The limited ownership in Canadian national media remains a stubborn and persistent problem. Newspapers in particular have proven to be a small club where very few new voices are able to compete. Successive federal studies in 1970 (the Davey Commission) and 1981 (the Kent Commission) raised concerns about media concentration in Canada and the implications it might have on the availability of differing views, and by extension, democracy (Montgomery, 2019).
Despite the launch of the English-language The National Post in 1998, there remain limited national news outlets. In 2020, The Post is heavily indebted and largely controlled by New York–based hedge funds. Many arguments similar to the Davey and Kent Commissions have been resurrected in more recent studies:
Canada has one of the highest rates of media concentration in the world, and the Committee has noted that no federal government body has the mandate to intervene when necessary to ensure a healthy and competitive media industry. Collapsing media revenues have become a justification invoked by media conglomerates to explain the need for merging, acquiring, selling and shutting down media outlets, shutting down newsrooms, moving corporate headquarters, layoffs by the tens of thousands, and to concentrate a growing proportion of media in the hands of a small group of businesses that are less and less diverse.
(Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, June 2017)
However, another key 2017 study questioned the continued relevance of the concentration of ownership concern in the time of ubiquitous digital content:
The odd blend of content fragmentation, revenue consolidation and indifference to truth has overtaken simple concentration of ownership as the main threat to holding public officials to account and reflecting Canadian society back to its citizens.
(Public Policy Forum, 2017)
According to the authors of this report, all Canadians now have the ability to express viewpoints and be exposed to a range of ideas online – therefore, concentration is not the paramount issue; the problem now rests with the ability to provide professional, reliable journalism as the established economic model is collapsing. The digital world offers a wide range of information from a broad scope of perspectives, so the concerns of previous decades have been usurped by new questions regarding quality of reporting and shared information among citizens.
