Ordinary Albertans would be forgiven for not knowing what to believe.

Further fuzzying matters was Pollara’s declaration that its figure on separation was “the highest recorded by the company” since 2021. But even this surging support for Alberta separation was dwarfed by the Leger poll. And then Abacus flatly declared “Support for separation is low.” Its report concluded: “There is not a widespread appetite among the public for such a significant constitutional rupture.”

Polling—also called surveying—takes many different forms, and in Alberta this year we’ll see poll numbers touted by separatists, and other numbers cited by their federalist opponents. With so much on the line, how useful is polling for providing accurate insights into what people want?

Public opinion polling started in Canada during the 1940s. The first national poll was conducted by the Liberal Party in 1942 to try to determine the likely outcome of a plebiscite on conscription. The first election poll was done by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion in 1945. The first political poll—used to help craft a party’s electoral strategy—was by the Quebec Liberals in 1959. Yet only since the 1980s have national polls been conducted regularly. Polling of public opinion at the provincial level is now routine as well.

Sometimes polling itself becomes the story. For example, during Alberta’s 2012 election, most pollsters projected a win by the Wildrose, led by Danielle Smith. As it turned out, the Progressive Conservatives under Alison Redford were the victors by a comfortable margin. “Clearly something’s wrong,” pollster Bruce Cameron told the CBC afterward. “I’m concerned about the impact on the credibility of the profession.”

Similarly, the 2017 civic election in Calgary was marked by conflicting polls, one of which suggested incumbent mayor Naheed Nenshi was losing badly. A post-election investigation by the Marketing Research and Intelligence Association (MRIA) noted that “accurate public opinion polling can provide voters with information about the views of their fellow citizens [and] draw voters’ attention to particular candidates and issues.” It found that several polls by Mainstreet Research, commissioned by Postmedia, had been “seriously, methodologically flawed” and had “significantly affected the course of the campaign,” including by throwing Nenshi on the defensive and dooming the third-place candidate’s campaign.

The chief differences in polling techniques can be categorized according to the how (methodology) and the what (the content of the questions).

The “how” of polling constantly evolves. In his history of polling in Canada, Christopher Adams suggests polling had several precursors, including censuses, the first of which was conducted in 1666 by the intendant of New France. Another precursor is the market survey. In 1929, for example, the Canadian Business Research Bureau interviewed thousands of users of various products to learn what they “actually think and know about the goods.” Over time, market research acquired the sheen of academic rigour. W.W. Goforth, who taught economics at McGill, was hired by the ad agency Cockfield, Brown & Co. in 1928. In this early period, data-gathering included face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews and mail-in surveys.

The possibility of polling errors became apparent even in those early days. In 1919 the Winnipeg Free Press asked readers to complete a questionnaire about cars and accessories and mail it back. Questions included “How much have you spent for accessories [since the car purchase]?” Bertram Brooker, an ad executive, wrote in Marketing and Business Management in 1924 that surveys of this sort presented many problems, including an inability to control the sample size and to screen respondents. This survey, for example, failed to screen people who didn’t own or regularly use their car.

A major development in polling in the 21st century has been the decline in telephone surveys and the rise of the online variety. Canada’s Angus Reid Institute, for example, conducts all of its surveys and studies through the internet, citing a Pew Research study showing that response rates for phone interviews had dropped to only 6 per cent in 2018.

One pollster that remains attached to telephone surveying is Janet Brown. The company she uses, Trend Research, is based out of Edmonton. “The secret sauce is Albertans calling Albertans,” says Brown. She uses cell numbers and landlines, and says people are more inclined to stay on the line—or pick up in the first place—if they believe they’re talking to someone in Edmonton rather than in Montreal or outside Canada entirely. The company makes five attempts to reach a person before giving up.

The MRIA report on Calgary’s misleading polls in 2017 singled out Mainstreet for not calling enough cell phones, thus ignoring younger voters and creating an unrepresentative sample.

Frank Graves, founder and president of EKOS Research, however, isn’t as sold on telephone polling. “There is a tendency to overemphasize the importance of the mode of contact,” he says. “Whether or not you call someone, email them, do an intercept survey in the street or in their home—they all have different strengths and weaknesses.”

What Brown, MRIA and Graves would agree on, however, is that good polling requires a representative sample. This means, as the Pew Research Centre puts it, that any sample is “assumed to be representative of the larger population on any question we might be interested in.” Pollsters use various techniques to improve the reliability of a sample. One is weighting, or adjusting the relative contribution of respondents. People who participate in polls don’t necessarily reflect the general population. For example, they’re more likely to have a postsecondary degree. The pollster’s answer to this problem is to “weight down” the responses of postsecondary graduates in their final results.

Brown argues that polling in Alberta tends to underestimate the conservative vote and overestimate the progressive one. “Pollsters make the same mistakes over and over again,” she told the CBC in November 2020. It’s a message she reiterated to Alberta Views. Her theory is that progressive Albertans are more likely to participate in polls and that it takes strenuous attempts to reach more-conservative voters—by phone—to correct for this bias. “I sometimes joke that progressive people will tell you their opinions all day long,” she says. “Conservatives are a little bit more cautious, a little bit more reticent, and don’t want to be probed as much.”

Members of the public are sometimes invited to participate in opinion surveying. Once recruited, they’re part of what’s called a “panel”—a cohort asked to respond to survey questions. The most reliable panels are selected through probability-based sampling; the very best kind—online or offline—are those in which respondents are chosen at random. To do that perfectly would require a comprehensive list of the entire population or at least the target population. But such lists aren’t usually available, so pollsters use a variety of probability-based techniques to try to ensure that their samples (their panels) are constituted in such a way as to minimize sampling error.

It is important to distinguish between probability-based panels and opt-in samples. “Opt-in” means the respondents weren’t chosen at random; rather, they were invited to participate. The Pew Research Centre has concluded that opt-in sampling is only half as accurate as probability-based panels. However, opt-in sampling can be conducted in such a way as to improve its reliability. Canada’s Angus Reid Forum is an online panel composed of people selected through online ads on numerous, diverse websites. The company claims its panels “reflect the general population by continually verifying and recruiting so that the socio-demographic characteristics of each sampling region match actual sub-populations according to both the census and electoral data.”

