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Trudeau’s Online News Act has crushed hundreds of local Canadian news outlets: study

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From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

Trudeau’s Online News Act, framed as a way to support local media, has hurt small media outlets while giving massive payouts to legacy media, a study has found.

According to a new study, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Online News Act has successfully crushed local media outlets while mainstream media has remained relatively unaffected.  

According to an April study from the Media Ecosystem Observatory, Trudeau’s Online News Act, also known as Bill C-18, has caused a 84 percent drop in engagement for local Canadian outlets, as Big Tech company Meta – the parent company of Facebook and Instagram – has refused to publish links to Canadian news outlets on their platforms.  

“We lost 70 per cent of our audience when that happened,” Iain Burns, the managing editor of Now Media Group, which manages news posts for outlets serving smaller communities, revealed. He further explained that he experienced a 50 percent loss in revenue following the move. 

“We’re not the only ones. Many, many outlets are in this situation,” Burns added.

The Online News Act, passed by the Senate in June 2023, mandates that Big Tech companies pay to publish Canadian content on their platforms. While the legislation promised to support local media, it has seemingly accomplished the opposite.  

While Meta has blocked all news on its platforms, devastating small publishers, Google agreed to pay Canadian legacy media outlets $100 million to publish their content online. 

The study, a collaboration between the University of Toronto and McGill University, examined the 987 Facebook pages of Canadian news outlets, 183 personal pages of politicians, commentators and advocacy groups, and 589 political and local community groups.  

“The ban undoubtedly had a major impact on Canadian news,” the study found.  

“Local news outlets have been particularly affected by the ban: while large, national news outlets were less reliant on Facebook for visibility and able to recoup some of their Facebook engagement regardless, hundreds of local news outlets have left the platform entirely, effectively gutting the visibility of local news content,” it explained.   

However, LifeSiteNews has been relatively unaffected by the ban as viewership on its official Facebook page has remained relatively the same, similar to its Instagram account since most views already came from the United States.  

Similarly unaffected was Meta: “We find little evidence that Facebook usage has been impacted by the ban.”  

“After the ban took effect, the collapse of Canadian news content production and engagement on Facebook did not appear to substantially affect users themselves,” the study said.  

While local media outlets’ viewership has declined thanks to Trudeau’s new legislation, larger media outlets have thrived due to increased payouts from the Trudeau government.  

Legacy media journalists are projected to have roughly half of their salaries paid by the Liberal government after the $100 million Google agreement and the subsidies outlined in the Fall Economic Statement.  

Mainstream Canadian media had already received massive federal payouts, but they have nearly doubled after Trudeau announced increased subsidies for legacy media outlets ahead of the 2025 election. The subsidies are expected to cost taxpayers $129 million over the next five years.   

However, just as government payouts increase, Canadians’ trust in mainstream media has decreased. Recent polling found that only one-third of Canadians consider mainstream media trustworthy and balanced.   

Similarly, a recent study by Canada’s Public Health Agency revealed that less than a third of Canadians displayed “high trust” in the federal government, with “large media organizations” as well as celebrities getting even lower scores.  

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2025 Federal Election

No Matter The Winner – My Canada Is Gone

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Trish Wood is Critical

Trish Wood

This clip of Andrew Coyne represents journalistic malpractice but represents what many of our “elites” are thinking. They hate ordinary Canadians and populism. They have no clue what many voters are actually upset about.

I was awake part of the night thinking about how awful this election campaign is. And not just because I am terrified that Mark Carney will win. No — it feels like we’ve crossed a threshold and there is no turning back. Ten years of Trudeau’s division, his utilizing of the culture and woke wars to make us hate each other. Ten years of Conservatives either firing back and keeping the war going or pretending to go along to maintain popularity with a propagandized population. This is the definition of a sick society. As I said, I will vote Conservative but I’m not going to exhale after I do it.

There are virtually no sincere appeals to reuniting the country after the COVID-19 debacle, Freedom Convoy, or any of the other politicized events that encircle our tribes. I’ve told you many stories about this reality.

Dinner parties have become almost impossible to navigate with important topics off-limits. What’s left? Movies, streaming series and sports. In between bursts of conversation there are heavy silences between people who love each other but reside in different conversational realities. This is the fault of pols and media. Full stop.

This clip of Andrew Coyne represents journalistic malpractice but represents what many of our “elites” are thinking. They hate ordinary Canadians and populism. They have no clue what many voters are actually upset about. Carney himself said he was returning to Canada to “end populism.”

I just want my country back. Let me tell you a story.

In 1989, I was dispatched to Kuujjuaq, a tiny, freezing and somewhat desolate town in Northern Quebec. Scientists had just published a shocking study showing that Inuit mothers were testing positive for PCBs in their breast milk. How could this be in such a remote, non-industrialized village?

The Inuit mothers had been chosen as a pristine control group to study against PCB presence in mothers residing in Southern Quebec, near industry. The findings were completely unexpected and I was sent to report on them by the great James Cullingham, my boss at As It Happens.

I arrived at the tiny airport with my recording gear and was welcomed by the locals who set me up at a lodge. We couldn’t have been more different but I was treated kindly as someone who’d come from the CBC to help publicize their plight.

How did they become contaminated, way up there? It turns out PCBs travel in the blubber of animals that swim through polluted waters. Seal fat, which was a mainstay of the local diet is riddled with PCB’s dumped into the St. Lawrence hundreds of miles away.

Here is where it gets interesting — a day I will never forget. The local chiefs were meeting to choose a brand new word in Inuktitut to describe what they were dealing with. It seems the concept of PCB contamination was so foreign, they had to add to their lexicon to even discuss it and I was invited to attend.

