Why do we need to diversify Canadian media?
Right now, a handful of corporations, algorithms, and foreign interests control our news, narrowing what we see. It’s like trying to understand the world through a tiny keyhole—distorted, limited, and designed to keep us in our own reality.
A strong, diverse media landscape is the backbone of democracy. Without it, we’re stuck in echo chambers, force-fed whatever clickbait is most profitable to publish. Canadians deserve better—real variety in news, not just a few voices deciding what matters.
How did we get here?
It’s no wonder trust in the media is crumbling—68% of Canadians have little to no faith in the news they consume, while only 10% say they fully trust it.7 How did it get this bad? A mix of bad ingredients:
- Local news outlets disappearing. A profit-hungry ad model has crushed independent journalism.8,9 Since 2008, over 500 local news outlets have shut down, leaving 351 communities across Canada without local reporting.10 Entire regions have become "news deserts", where critical stories affecting people’s lives go untold.11
- Corporate consolidation. Big corporations like Postmedia, which owns over 100 Canadian newspapers, control most of the narrative. Meanwhile, their deep ties to U.S. hedge funds raises big questions about foreign influence over our news.12 As Canada’s traditional alliances are faltering, this consolidation can lead to opinions and editorial decisions that may not align with Canadian values and interests.
- Algorithm-driven platforms. Around 80% of Canadians get their news online,13,14,15 but social media feeds us what keeps us scrolling, not what keeps us informed. Over time, misinformation, polarization, and foreign narratives have quietly replaced reporting with diverse perspectives, subtly reshaping public opinion and ratcheting up the temperature of our politics.
What can we do?
Right now, corporate consolidation and click-driven platforms are suffocating independent, homegrown journalism. We need policies that uplift local voices and keep our media free from corporate and foreign control.16 Because when media diversity thrives, so does democracy.
There’s a path to doing just that. We need to make journalism commercially viable again by making the majority of media subscriptions tax-deductible—75%, not the measly 15% currently on offer. We should help Canadians support a broad range of media by giving us each a tax credit to empower people to fund journalism and ensure a diversity of voices in our media.
And we need to fix the CBC. Our public broadcaster is more focused on ad dollars and executive bonuses than making sure every Canadian community has a local reporter. But we can fix it, by taking the CBC out of the ad market, focusing it on local reporting; funding its reporting properly, like every other Commonwealth democracy does; and Creative Commons licensing ALL its journalism, so we can all share and reuse the content WE paid for!
We need news that informs, not divides. Tell Canada’s leaders to take action and fix Canadian media NOW!