Polling is, of course, ultimately about the answers to the questions—the what. Questions can be asked in numerous ways, including as neutrally as possible. Or questions can be selective, or leading, or presented in a specific order if a certain result is desired. Sometimes this takes the form of what is called “push polling.”

This is what the provincial government’s Alberta Next Panel has been accused of. In early 2025 Albertans were invited by the government to give their opinions, ostensibly to help the government choose its policies. A St. Albert Gazette editorial in August 2025 argued the surveying conducted through the Alberta Next website was more accurately described as push polling. “You can frame the questions in such a way that every answer is a version of your view, or [the questions] simply don’t include any option to oppose that view,” wrote Gazette staff.

The Alberta Next website, for example, offered ideas on “how to strengthen our sovereignty,” including ending equalization, creating an Alberta Pension Plan, forming a provincial police force, and withholding social services from immigrants. University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young said, “The subject matter of the Alberta Next questions and videos are very much informed by the groups that we might call the UCP base.” The survey itself, which closed October 10, purported merely to consult Albertans.

On the topic of immigration, however, respondents (whether online or at the town halls) were required to first watch a short video, then were asked “Should Alberta take more control of the immigration system to counter Ottawa’s open-borders policies?” They were then presented with the following statement: “Ottawa approved 1.2 million people under the permanent and temporary immigrant streams in 2024. This is four times more than was approved in 2014 under prime minister Stephen Harper.”

Finally, respondents were asked to choose from three options:

• Far too much—immigration should be brought down [to] under 2014 levels;
• Definitely too high, and immigration needs to be brought down to 2014 levels again;
• Acceptable—I have no issue with immigration levels being this high.

Given this context, respondents’ answers were a foregone conclusion.

As of late November, none of the Alberta Next survey results had been released to the public. But premier Smith says she’ll use those results to assess which proposals will move to a referendum and which her government will legislate directly.

A investigation in 2017 found several polls in Calgary had been “seriously, methodologically flawed.”

Polling on support for Alberta political parties is conducted regularly. For those that pay for it, Janet Brown and journalist Paul McLoughlin release the monthly “Wild Ride” update, showing, e.g., how the UCP and NDP are faring. Accompanying charts track party support over time.

Polling such as this is sometimes criticized for its oversized impact on public discourse. For example, a poll by Brown in the late stage of the 2023 campaign, which contradicted other polls by showing the UCP ahead in Calgary, was leaked to the press. As political commentator David Climenhaga wrote, “This [survey] does change the narrative of the last two weeks of the election campaign—and that’s why it was leaked.”

Episodes like this colour the public perception of polling. “If you took a public opinion poll about polls, odds are that a majority would offer some rather unfavorable views of pollsters and the uses to which their work is put,” wrote E.J. Dionne Jr. and Thomas E. Mann for the Brookings Institution. The authors add that “public opinion is an illusive commodity.” Not all polls are created equal. Some are well constructed and designed to be credible; some are not. Some polls do seem to push people to give the answer that those who commissioned the polls want.

This is arguably what Brown herself did when she found support for a potential provincial pension plan. The poll, commissioned by the Smith government and conducted in April and May of 2025, asked Albertans how they would vote in a referendum on a variety of proposals, including “Replacing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) with an Alberta Pension Plan (APP) that guaranteed all Alberta seniors the same or better benefits than the Canada Pension Plan.” Fifty-five per cent of respondents said they’d vote for the APP, while 45 per cent said they’d vote against it. But as CBC journalist Jason Markusoff noted, the question added a new nuance to the previous binary of CPP vs. APP. It posited a “guarantee of no financial risk for pensioners,” he wrote, “an assurance that could depend largely on how much of the total CPP pie Alberta would get as its starting pot, a figure that remains in dispute.” Who wouldn’t prefer something with no downside?

Whether using leading questions or not, polling has an effect on its audience. “There are concerns that inaccurate voting intention polling has a negative impact on the conduct of elections due to its influence on voters, the media and political parties,” concluded the Select Committee on Political Polling and Digital Media, struck by the UK’s House of Lords. The committee was a response to three consecutive cases of polling getting it wrong during critical moments: the UK’s 2015 and 2017 general elections and the 2016 vote on leaving the European Union—the infamous Brexit referendum.

The committee noted a number of theories on how polling results impact voters. One of these is the “bandwagon effect,” in which people get on board with an idea because they see many other people doing the same. The obverse of this is the “underdog effect,” which can encourage people to “adopt a minority view out of sympathy.” Polling can also affect voter turnout. Academics showed the committee evidence “that turnout is higher in elections that are anticipated to be close.” Conversely, if a poll tells someone that their candidate is losing badly, they might not bother voting at all.

So what do we really know about support for Alberta separation In an interview with Alberta Views, Dennis Modry, the founder of the Alberta Prosperity Project (APP), which is leading the separatist charge, says his movement enjoys a “plurality” of support, meaning that more Albertans want to separate from Canada than remain undecided or want to stay in Canada. And he argues polling underestimates separatist support. “We still live in an era of cancel culture,” he says. “Oftentimes, people won’t respond to a question that they perceive as possibly controversial or that has any risk of cancelling them in any way.”

A further wrinkle is that not all polling companies are created the same. Cardinal Research, for example, released a poll in October 2025 suggesting that 11 per cent of decided voters in Alberta support the new provincial Republican Party. It was the first poll to show significant support for the separatist Republicans; CBC polls analyst Éric Grenier called it “a bit of a jaw-dropper.” But a Toronto Star story noted that Cameron Davies, leader of the Republican Party, had until recently been a part-owner of Cardinal Research. Until the Star story came out, media coverage omitted that potential bias. The Lethbridge Herald quoted Davies: “What [the poll] shows is our message is resonating with Albertans; we’re getting out there, we’re doing the work.”

The Canadian Research Insights Council (CRIC), which represents pollsters, cautions that the publication of political-poll results “carries with it the potential for great consequence,” including the risk of misleading voters or eroding public trust. The council asks that journalists, before publishing a poll’s results, consider how questions were phrased, sample sizes and margins of error. It also asks “Who’s the sponsor, and what’s their interest in the topic?” CRIC quotes a former US network TV director: “When assessing whether to publish the results of a poll, media need to apply the same degree of journalistic critical practices and skepticism that they would to any other source of information.”

