other cases, it had to do with the fact that I was still building up the site and the site itself was new in the past.

As a result, this made my job as a journalist more difficult, but I found ways to work around this problem anyway. As much as I would love to publish thoughtful interviews with others here, that has remained simply out of reach for me. That is why such a thing doesn’t happen around here. It’s not that I’m somehow “lazy” or anything like that. It’s because people refuse to participate which is a pretty big difference.

Well, as it turns out, another journalist working for a different independent media organization got a taste of what I experienced over the last decade plus. A journalist working for The Orchard attempted to contact the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and request comment on a story. The Canadian governments response? It basically amounts to “we only respond to inquiries from journalists we subsidize”. From The Orchard:

A few hours after my Feb. 27 inquiry, I received a response from IRCC spokesperson Jeffrey MacDonald informing me that the ministry “conducts a detailed review of all media requests received to assess each outlet’s eligibility for media services.”

“As your organization doesn’t qualify for these services, you may wish to pursue other avenues to obtain information from IRCC,” he wrote.

MacDonald linked me to IRCC’s “media accreditation criteria,” which reads:

IRCC media relations services are limited to

• journalists engaged in researching, reporting or editing for recognized online, print and broadcast news services or magazines that regularly publish or broadcast original news
• students enrolled in a full-time journalism program

The requester must work on behalf of an organization that demonstrates a commitment to producing original news content on an ongoing basis and is not engaged in producing content that serves to promote their immigration business interests.

IRCC must be satisfied that journalists requesting media relations services are media professionals who represent bona fide media organizations, which are defined using criteria similar to the qualified Canadian journalism organization [QCJO] designation in the Income Tax Act. [Emphasis added.]

So a Canadian government ministry was using criteria to determine eligibility for subsidies to determine who is or isn’t a legitimate journalist worth engaging with, thereby privileging established media outlets that receive government funding.

IRCC isn’t alone. Global Affairs Canada is also using the QCJO criteria to confer legitimacy on media outlets.

The implications of the government refusing to engage with journalists who aren’t eligible for state funding are disturbing.

After an intervention on my behalf by Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) president Brent Jolly and a story from Stu Benson in the Hill Times, IRCC has backtracked. But I think it’s worth having my first-hand experience, with its twists and turns, in the public record for future reference.

Right-wing media outlets have long warned that “widespread subsidies to private media outlets was a slippery slope that would become a form of media accreditation,” tweeted Harrison Lowman, managing editor of the conservative online outlet The Hub. In this instance, their suspicions were correct.

So, further inquiries from other outlets were made, and just to pour salt in the wound, the response was basically that if the reporter had a problem with the governments refusal to respond, they could reach out:

After I posted IRCC’s response to my request on social media, PressProgress reporter Luke LeBrun reached out to IRCC to inquire about it.

LeBrun told me that by using QCJO criteria to determine accreditation, IRCC is “perverting the original point of the QCJO designation and using it to decide who has the right to ask the government questions.”

“‘Media relations services’ is not a luxury add-on perk reserved for VIPs. In a democracy, the government has a duty to answer questions from journalists and communicate information with the public,” he added.

LeBrun characterized IRCC’s response to his request “baffling.”

“If the requestor has any concerns about our assessment, we invite them to reply directly to us with these concerns, as we note that you are writing from a different outlet,” an unidentified IRCC spokesperson wrote to LeBrun.

This is pure Kafka. No, we won’t respond to your inquiries, but if you have any inquiries about why we won’t respond to your inquiries, feel free to reach out!

So I did, noting that I’ve never had a media request from government denied because I don’t meet the QCJO criteria. I asked how long this policy has been in place and whether it applies across the federal government.

The response didn’t answer either question, but was nonetheless revealing:

Based on our assessment, while The Orchard does produce news content, its business model also includes Substack under the same brand, which produces subscription based content. These additional activities are a main consideration in determining that it does not fully meet IRCC’s media accreditation criteria.

So Substack is verboten, because it “produces subscription based content,” which could be said of any newspaper.

Yeah, welcome to the world of bureaucratic bullshit I’ve dealt with for years. The excuse for not responding to inquiries is because the news organization has subscriptions. So that would probably explain why the government doesn’t speak to news organizations like the CBC, the Globe and Mail, Reuters– hey wait a minute.

The reality is that all of this is by design. The government wants a nice comfortable China style circle of “news” organizations that are more interested in acting as political megaphones more than anything else. If the news organization starts asking uncomfortable questions, then either the journalist in question faces demands to be fired or the news organization in question suddenly starts facing threats of having their government approved “accreditation” revoked. I mean, look no further than the 2022 Lisa Hepfner scandal where she declared all news organizations that operate online are “opinion only” and not worthy of things like subsidies. While Hepfner ultimately apologized, the scandal laid bare the fact that the government has long been interested in keeping independent journalism at bay while maintaining a close circle of friendly outlets that are more interested in maintaining a cozy relationship and simply acting as a political megaphone as opposed to organizations that hold government to account.

The fears of draconian levels of control thanks to things like the Online News Act and taxpayer funded bailout money is by no means idle worry or theory. This is the reality Canada lives under today. The people who raise the alarm about this are quickly shuffled off to corners of the web where they can’t be heard and the mainstream media, who have every reason to maintain this situation since they are benefiting significantly from not having to deal with competition among other things, have no reason to even mention that this is even a thing. As a result, actual journalism in Canada is under significant strain and the general population at large will continue to suffer the consequences.

(Via @LukeLebrun)

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.