As the second-largest country on the planet – 41 times larger than the UK – and a population density of four persons per square kilometre, big gaps and regional disparities, not surprisingly, exist in Canada. While there is media abundance in Canada’s urban areas, large parts of rural Canada, especially its vast north, are underserved by news media and broadband, mobile, and telephone coverage. Despite the challenges, CBC/Radio-Canada, APTN, and other Indigenous news media do offer services in several Indigenous languages in Canada’s arctic. There is also clear division between rural versus urban broadband speed. The federal government committed in 2019 to connect all Canadians, including many remote Indigenous communities, to reliable high-speed Internet by 2030 (Jordan, 2019). The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the digital divide, prompting the federal government to accelerate its commitment to speed up broadband in rural and remote communities.
Canada’s news media comprises a mixture of both public broadcasting (radio, television, and digital) and commercial radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and digital services. See Table 1 for details about household access to each media type.
[supsystic-tables id=16]
More than 700 commercial radio stations (122 AM and 599 FM) are spread across the country. The vast majority (599) are English, while 97 broadcast in French, and 25 in a third language (CRTC, 2019b: 134). CBC/Radio-Canada has 66 radio stations across Canada, and their radio services are available, free-over-the-air, in every region in both official languages as well as online.
In the switch to digital, free-to-air television over the last decade, some communities (smaller cities and rural areas) have been left without service, including access to the public broadcaster. Conventional television transmitters remain only in mostly urban markets (CRTC, 2018; Taylor, 2013). Nearly three-quarters of Canadians subscribe to a television service (cable, satellite, or Internet). There has been a more than 10 per cent drop in television distribution since 2013, the first year Canadian television distribution had ever experienced a decline in customers. There are 94 private and 27 CBC/Radio-Canada conventional television stations across Canada (CRTC, 2019b: 178). Five Canadian networks – CTV, Global, CBC/Radio-Canada, Téléviseurs associés [associated telecasters], and CityTV – provide national and local services across the country.
The last decade has been bleak for newspapers in Canada, with hundreds of local news outlets – mostly community papers –closing. Reportage about civic affairs has declined, especially in smaller communities, raising normative questions about democratic information and participation (Lindgren & Corbett, 2018). As noted in the news journal The Walrus, “the symptoms of local news poverty are increasingly evident: the underreporting of complex political issues, the proliferation of superficial journalism, and a citizenry deprived of credible information” (Lindgren, 2019: para. 2).
Advertising revenue for newspapers in 2016 and 2017, the years in which the latest data is available, fell by 20 per cent. The challenges facing Canada’s news industry was made clear in the federal budget of 2018, in which the Liberal government pledged public support for local journalism. Despite the commitment of government support, local journalism has continued its decline. The Local News Map, a crowd-sourced research project tracking local news in Canada, estimates Canada has lost 297 news services in smaller communities across the country since 2008 (Lindgren & Corbett, 2020: 2).
Despite more than a decade of tough times, slashing staff, budgets, and reducing the amount of coverage offered, newspapers continue to reach more than three million Canadians each day.
Canada has two national newspapers, The Globe and Mail and The National Post. As of 2017, The Globe and Mail no longer distributes its newspaper in Atlantic Canada. This move is indicative of the wider news distribution trend across Canada: larger cities are relatively well served while smaller communities are increasingly left with local news with very few journalists, or no local news at all. The issue of limited local coverage may have reached a boiling point in March 2020, when CBC News (the division of CBC/Radio-Canada responsible for news programmes on its English-language operations) announced they were suspending local television newscasts in many regions of the country. Public reaction was swift and furious. The Premier of Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, put out an angry public statement noting that CBC News was the only local television news in the province (Hurst, 2020). Two weeks later, CBC News was forced to backtrack and reinstate the local television news shows.