One of Modry’s main adversaries, Thomas Lukaszuk, leader of the Forever Canadian campaign, believes support for Alberta separatism is much more modest. “I think it’s fair to say approximately 10 per cent of Albertans are 100 per cent determined to separate from Canada,” he says. Lukaszuk’s impression is based in part on months of collecting signatures from hundreds of thousands of “pro-remain” Albertans. Meanwhile, he believes separatists themselves are divided. “That 10 per cent is further subdivided between those who’d like to join the US [and] those who somehow envision forming a new country.”

Polling conducted by Janet Brown, commissioned by CBC, has offered a more nuanced picture. In her survey of 1,200 random Albertans, conducted in May 2025, 22 per cent of respondents identified as “committed separatists.” Her survey suggests that a further 14 per cent identify as “soft separatists”—frustrated, perhaps, but not especially keen to leave Canada. They tend to approve of premier Smith’s attempt to forge a new relationship with Ottawa.

A deeper dive into Brown’s polling data offers further insights. John Santos, Brown’s data scientist, explained: “Of those who are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ confident in their ability to save for retirement, 36 per cent would vote for separation; conversely, only 22 per cent of those who are ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ confident in their ability to save for retirement would vote for separation. This is very much an issue of financial security.”

This survey and others suggest the drivers of separatism in Alberta aren’t cultural or linguistic as in Quebec. They’re economic. The U of C’s Lisa Young argues separatists believe “Canada has stood in the way of Alberta’s prosperity because of [federal] environmental regulations.” Lukaszuk observed something similar: “We found that cities, towns and other areas that are very much reliant on the oil and gas servicing industry tend to be more pro-separatist.”

Frank Graves of EKOS suggests that surveys on Alberta separatism are being swayed by misinformation. He shared with Alberta Views preliminary results of polling he conducted on behalf of the labour movement. “The level of misinformation in Alberta is the highest in the country,” he says. In polling on the role of false information in Alberta politics, EKOS asked a number of screening questions. Respondents were asked whether certain statements were true or false. For example: “Deaths due to COVID-19 vaccines are being intentionally hidden by the government.” This process helped EKOS identify respondents that have been swayed by falsehoods. Graves believes that susceptibility to misinformation is the most “powerful predictor” of support for separating.

Not all polls are created equal. Some seem to push people to answer questions a certain way.

So, what ultimately explains the difference between Pollara’s 24 per cent, Leger’s 41 per cent and Abacus’s 18 per cent support for Alberta separatism Perhaps subtle changes in the wording:

“If a referendum were held on your province’s sovereignty, would you vote FOR or AGAINST?” (Pollara)

“If a provincial referendum were held tomorrow on whether or not your province should separate from Canada to form its own country, how would you most likely vote?” (Leger)

“Do you agree that the province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province of Canada?” (Abacus)

Leger gave respondents the option of “strong support” or “somewhat support,” then combined these to show “support for separating.” Pollara’s choice was starker: “Stay or separate?” And Abacus seemed to be asking for a prediction. The questioners had different sample sizes, weighting strategies and survey methods. One survey prompted respondents with a question about Liberal leader Mark Carney; another prefaced its survey by asking how closely respondents have been following the news. Respondents may have been influenced by the looming federal election, or by financial insecurity, or by misinformation, or even by other surveys they’d seen.

For his part, Graves didn’t want to speculate on the differences. “If I were doing this,” he says, “I’d do random control assignment testing. A random portion is assigned to version A of the question, and the other is assigned to version B.” This would be the only way to determine whether or not the way the question was asked had a bearing on the result.

Many more such surveys will be released this year. The stakes are high—Albertans could soon face a separation referendum. And the ultimate poll will come at the ballot box.

Illustration by Gerry Rasmussen

Laurence Miall lives in Edmonton. He has written for Jacobin, the CBC and Alberta Views, and is a former editor of carte blanche.

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A few days later I got a panicked phone call from a member of an environmental group I was in touch with. Was I aware that the United Conservative Party government had just opened up one of Alberta’s most beloved landscapes to coal mining I was not. It seemed newsworthy and I started writing about it. Others joined in, and you all know what happened next. Probably the greatest environmental backlash this province has ever seen eventually forced the government to back down. At least for a little while.

But let’s compare the rollout of the coal policy rescission with another major Alberta land-use move, the South Saskatchewan Regional Plan. That plan governs energy development, water use, farming and ranching, recreation, forest management and nature-based tourism over a huge part of southern Alberta. It was released in 2014 after five years of study. Thousands of Albertans made themselves heard during three rounds—three rounds!—of public consultation. The legally binding plan remains in place and is relied on for guidance by everyone from municipalities to NGOs.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the distance we’ve travelled. We once made policy using the classic conservative virtues of careful thought and consultation. We now have top-down fiats delivered from on high.

You are not about to listen to a research paper. I’m going to speak from personal memory and experience, as someone who has travelled this distance I speak of. That journey has led me to a few conclusions. What I’ve seen is that at a time of environmental crisis, when cities are literally burning and major watersheds drying, our governments are denying us the conversations we need to have. They’re drawing the blinds on our window into policy, they’re closing the shutters on our view into decision-making and they’re bricking up our doorways into understanding.

I came to the Edmonton bureau of the Canadian Press in 1994 and worked there until I retired in September 2024. I arrived back in the days of Ralph Klein. I didn’t agree with a lot of what that government did, but I will say this for Ralph: when the legislature was in session, he would show up regularly in the press gallery media theatre at 1:30 and take questions. And not just a few, for there were a lot of us back then. Ralph would stand there and field everything we threw at him. We’d shout out questions from the floor and he’d take them on. Some of those press conferences went on for over an hour. It got to be a bit of a press gallery joke—keep Ralph talking and eventually he’d say something newsworthy. Nor was Ralph the only open-access politician back then. Ministers were buttonholed daily in freewheeling scrums. Often they granted personal interviews, in person or on the phone. And after the hurly-burly of a big day, a throne speech or a budget, reporters and politicians would gather at a bar across 109th St. from the legislature for beers. Those were the days.

