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

Published

11 months ago

5 minute read

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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Health

Selective reporting on measles outbreaks is a globalist smear campaign against Trump administration.

Published on April 4, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Robert Malone M.D.

Ontario has a larger outbreak than Texas. European cases dwarf the Texas outbreak. But the World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States.

In the currently ongoing outbreak, there have been about 572 measles cases in Ontario, Canada. This is a significantly larger outbreak than the currently hyped one in Texas, which has about 422 cases. The mainstream media has almost completely ignored the Ontario outbreak – their reporting has only focused on the Texas outbreak.

Ontario’s top public health official, Dr. Kieran Moore, does not recommend mandatory vaccination and says the standard public health measures to limit the spread are working. This is a very reasonable response, yet when Sec. Kennedy says something similar; he is viciously attacked.

It is evident by the mainstream media response to the Ontario outbreak versus the Texas outbreak that this is yet another example of the liberal media/pharma machine harassing Kennedy and President Trump.

However, this reporting has an even more sinister aspect – as the media appears to have taken their lead from the World Health Organization.

The World Health Organization has launched a travel advisory for the United States. See the screenshots below (the first screenshot is from an AI summarizer at BRAVE and the second one is from the WHO website):

But what about Canada’s outbreak? Why isn’t Canada mentioned in the travel advisory? Was it an oversight? Did the WHO release a travel advisory just for Canada?

In fact, the AI summarizer at BRAVE is clear that the WHO doesn’t put out travel advisories for individual countries, like Canada… The new normal is that the WHO puts out special advisories only for the United States <insert sarcasm>.

And in fact, a search on the WHO website yields not a single mention of the measles outbreak in Canada.

In fact, the WHO places the 422 measles cases in the United States on par with the earthquake in Myanmar, which may have killed up to 10,000 people, all told.

But somehow the 572 cases of measles in Canada don’t deserve a mention.

But wait – the story gets even more bizarre.

The European Region, which includes central Asia, continues to have a significantly high number of measles cases.

The WHO European Region has a population of approximately 745 million people, and had about 127,350 measles cases last year, or 1 in 5,850 people.

Yet – crickets from mainstream media on this factoid.

Why the outcry over 422 measles in Texas?

Here are some ideas:

  • To reduce support for RFK Jr., Trump, and MAHA by the American people.
  • To scare parents into vaccinating.
  • To increase the money going to public health for vaccine stockpiling.
  • To support the liberal left in their obsessive hatred of anything MAHA.
  • Because the WHO put out a travel advisory.

In the meantime, the WHO has announced that, despite budgetary cuts, they have a $2.5 billion gap for 2025-2027. WHO Director General Tedros correctly blamed Trump for the deficit. However, what Tedros gets wrong is that this deficit is a well-deserved consequence of years of corruption at the WHO leading to this outcome.

This is how it is done, folks.

This is called retaliation by the World Health Organization against the Trump administration.

Another wrap-up smear in action. The deep state and the globalists are pulling out all the stops to attack Trump and Kennedy via “trumped-up” WHO travel advisories and emergency reports that are then reported on breathlessly and uncritically by mainstream media. The propaganda machine continues unabated.

Reprinted with permission from Robert Malone.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter

Published on March 30, 2025

By

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By Cam Wakefield

“It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,”

“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.
This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.
What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.
The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?
A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike.
Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.
Parents Allen and Levine were questioned by police over their WhatsApp messages.
For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.
So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.
But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.
Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.
“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”
Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.
Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”
Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”
One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.
Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?
What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”
Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.
After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.
This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.
Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?
It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.

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