There are no legal provisions in Canada protecting the job security of journalists. Unionised journalists have rights when they are laid off. Casuals or temps comprise about one-quarter of CBC’s unionised workforce who work in English-speaking Canada and Radio-Canada employees outside of Quebec and Moncton, New Brunswick. Many of these public broadcasting workers complain that they have little agency or security, leading to poor morale (Houpt, 2019). CBC/Radio-Canada’s most recent collective agreement with the Canadian Media Guild included the provision to convert 41 employees into permanent workers at the public broadcaster.
Many newsrooms have downsized. In 2019, for instance, the Torstar publishing company shut down dozens of daily and community newspapers across the country, cutting 70 jobs. In a time of job slashing in the news industry, Statistics Canada census data from 2016 shows that the number of journalists working in Canada declined by 7 per cent since 2001 (see Figure 9). When asked to reflect on the state of job security in Canadian journalism, a well-known scholar in the field interviewed for this study remarked “everyone’s kind of trying to stay alive and keep their jobs”.
Figure 9. Journalists in Canada (J-Source, May 4, 2018).
A close look at statistics reveals that the number of journalists working in Canada has, in fact, risen slightly in absolute terms since 1987 (Wilkinson & Winseck, 2019). But, as a percentage of the total Canadian working population, journalists fall from .08 per cent in 1987 to .06 per cent in 2017. More journalists are working as freelancers or in permanent positions for news organisations. Wilkinson and Winseck (2019) contend that while there have indeed been substantial layoffs at legacy media organisations, a lot of Canadian journalists are working at new digital news services or as social media managers.