Compare that to a Danielle Smith presser. First, they’re rare. Smith prefers to address Albertans through social media or her radio show. Second, they’re short—in my experience, rarely more than 20 minutes or so. Many times I was still in the question queue when things wrapped up. Third, they’re highly managed. Government communications staff choose the questioners, putting control in their hands. Chosen reporters are then limited to two questions each. If a politician can’t bat aside two questions with message-track responses, they’re in the wrong job. Almost all UCP press conferences follow this pattern. So do those of many other politicians, Liberal and Conservative. They all do it that way now because it works. It keeps things under control.

If that were my only complaint, I wouldn’t be speaking with you here today. No doubt some form of order needed to be imposed on us unruly reporters, especially as more and more of us dial in rather than show up. Press conferences have always been part theatre, and are not a reporter’s most important source of information. But the noose on access has been pulled much tighter than just that.

Part of a reporter’s job is to collect as many different sides to a story as can be crammed into the copy. It was routine for me, after I’d listened to someone’s concerns or read some new research, to go to the government for its side. Back in the day, I could usually get someone on the phone who understood and could actually explain the policy in question. Sometimes I could get the minister. Even press secretaries would answer a verbal back-and-forth with on-the-record responses.

By the end of my career, explanation and response had deteriorated into “comment.” If I wanted “comment” I had to email a question or two to the requisite press sec and wait for a response. It normally came right on my deadline, generally three or four sentences of motherhood statements that a colleague of mine used to call “banana mumble chicken.” There was little chance for follow-ups or clarification. Take what you get and be grateful for it. Often, the responses didn’t even address the questions I’d raised and were simply partisan jabs—government good, opponents bad. It was often a challenge to find something actually usable for my story. Again, this is not unique to Alberta. It started with Stephen Harper in Ottawa, and they all do it now. But Alberta seems uniquely enthusiastic about emailed “comment.” For example, the head of communications at the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) once told me bluntly that the institution’s policy is that all communications are conducted through email. Nobody is allowed to talk to anyone, under any circumstances, lest they say something.

Cabinet ministers Forget about it. Over my career, I interviewed, repeatedly, every single environment minister from Ralph Klein onward. Some of them I was on pretty good terms with. The UCP have had two environment ministers—Jason Nixon and Rebecca Schulz. I once got five minutes on the phone with Nixon. Despite dozens of requests, Schulz never spoke with me. Not once.

Nor is the clampdown limited to politicians and political staff. I used to be on a first-name basis with some of the Alberta government’s top scientists, and we have had some really good ones working for us. If I needed information on say, caribou populations, or chronic wasting disease in deer, I could go straight to the expert right away. By the time I left the Canadian Press, it took elaborate, secretive machinations on the level of a spy novel to talk to actual scientists. For good reason. One researcher refused to speak to me at all about a published paper he had co-authored, for fear of repercussions from Alberta, even though he no longer worked for the government and lived in the US.

And then there’s FOIP. It’s supposed to stand for freedom of information but may have been better summed up by a Klein-era cabinet minister as “Fuck off, it’s private.” FOIP searches used to be extremely useful to me. I got all kinds of stuff—draft reports on sour gas releases written before the bureaucrats had had a chance to water them down, for example. Some of my first oil sands stories, back in the late 1990s, were based on internal environmental impact studies I’d gotten through FOIP. I understand that not everything can or should be released. But over the years, the redactions just kept getting bigger. I think peak redaction was achieved the day I got a FOIP response consisting of 300 completely blank pages. Yes, I did write a story about it.

There are still reporters doing excellent FOIP work, God love ’em, but it’s getting harder. The Globe and Mail has declared Alberta the most secretive jurisdiction in a secretive country, and recently things have gotten worse. The UCP has introduced legislation that would extend exemptions from the law to political staff, keeping more people nice and warm under a blanket of secrecy.

The flipside of ignoring troublesome questions is cherry-picking whom to listen to. This also happens. Look at the recent study on reforms to the AER, written by a pair of long-time insiders and containing no input from civil society. Look who has standing before the regulator’s hearings—unless you are literally next door to a project, you have no voice. Look at the Siksika First Nation, forced into court over broken government consultation promises. And if I may leave purely environmental concerns for a moment, consider the government’s recent report into its COVID response, headed by a former UCP nomination candidate and dismissed by medical professionals as misinformation.

Maybe you’re saying “So what. Governments are elected to govern, and that means making choices that not everyone’s going to be happy about. Majority rules, and if you don’t like it, try again in the next election.” I would suggest that’s a grade-school understanding of democracy. Governments are entitled to act on their agendas, but they are not entitled to pretend those who don’t agree don’t exist. Mature administrations try to find some compromise, to bring everyone along and to govern for everyone. It’s the difference between parliamentary democracy and an elected monarchy.

I would argue further that broad discussion among an informed public is particularly crucial in environmental issues. Decisions about the health of a river or a forest, the integrity of a landscape or the abundance of wildlife last for generations. A law on tax policy can be changed after the next election if it doesn’t work out. A law that allows the removal of a mountaintop alters Alberta forever.

As well, you may have noticed that the world is changing. Climate change will eventually force a worldwide shift away from high-carbon energy, the kind of energy our province produces. We will not have a choice in this. It will happen, for the alternative does not bear thinking about. We all know the extent to which this province depends on oil and gas. But for the first time we can see that this industry that has powered our province for so long is vulnerable. We desperately need to have honest conversations about where we’re going, how long it will take to get there and what this place will look like when we arrive. Instead, it’s an information-free zone. Instead, we get “ethical oil,” as if the jet stream or the oceans cared about our human rights laws. Instead, we get bromides about “world-class” regulatory systems, as if unreclaimed wells and tailings ponds don’t dot our landscape.

Instead, we get what happened to Alberta’s renewables industry. Some said the developments would use too much farmland, or that wind turbines are too hard to reclaim. Those objections were all pretty much refuted, some by researchers at this school [U of C]. But reality-based information didn’t matter. The decisions were made behind closed doors on the advice of nobody knows who. The most promising parts of the province are now shut off to the renewables industry, and money is fleeing elsewhere.

