The transparency list of who got what amount of money from Google via the Online Streaming Act has been released.
The Online News Act was always about two things: The government picking who are winners and who are losers, and ensuring that the “losers” will always have a competitive disadvantage no matter what. It’s a status quo legislation designed to upend the fact that time has moved forward.
What should be happening is that those who were refusing to adapt to the fact that the internet is here to stay would ultimately end up getting left behind (outside of very special cases). Those who were forward thinking and having an online friendly business model would ultimately reap the rewards of being innovative. Yet, that ultimately didn’t happen thanks to this law. Instead, the government is deciding that the large corporate media ownership should be getting free money forever no matter what they do. If they decide that the internet is just some fad, then that’s fine because they will always continue to receive paychecks from a system that is propping them up in the first place.
The knock on effect is that it makes it harder for the little guy (such as Freezenet) to compete. If a news organization is able to spend $10,000 on advertising every month because they constantly get free money, then it makes it far harder for someone of a more modest background to be heard here in Canada who would struggle to put together a budget at all for advertising of any kind. So, you can already see the significant market distortions this brings.
None of these criticisms are new, of course. They have been shouted to the rooftops by experts and smaller media companies throughout the entire legislative process. The government’s response? It’s all just “Big Tech” propaganda and we won’t be supporting techno geek losers like you. In fact, at one point, the government took things a step further by going so far as to argue that online news outlets are “not news“, launching a smear campaign against all outlets who operate exclusively online. The comments were made by Liberal Jerkules, Lisa Hepfner who, after receiving considerable blowback for being unusually honest about her opinion, later apologized for her arrogance and stupidity.
Of course, it is that arrogance and stupidity that politically won the day. The legislation ultimately passed, and the mainstream media entered the “find out” phase when Meta did exactly what they had been warning all along and dropped news links on their services. Traffic plunged for mainstream media outlets and bankruptcies quickly followed for smaller outlets. The loss of Meta, for a number of outlets, proved to be the straw that broke the camels back for a number of outlets.
The Canadian government, for their part, had a much bigger problem on their hands. That is the fact that Google was preparing to follow suit and drop news links as well. While the media sector was on the ropes due to Meta pulling out, Google dropping news links would prove substantially more fatal, compounding obscene losses in the media sector. As anyone who works online knows, getting de-listed from Google is a death sentence for your website and Google was preparing to more or less do just that, potentially leading to a huge crisis in the journalism sector in Canada. With their backs against the wall, the Canadian government folded to Google and handed everything they asked for and called it a “deal”.
The mainstream media, in their constant and nonstop lying about the situation, declared victory and argued that the $100 million was a huge win for the media sector. What’s more, they foolishly argued that Meta was likely to follow suit any day now because they would get so wrapped up in jealousy that they would have no choice but to do the same.
To the surprise of absolutely no one paying attention, Meta never came back and news links are, to this day, still gone from Meta services here in Canada. As I’ve pointed out countless times, the loss of Meta represents a $230 million loss per year and Google’s $100 million bailout doesn’t even come close to covering the losses. As some might say, the math is not “mathing”. As a result, the Canadian government, working behind the scenes, issued a massive bailout to try and make up the difference.
This, of course, represented a huge problem for the media. For one, one of the original sales pitches for the terrible Online News Act was that this process wouldn’t cost taxpayers a penny. In reality, it resulted in a massive subsidy program where Canadian taxpayers were very much on the hook for paying for the salaries of journalists. For another, it also resulted in the mainstream media being wholly dependent on governments cutting checks. This meant that the independence of the press is ultimately undermined.
The best case scenario is that there is a perceived conflict of interest where the person writing the news is doing everything they can to appease the government. More likely, it’s not really perception, but rather, the reality of the large media companies. As I’ve said in the past, are you really going to publish an article critical about the very entity writing your paycheck? Probably not. If all of this sounds more theoretical than reality, well, it’s not because barely a month after the Online News Act came into force, a newspaper was threatened by a municipal government with funding getting pulled after they published a politically inconvenient story. To put it bluntly, it’s already happened here in Canada.
More recently, the Canadian Journalism Collective has released a transparency report showing what media organization got what:
he Canadian Journalism Collective-Collectif Canadien de Journalisme (CJC-CCJ), the independent administrator of funds under the Online News Act, is pleased to issue its first public disclosure of fund recipients today, reaffirming its commitment to transparency.
