Ethnic media has a history in Canada spanning more than four decades. In 1978, the Canadian Ethnic Journalists and Writers Club was founded, which evolved to later become the Canadian Ethnic Media Association. In the last two decades, there has been a wider effort to expand Canadian media beyond the traditional English and French mainstream (Taylor, 2008).
There is a broad range of Indigenous media, including independent print news (Baker, 2016). The Native Broadcasting Policy (CRTC, 1990) emphasises the importance of Indigenous ownership and the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures. In 2019, the CRTC announced a review of this policy in an effort to ensure that it reflects the current needs of Indigenous communities.
According to the CRTC, there are over 50 licensed – and hundreds of licence-exempted – Indigenous radio stations across Canada (CRTC, 2019c). The APTN is the first national Indigenous television network in the world, run by Indigenous people and designed to reflect their communities in many of their languages. APTN must be carried by all television service providers.
Canada licenses a national multilingual, multi-ethnic service called Omni Television. In 2019, the CRTC issued a rare must-carry order that determined Omni must be offered by all licensed television distributers (CRTC, 2019a). This means that all Canadians with access to cable or satellite distribution (which is all Canadians) have the ability to acquire Omni Television if desired.
The country also has a range of alternative media in print. In December 2015, MIREMS, a firm that tracks trends in ethnic media, estimated that at least 460 print or web-based ethnic news organisations and 160 broadcast outlets have a total audience reach of 6.7 million in Canada. For many Canadians, ethnic publications are a primary source of news. In 2008, Ethnique Media found that 55 per cent of those with South Asian and Chinese heritage read English newspapers, versus 75 per cent for ethnic publications (Public Policy Forum, 2017). Diversity Votes, a website dedicated to the study of ethnic news in Canada, cites over 800 ethnics news outlets across the country (Diversity Votes, 2019). Their 2019 study on ethnic media and the 2019 election demonstrates political divisions between various communities, with a slight edge for liberals – in other words, a view similar to the wider Canadian public.
Outside the mainstream political spectrum, far-right-wing news sites such as The Rebel have a small following. During the 2019 election, there was debate regarding whether such populist media organisations were, in fact, journalism (Levant, 2019).