Finally, I would argue environmental decisions reveal important things about Albertans as a people. Choosing what to exploit and what to preserve shows what we value and who we care about. This land is our home. And like a home long lived in, how it looks reflects its residents. When we allow one more bit of caribou habitat to wink out or one more trout stream in the foothills to silt up, we lessen ourselves. And we lessen following generations. I’m going to argue that what we do to our home, our province, we do to ourselves. Surely we should all be around the table to talk about that.

Again, I’d like to emphasize that this is my experience. I’m sure other reporters see things differently. I’m not arguing with them, I’m just telling you what it’s been like for me. And this is what I’ve seen in 25 or 30 years on the environment beat in Alberta—fewer chances for public input, fewer answers from government, and a gradual restriction of public space while decision-making concentrates in fewer and fewer hands.

So where does this leave us Fortunately, with a number of bright spots. While our country’s largest newspaper chain, Postmedia, is nowhere to be seen on this issue, good environmental journalism is being done by many mainstream news organizations. And independent media that take environmental issues seriously are a rising force. I’m thinking of the National Observer, The Tyee, Hakai magazine and of course The Narwhal—which is, astonishingly, only seven years old and already inflecting the national conversation.

Another hopeful sign is what I call the democratization of data. Our governments may be increasingly close-mouthed, but in a way that matters less and less. As I speak, dozens of satellites orbit overhead monitoring a whole range of environmental benchmarks, from greenhouse gas emissions to clear-cutting. And they’re doing it in real time at a level of precision that boggles the mind. Ten years ago, data like this was precious and rare. Now, it’s a commercial product you can go out and just buy, or acquire from sources like the European Space Agency or NASA. Environmental groups have become expert at using this data to ground-truth government claims. They use geomatics with impressive accuracy and speed. I remember that during the initial controversy about Alberta’s coal policy the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society made maps of all the coal exploration leases that were much more comprehensive and useful than anything released by the government. Similarly the late, lamented Alberta Liabilities Disclosure Project carefully documented the size and extent of the lingering impacts of the energy industry, a great service to us all. Scientists themselves are becoming increasingly outspoken about the consequences of our current path.

So despite government attempts to direct the environmental conversation, they are increasingly unable to. That’s good.

Still, environmental journalism is always going to be a tough row to hoe. Nobody likes the environmental reporter. In good times, you’re a buzzkill. In bad times, you’re a job-killer. You’re always kind of a scold. And it ain’t glamorous. You’re not out there with hip waders, shoulder-to-shoulder in the swamp with the intrepid field biologist. No, you’re back in the newsroom, going through court judgments and regulatory documents, because that’s where we really decide who gets to do what to whom. You’re adding up and staring at long columns of figures until a pattern emerges or your eyes cross, whichever comes first. And it takes resources to do this, the chief among them time. In a newsroom, time is the most precious commodity of all. As journalism resources shrink, there’s less of that precious commodity for everyone.

It takes a personal toll as well. There aren’t too many good-news stories on this beat and you always seem to be writing about loss. That weighs on you after awhile. It weighed on me.

But that’s the world we live in. What we make of it is up to us, reporters and members of an engaged public. And before I close, I’d like to remind you of what still can be made. I’d like to return to the event with which I started this talk—the coal policy rescission.

It didn’t take long for news of the government’s plan to spread. My colleagues and I got the information out as quickly as we could, and I have never seen anything like what happened next. It was clear Albertans felt a sacred trust had been breached and that their sense of themselves, who they were and where they lived, had been attacked. Within days, ranchers, big-city nature-lovers, small-town mayors, scientists and country music stars banded together and forced the UCP government to backtrack. We demanded, and got, a seat at the table and a forum for our voices. We demanded, and got, policy that protected what we loved and wanted for our children. It was maybe the most inspiring story I ever covered and made me realize how much, despite everything, I love this place.

Now, you may say the coal threat is back. Yes it is, and that shouldn’t be a surprise. As the writer Jane Rule tells us, politics is like housework: Just because you swept the dirt out last week doesn’t mean it doesn’t need doing again. The point is that it can be done. It can be done when the facts are on the table, and it can be done when people are heard. It can be done, and it must be done. It’s hard and disheartening and it never seems to end, I know. But in the words of the great Lyle Lovett, what would you be if you didn’t even try?

Bob Weber is a retired environment reporter formerly with the Canadian Press. The Edmonton-based Weber started at CP in 1996 and specialized in environmental coverage and Arctic issues

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The law firm had been monitoring a growing number of reports published by government agencies in Europe, the UK and Australia that accused the two giant technology companies of using their market power to take advantage of publishers and advertisers. A key development for the Toronto lawyers and the case they were trying to build in Canada came in the fall of 2021 when a New York judge unsealed most of the documents in an antitrust lawsuit against Google that had been filed by Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, along with several more attorneys general from other states. The Competition Bureau of Canada started its own investigation into Google’s online advertising business in October 2021, around the same time the documents in the Texas-led case became public.

The Sotos lawyers figured they had the evidence they needed to prove Google misled publishers about how its online ad technology worked in order to reap additional profits and corner the market for digital display advertising. But the firm couldn’t find a Canadian publisher willing to stand up to the tech behemoths. No plaintiff meant no case. By the time they reached out to the AWNA they had been looking for the better part of a year.

Minutes after hearing the lawyers’ description of the allegations against Google and Meta, Sygutek interjected. She was in. She owns a weekly newspaper in the Crowsnest Pass, a municipality of 6,000 denizens of five towns huddled along a two-lane highway as it cuts through the front ranges of the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Alberta. As she learned about the inner workings of Google’s online ad technologies, something clicked for Sygutek. The lawsuit validated the anger and confusion she had felt in recent years as she had watched a huge chunk of her advertising revenue evaporate. Her staff had been cut in half, from eight to a skeleton crew of four.

That split-second decision to volunteer was as much a reflex as it was a conscious choice. The paper has always meant more to Sygutek than just a business. It’s a way of life, one passed down by her parents. The Crowsnest Pass Herald is a local institution, having been founded in 1930. It’s the second-oldest business in the community behind Morency Plumbing & Heating, which got started in 1909. Those sorts of things matter in the Pass. Roots matter. Maybe it’s a defence mechanism against the relentless wind.

