Journalists should not be paid by the government

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Trust in journalism is crumbling while government funding of the media ramps up.

The Trudeau government is currently in a spat with tech giants Google and Facebook which could cost taxpayers big money.

Bill C-18 is forcing internet companies to pay media corporations when links to news stories are posted. In retaliation, the companies are vowing to block news links from their services.

The brass from media companies say if their news links are banned, they will lose out on millions of dollars.

What happens if Big Tech refuses to pay?

This Trudeau government is eager to have a place in the newsrooms of the nation.

“We have to make sure that newsrooms are open, that (journalists) are able to do their job and (they) have the resources necessary,” Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez told reporters.

In government speak “resources” means taxpayers’ money.

It’s time to set out a fundamental truth: having the government sign the paycheques of journalists who are supposed to impartially cover that very same government is a massive conflict of interest.

Columnist Andrew Coyne penned it well back in 2019 when the so-called media bailout was first being hatched:

“Taking money from the people we cover will place us in a permanent and inescapable conflict of interest; that it will produce newspapers concerned less with appealing to readers than to grantsmen.”

Fast forward four years and those media bailout deals are coming up for renewal, with the funding set to run out at the end of the fiscal year.

According to the heritage minister wielding the taxpayer piggybank, it sounds like more government-funded media is on the way.

That’s the last thing we need.

The CBC already gets more than $1.2 billion in taxpayers’ money every year and the feds budgeted $595 million for the media bailout over the past four years.

This means taxpayers have poured about $5.3 billion into the CBC and private-sector newsrooms over the last four years.

That kind of money would buy a year’s worth of groceries for about 350,000 families. It could cover the annual income tax bill of more than 380,000 people – about the population of London, Ontario. It could buy about 7,400 homes.

This government-funded media scheme isn’t just a waste of money, and it’s not just a conflict of interest – it also isn’t supported by Canadians.

More than 59 per cent of Canadians surveyed said the government should not fund newsrooms “because it compromises journalistic independence.”

That “journalistic independence” is an endangered species.

A Trudeau government committee is deciding what a journalist is, what a qualified newsroom is and the government is paying journalists.

The term “free press” doesn’t mean newspapers were free to take off a newsstand. It means the press is free from government influence and censorship.

Journalists should not be paid by the government. Newsrooms should rely on money from advertising, subscriptions and free-will donations from people who support them.

Under Trudeau’s bailout program newsroom employees get 25 per cent of their salaries covered by the government, up to a maximum of $13,750 per person.

Imagine being a journalist and knowing a big chunk of your paycheque is covered by the same government you are covering.

That’s like referees saying they can call the game fairly while also making bets.

Even the perception of corruption or bias erodes trust and a majority of Canadians have lost trust in journalists.

According to a longstanding survey that gauges trust, 61 per cent of Canadians think “journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

Most Canadians now think journalists are trying to mislead them on purpose.

For journalists who believe their craft is a calling and that speaking truth to power is a nearly sacred task, that distrust is very tough to hear.

But we must listen. We can’t afford not to.

Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former longtime member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersFederation #KrisSims #MediaBailout

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industry, child care, supermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute

Business

‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.