Today’s disclosure includes 108 news businesses that have received funding up until April 23, 2025, totalling $22,193,608.09, as part of CJC-CCJ’s mandate to support a vibrant, innovative and independent news ecosystem for all Canadians.
The list is fairly long and contains a dollar amount for each organization. Here’s some of the examples:
- Canadian Press Enterprises Inc $1,355,445.93
- The Globe and Mail Inc. $2,062,409.41
- Metroland Media Group Ltd. $1,953,750.36
- Postmedia Network Inc $4,268,319.33
- Black Press Group Ltd. $1,371,649.8
- Glacier Media Digital Limited Partnership $397,002.77
- Great West Media LP $309,726.96
- Golden West Broadcasting Ltd $289,838.73
- Buzz Connected Media Inc $250,870.56
- Prairie Newspaper Group Limited Partnership $186,991.9
- Observer Media Group $104,777.47
- Tyee Independent Media Society $128,596.81
- T.Bay Post Inc $106,125.74
- The Narwhal News Society $139,633.88
- Hill Times Publishing $188,218.56
- All Business Online News Group Ltd $303,047.94
- Discourse Community Publishing $107,829.98
- Macleans Inc. $199,814.52
- Castanet Holdings Limited Partnership $155,584.34
- 10320633 Canada inc. – Gravité Média $142,559.56
- Vista Radio Ltd $185,394.58
- FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership (FPLP) $785,873.32
- Les Éditions de L’Acadie Nouvelle (1984) ltée $152,844.24
- 2190015 ONTARIO INC o/a CHCH $232,624.50
- La Presse inc $1,615,942.78
- Nortext Publishing Inc. $108,217.10
- Mishmash Media inc. $125,661.26
- Coopérative nationale de l’information indépendante, coop de solidarité $1,475,782.47
For those wondering where the CBC is in all of this, the page offers this:
As declared in the Online News Act, « (3) No more than 30% of the monetary compensation may be allocated to news businesses — other than the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — that carry on a programming undertaking as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Broadcasting Act, in relation to news outlets that are or are part of a broadcasting undertaking as defined in that subsection, and no more than 7% of the monetary compensation may be allocated to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. » This is why the amount differs between broadcasters and publishers.
This is what picking winners and losers looks like. This is basically a who’s who of the Canadian mainstream media journalism landscape.
To put this into perspective, let’s say Freezenet got $100,000 in all of this – a dollar figure that is literally smaller than all of the above examples. What would I be able to do with that money? Well, I would immediately begin hiring separate journalists. I would also probably hire an editor and another staffer to help maintain the website. What’s more, I would immediately begin investing in advertising and getting Freezenet off the ground and brought to a place that is much more competitive on the world stage. Freezenet would, without a doubt, be an official small business with a bright future ahead of it.
Instead, Freezenet didn’t receive a penny in all of this. I’m having to scrape by with the absolute minimum (and I’d argue the fact that the site has survived all this time is something of a miracle for some). Even worse, in some instances, I’m having to compete against this big media machine on top of it all working with almost nothing. The fact that the quality is so high here in the first place is an amazing accomplishment.
So, the money is likely going to hedge fund billionaires and corporations instead. Is some of that money going to journalism efforts? Likely. Is a majority going to such a cause? Unlikely. If I had a guess, I’d say that money is going to pay off debts that the billionaire class saddled these organizations in the first place. As a result, even if this was all new funding, I don’t see it really improving the media landscape by much. The fact that the media companies got hit with huge losses due to Meta sensibly pulling news links also means that the money is also going to making up the difference… partially. So, really, that money is just getting largely commenced to the deep after all of this.
At this point, I have to resort to begging for scraps of cash through Patreon because the system is severely stacked against the little guy like myself. When larger players are helping themselves to free mounds of cash, it’s hard to really hard to compete against that when you are trying to ask average every day people who already don’t have much money to support this site. I’m eternally grateful for those that do, but I can’t help but note how unfair the system is in the end. After all, the powers that be have put me in the “losers” column and is actively working things to ensure people like me don’t succeed.
(Via @fagstein)