And so that’s how the owner of the Pass Herald, circulation 2,000, would end up representing Canadian publishers in an $8-billion class action lawsuit against two of the largest corporations in human history.

Sygutek has a tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. Three Canada geese, each about the size of a dime, fly in a triangle up towards the palm of her hand. She lost her father, Willy Sygutek, then her mother, Gail, and then her mentor and business partner, Trevor “Buddy” Slapak, within a two-and-half-year stretch from the summer of 2014 to the start of 2017.

Buddy and Sygutek had worked together at the paper up until a month before he died. He was 86. “He loved the paper, and so part of my keeping the paper, it’s a legacy thing,” she told me. “I felt like it was my job to carry on for him because he was one of the most influential people in my life. He was really something.” Buddy was the editor of the Pass Herald, but had a variety of other part-time jobs, from mortician to autobody technician. He raced stock cars, flew gliders and played the saxophone in local bands and orchestras.

More than one person I talked to described Sygutek as a “pistol.” Her word would be “spicy.” She’s 52 without a trace of grey in her blond hair, and she’s quick to laugh and even quicker to give her opinion. She has summitted 40 peaks in the Crowsnest Pass area, many of them by herself. “It’s a really great time for me to reflect and kind of fall back in with nature, and that brings me a tremendous amount of joy,” she said. Sygutek was coming down off Mount Gladstone, a 20-kilometre route that gains 1,000 metres of elevation, this past summer when she was startled by what she thought was a bear and fell off a short drop, breaking her ankle. She wrapped it with duct tape and just kept going.

When Sygutek was really young—3 or 4—she would sit under her mother Gail’s desk in her office in Blairmore and play with a Fisher-Price phone. She’d pick up the plastic receiver and answer, “Good morning, Pass Herald.” Gail started working at the paper in 1962. She bought it from Buddy in 1977, but he stayed on as editor. “I literally grew up in that building underneath my mom’s desk,” Sygutek said.

She started helping her father deliver the paper at age 6 or 7. He’d drive and she’d hop out at each stop to run the new issue up to the door. She helped stuff flyers during high school for pocket money. Sygutek studied English at the University of Lethbridge and then got another degree in management. She was going to move to Calgary and take the corporate world by storm. But the offices of the Pass Herald, in the company of her mother and mentor, offered such a great atmosphere to raise her three sons—another generation growing up under the desks of a bustling small-town paper.

This past October Sygutek closed her office of 17 years in a storefront on the main street in Blairmore. It was three doors down from the one her parents used to occupy. Much of the foot traffic through the door, the people who would stop by to pick up their newspaper in person and chat, had been widowers adjusting to a new phase of solitary life. The extra $15,000 a year she’ll save on rent will go towards another part-time reporter.

There have been some lean years over the past decade, when Sygutek didn’t take a paycheque at all from the Herald. Her gross revenue in 2014 was $350,000. It was $197,000 in 2023. That’s a 45 per cent drop when adjusted for inflation. She works part-time as a town councillor and as a public relations consultant. Her husband, Lyle Douglas, is a maintenance superintendent with Teck Resources, a company that operates one of the coal mines just over the boundary in BC.

Two nuggets of wisdom from Buddy, a quintessential small-town newspaperman, have stuck with Sygutek. One, you’re not doing your job if you don’t get sued once in a while. Real journalism is found in the kind of hard-won information that somebody doesn’t want you to know. And two, an old adage known as “Greener’s Law”: never pick a fight with a woman who buys her ink by the barrel. Buddy modified the saying as a way to encourage Sygutek to stand her ground in a male-dominated industry. “He always made a point of saying, ‘Remember, you’re playing in a field that wasn’t made for women, so you have to be stronger and tougher than everybody,’” she said.

And that constitutes a very abbreviated history of one Canadian newspaper, and newspaper family, that’s managed to keep the lights on when so many others just like it have blinked out of existence.

Of the 525 local news outlets that have closed in Canada since 2008, 400 were community newspapers, defined as publishing less than five times a week. April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism, has her finger on the weakening pulse of the country’s media industry. She is the lead investigator on the Local News Research Project, which includes a crowd-sourced map that tracks all the changes to print, broadcast and digital media organizations across Canada. “There are real consequences that are no longer the subject for academic journal articles. They’re actually playing out on the ground in communities,” Lindgren said. Some of those repercussions include lower voter turnout, an increase in social and political division, the spread of misinformation, and less accountability for people in positions of authority in both the private and the public sectors.

The news, and especially the news in the form of a local paper, offers a chronicle of the people, organizations and institutions that characterize a community. Margaret Sullivan wrote about this place-making dimension of newspapers in her book Ghosting the News, published by Columbia Global Reports in 2020: “It’s not just watchdog journalism that matters. It’s the way a local columnist can express a community’s frustration or triumph, the way the local music critic can review a concert, the deeply reported feature stories, the assessment of a new restaurant, the obituaries, the letters to the editor. The newspaper ties a region together, helps it make sense of itself, fosters a sense of community, serves as a village square.”

Of the 525 local news outlets that have closed in Canada since 2008, 400 were community newspapers.

Sullivan started her career at the Buffalo News, a daily that at its peak in the 1990s was making a million dollars a week for Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett’s holding company. She recounts the major plot points of the internet’s disruption of the newspaper industry in her book. It’s a story most of us are familiar with. Craigslist, which started as an email newsletter in the mid-1990s, first drained away lucrative classified advertising. Then Google and Facebook siphoned more ad revenue from traditional media, due to the scale of their audiences as well as their ability to narrowly target ads and then track whether or not they succeeded at convincing someone to buy something. “This ubiquity, along with narrow targeting, was a tough combination to compete against,” Sullivan writes.

The 2008 financial crisis and resulting recession was another blow to subscription and advertising revenues. Sullivan references a widely circulated graphic by the Newspaper Association of America that captured the speed and magnitude of the industry’s decline. “From its peak in 2000 to 2012, print advertising fell 71 per cent,” she writes. Data provided by News Media Canada, an advocacy organization that represents 500 digital and print titles across the country, shows a 79 per cent drop in ad revenue for newspapers from 2010 to 2022.