I felt like an intruder from the rapacious south witnessing a tragedy that we’d inflicted on these sturdy, welcoming people. But they were gracious and open as they struggled to find a solution.

I left feeling grateful to be Canadian; to work at CBC and to have experienced the lives of others who shared this once-great land. I am nostalgic for a Canada, full of good will, even in times of tragedy — that no longer exists.

Meanwhile — the Liberal campaign and its supporters are reduced to looking for MAGA “dog whistles” at Poilievre events while at the same time being outed for “finding” MAGA buttons at a Conservative gathering in Ottawa.

Two Liberal Party staffers attended last week’s Canada Strong and Free Networking (CSFN) Conference where they planted buttons that used Trump-style language and highlighted division within the Conservative Party.

The conference, often referred to by its former name, the Manning Conference, is an opportunity for conservative-leaning Canadians to talk about policy proposals and network. It was held at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa.

We aren’t talking about Big Things or Inspiring Things. Or what we share as a people. We have been deceived. Pitted against each other and fleeced of our natural affinity for other Canadians, no matter how different. Canadian voters are victims of a home invasion robbery — perpetrated by legacy media and our gutless political class who play along for what some of them wrongly believe are high-minded reasons.

In the meantime, Mark Carney is clearly fixing to ban X and other websites that threaten his temple of deceit. For this reason alone, he must not win. But we are all losers regardless of the outcome.

This is perhaps the scariest clip of the campaign. They have failed at everything. The economy, COVID-19, retaining a semblance of democracy….but they have successfully brought us to the brink of collapse and separation. And their solution is to not fix it, but prevent us from talking about it.

Stay critical.

Thanks #truthovertribe

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2025 Federal Election

Mark Carney Vows Internet Speech Crackdown if Elected

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Mark Carney dodges Epstein jabs in Hamilton while reviving failed Liberal plans for speech control via Bill C-36 and Bill C-63.

It was supposed to be a routine campaign pit stop, the kind of low-stakes political affair where candidates smile like used car salesmen and dish out platitudes thicker than Ontario maple syrup. Instead, Mark Carney found himself dodging verbal bricks in a Hamilton hall, facing hecklers who lobbed Jeffrey Epstein references like Molotovs. No rebuttal, no denial. Just a pivot worthy of an Olympic gymnast, straight to the perils of digital discourse.
“There are many serious issues that we’re dealing with,” he said, ignoring the criticism that had just lobbed his way. “One of them is the sea of misogyny, antisemitism, hatred, and conspiracy theories — this sort of pollution online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States.”
Ah yes, the dreaded digital tide. Forget inflation or the fact that owning a home now requires a GoFundMe. According to Carney, the real catastrophe is memes from Buffalo.
The Ghost of Bills Past
Carney’s new plan to battle the internet; whatever it may be, because details are apparently for peasants, would revive a long-dead Liberal Party obsession: regulating online speech in a country that still pretends to value free expression.
It’s an effort so cursed, it’s been killed more times than Jason Voorhees. First, there was Bill C-36, which flopped in 2021. Then came its undead cousin, Bill C-63, awkwardly titled the Online Harms Act, which proposed giving the Canadian Human Rights Commission the power to act as digital inquisitors, sniffing out content that “foments detestation or vilification.”
Naturally, it died too, not from public support, but because Parliament decided it had better things to do, like not passing it in time.
But as every horror franchise teaches us, the villain never stays away for long. Carney’s speech didn’t include specifics, which is usually code for “we’ll make it up later,” but the intent is clear: the Liberals are once again oiling up the guillotine of speech regulation, ready to let it fall on anything remotely edgy, impolite, or, God forbid, unpopular.
“Won’t Someone Think of the Children?”
“The more serious thing is when it affects how people behave — when Canadians are threatened going to their community centers or their places of worship or their school or, God forbid, when it affects our children,” Carney warned, pulling the emergency brake on the national sympathy train. It’s the same tired tactic every aspiring control freak uses, wrap the pitch in the soft fuzz of public safety and pray nobody notices the jackboot behind the curtain.
Nothing stirs the legislative loins like invoking the children. But vague terror about online contagion infecting impressionable minds has become the go-to excuse for internet crackdowns across the Western world. Canada’s Liberals are no different. They just dress it up and pretend it’s for your own good.
“Free Speech Is Important, But…”
Former Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, doing her best impression of a benevolent censor, also piped up earlier this year with a classic verbal pretzel: “We need to make sure [freedom of expression] exists and that it’s protected. Yet the same freedom of expression is currently being exploited and undermined.”
Protecting free speech by regulating it is the sort of logic that keeps satire writers out of work.
St-Onge’s lament about algorithms monetizing debate sounds suspiciously like a pitch from someone who can’t get a word in on X. It’s the familiar cry of technocrats and bureaucrats who can’t fathom a world where regular people might say things that aren’t government-approved. “Respect is lacking in public discourse,” she whined on February 20. She’s right. People are tired of pretending to respect politicians who think governing a country means babysitting the internet.
Powerful forces want to silence independent voices online
Governments and corporations are working hand in hand to control what you can say, what you can read; and soon, who you are allowed to be.
New laws promise to “protect” you; but instead criminalize dissent.
Platforms deplatform, demonetize, and disappear accounts that step out of line.
AI-driven surveillance tracks everything you do, feeding a system built to monitor, profile, and ultimately control.
Now, they’re pushing for centralized digital IDs; a tool that could link your identity to everything you say and do online. No anonymity. No privacy. No escape.
This isn’t about safety, it’s about power.
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