Sullivan explains the downward spiral of the media industry in terms of the familiar trope of how a new and disruptive technology supplants an older, less effective one. It’s the same kind of story about the inevitable march of progress as that of the horse and buggy getting usurped by the automobile. But the growing number of reports and lawsuits by regulators around the world, as well as private cases like the one brought by Sygutek and Sotos, have revealed a potential plot twist to what had been considered a straightforward narrative about innovation and obsolescence.

Google made close to $238-billion from advertising in 2023. The bulk of that revenue, about $175-billion, was generated from their search engine. This past August, a US federal judge ruled that Google maintains an illegal monopoly in online search and search text advertising—the ads that pop up to match the results of a search. The next step in the legal process is to figure out how to restore competition to that market. One of the remedies proposed by the US Justice Department is for Google to sell off its Chrome web browser.

The Justice Department faced the tech company in court again in September 2024, this time over an alleged monopoly in online advertising technologies. Google made about $31-billion from this side of their business in 2023. Digital display advertising is the lifeblood of online publishers. These types of ads help fund much of the content we read and consume on the internet. Every time someone visits a website, in the moments it takes to load, a multi-step and automated process unfolds for selling ad spaces that will reach the particular user viewing the page. These one-time ad placements are called “impressions” and millions are sold every day. Publishers use digital tools to help them get the best price for each impression. Advertisers use various programs to help them buy the highest-value impressions at the lowest possible prices. Ad exchanges are another type of program that work as intermediaries, taking the bid requests from the publisher side of the auction and matching them with bid responses from advertisers.

Google owns the dominant digital tools, the programs with the largest share of the market, at all three stages of the online auction for digital display ads. Lawyers with the Justice Department argued in court this past fall that Google violated antitrust laws in the realm of digital display ads, harming both publishers and advertisers in the process. The trial concluded at the end of November and the judge, as of April 1, 2025, had not yet delivered her ruling.

“It’s hard to imagine anyone at Google thinking all of this would be legal.”

The Competition Bureau of Canada announced in late 2024 that it too plans to take legal action against Google for anti-competitive practices in online ad tech services. Matthew Boswell, the commissioner of competition, is quoted in a press release about the Bureau’s rationale: “…Google has abused its dominant position in online advertising in Canada by engaging in conduct that locks market participants into using its own ad tech tools, excluding competitors and distorting the competitive process.”

Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, used plainer language to describe his state’s lawsuit in a video posted to social media in late 2020. “If the free market were a baseball game, Google positioned itself as the pitcher, batter and the umpire,” he said. The trial for that litigation started in March 2025. “Right now when you visit the website of a news outlet you know and trust, like the Wall Street Journal or your favorite local paper, you’ll see advertisements likely placed there by Google, but Google doesn’t tell you, the public, that they manipulate the advertising auction and continually illegally profit by taking money away from those web pages and putting it in their own pockets,” Paxton said in the video.

The class action lawsuit involving Sygutek and the Pass Herald was filed in March of 2022 and takes a similar approach as the case by Paxton and several other US attorneys general. One part of the case by Sotos alleges that Google told publishers that their tools for selling ad space on websites would maximize their revenues when in fact they were suppressing them. The firm’s statement of claim describes how several algorithms and programs operate behind the scenes to the benefit of Google and the detriment of publishers. “It’s hard to imagine anyone at Google thinking all of this would be legal,” said Adil Abdulla, a lawyer with Sotos.

The other part of the lawsuit accuses Google and Facebook of colluding to undermine an alternative technology called “header bidding” that enables publishers to sidestep some of Google’s tools and thereby earn more money. The tech companies nicknamed their secret agreement “Jedi Blue.”

The US-based companies tried to get the class action in Canada dismissed, and filed motions to strike in March of 2024. This past October, chief federal justice Paul Crampton ruled that the case against Google could proceed but that Sotos had not provided enough detail to justify the allegations of collusion. Abdulla told me they planned to appeal that decision and expected to have a hearing by the end of 2025.

The length of the trial will depend on how many motions the defendants bring. Sotos Class Actions recently concluded a case that had lasted 17 years. But then again, Google and Meta could decide to settle at any moment and abruptly end the lawsuit. The damages would be split evenly between the two parts of the claim: $4-billion in compensation for Canadian publishers because of the alleged conspiracy, and another $4-billion to account for lost revenue because Google allegedly misrepresented how its ad technologies worked. The law firm consulted with economists and other experts to determine the sum for the damages. Abdulla explained that the court will decide at a later stage of the trial who belongs to the class of defendants and how the potential damages will be divided among them.

The November 6 edition of the Pass Herald was printed in Lethbridge and shipped out that same morning. It arrived at about 10 a.m. to the old office on Blairmore’s main street across from the railway tracks. Sygutek had moved out during the first week of October, but was still renting the back room for the weekly ritual of preparing the new issue for delivery. The front-page headline of vol. 94, no. 42 read: “Pumpkins in the Park,” and was complemented by a series of nighttime photos of jack-o’-lanterns from an event in Coleman the week before.

“Just get them in, do them straight and count 10,” Mary told me. It was her job to stuff the flyers, which that week were from Canadian Tire. She’s been doing it every Wednesday morning for 20 years. Her sister Shirley usually helps, but she’s in her mid-80s now and was dealing with some health issues. Mary changed the orientation of the paper every 10 copies so it was easier to count the number in a stack. She went to a sink in the corner every so often to wash the ink off her hands.

Two young men and their supervisor from McMan, a social agency that provides supports for people with diverse abilities, were labelling papers on another table against a wall in the windowless room. Sygutek had printed the names and addresses back at her new home office.

I asked the group what the big stories were in the Pass these days.

“The coal mine. We want the mine,” Mary said.

“This is a coal town,” said the woman from McMan.

I had noticed a few posters in the windows of homes and businesses with a similar message. Coal has a long history in the area, although the last mine closed in 1983. Many locals are proud of the industry. The region has retained a hardscrabble, working-class feel. The old miners cottages, tiny bungalows built up close to the roads, are still a defining feature of the five small communities. But the modest homes are increasingly being replaced by larger and fancier residences. People looking for mountain vacation properties are driving up housing prices.

She tries to cover both sides and encourages her reporter to follow his instincts.

Town council had voted earlier that fall to hold a non-binding referendum at the end of November to gauge the desire in the community for a new mine on nearby Grassy Mountain. Northback Holdings, the company that wants to operate the mine, is from Australia. That week’s paper included a couple of stories about the coal project and the referendum, including one that outlined the concerns of a conservation society about how the mine will impact local water quality and the environment.

Sygutek is the fourth generation of her family to live in the Pass and is a vocal supporter of the new mine. But she tries to cover both sides of any topic in the paper and encourages her reporter, Nicholas Allen, to follow his journalistic instincts. She gets frustrated when people complain that she’s too biased in her editorials, though. “That’s my one part in the newspaper where I’m supposed to give my opinion on politics, government—whatever the hell I feel like,” she said.

On a tour of the rest of the office space, Sygutek pointed out where Buddy and her mom used to have offices. Two large wooden desks still filled the front room by the entrance. She told me how she was diagnosed with cancer three months after she first met the lawyers from Sotos and agreed to take part in the lawsuit. She needed emergency surgery on May 31, 2022, the day before her 50th birthday, but was back at work at the Pass Herald within a week. She had to wear an abdominal binder to stabilize her core and protect the incision. “It was a bizarre time,” she said. “But that’s what you do, right The paper doesn’t stop. Nothing should stop the newspaper. So I just kept going.”

Doug Horner is the author of Back From the Deep (Steerforth Press, 2024). He is a former staffer at AV and lives in Calgary.

Guillaume Nolet is a photographer who documents society, culture and rural life. You can find more of his work here.

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Read more from the archive “Publishing Through a Cultural Revolution” January 2023.

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The post Fighting back! appeared first on Alberta Views.

Jeffrey Dvorkin says YES

The Massey College senior fellow and former director of the journalism program at U of T

Government in Canada has been funding the media for 100 years. There has always been a postal subsidy for newspaper distribution. More recently, the Canada Periodical Fund has helped magazines, newspapers (non-daily) and digital periodicals overcome market disadvantages. And, of course, there is the CBC, which gets more than a billion dollars a year from a direct government subsidy.

Conservative and Liberal governments alike have seen support for media as an urgent part of maintaining democracy in Canada. There is widespread agreement among parties and beyond that without a vigorous journalistic culture, democracy here would suffer. US studies, for example, show that less journalism results in more frequent reelection of incumbents.

The question of government funding of media is increasingly about whether Canadian media has become—or is in danger of becoming—an arm of government. Meanwhile the digital transformation of media continues, convergence has given us fewer choices, and so-called “news deserts” spread. Over 500 news outlets in Canada shut down between 2008 and 2024.

How to correct this And what would be the consequences of less government support for media?

It’s worth looking at how other aspects of our society would function with less support. If government stopped funding public education, the private school business would boom. The privatization of hospitals would take us into a vastly poorer version of US healthcare—a life-threatening outcome. What about privatizing the military Let’s not go there.

A free press is a critical element of democracy. We don’t need more government-funded news or pro-government messages. We do need better ways to fund media—and they should involve thoughtful support from government.

Our government gives tax credits to media organizations for labour and technology costs and to invest in regions ill-served with news. Subscriptions to credible media earn individuals a tax benefit. In addition to this, the public should be allowed to donate to the CBC to enable the removal of ads. This would end CBC’s competition for ads with commercial news publishers, which is contributing to the spread of news deserts, and make the public broadcaster more accountable to its audience. A Crown-funded national public broadcaster must do what commercial outlets can’t: develop unique programming to serve the needs of local audiences for information, reflection and perspectives that enable effective participation in democracy and cultural life. Programming must be decentralized while budgets focus on strong local/regional news and information. Local stations must program the needs of a local audience.

We must restore public confidence while deepening journalism and reporting on government. If our democracy is to survive, media as an agency of citizenship must be brought up to date, not defunded.

Peter Menzies says no

The Macdonald–Laurier Institute senior fellow and former Calgary Herald publisher

Not long ago, anyone arguing Canada’s news media should depend on a buffet of taxpayer money controlled by politicians would’ve been labelled a traitor to the craft. In the meantime, a great many moral contortions have brought us to where the matter is even up for debate. But here we are: the vast majority of Canada’s news organizations now depend upon politicians for their existence. They have submitted to the humiliation of applying to the government to become a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization. They did so to avail themselves of the Journalism Labour Tax Credit and the Local Journalism Initiative. Others shape their content to qualify for the Canada Periodical Fund. Licensed broadcasters queue for assistance at the government-appointed Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.

It requires some imagination to square this with statements like this one from the Toronto Star’s Standards and Practices: “Independence from those we cover is a key principle of journalistic integrity. We avoid conflicts of interest and the appearance of such conflicts. …These policies apply to all outside interests that could cause our audiences to question the fairness and independence of our journalism.”

Journalists argue they can’t be bought. But the near-total absence of commentary arguing against these funds within the pages and platforms of organizations bearing the government’s stamp of approval indicates that debate can most certainly be stifled. And what journalists believe on this file is inconsequential. All that matters when it comes to subsidies and journalism is what the news-consuming public believes. And polling suggests the subsidies aren’t saving journalism; they’re killing it. Oh, the husks of once-magnificent titles still stumble around like zombies, but without trust—the bond tying journalists to readers, viewers and listeners—it’s all a charade.

In 2024 The Hub, a subscriber-based platform that eschews government funding (disclosure: I write for it), polled Canadians. Seventy-six per cent of respondents believe subsidies could undermine journalists’ ability to report objectively. Seventy per cent oppose the funding, including 75 per cent of Liberal voters and 86 per cent of Conservatives; 73 per cent say subsidies hamper journalists’ ability to challenge the government. Reuters, meanwhile, reports that Canadians’ trust in journalism fell from 55 per cent in 2016—before the latest subsidies were announced—to just 39 per cent in 2024.

If government and the news industry want trusted news to survive, subsidizing its production is counterproductive. If anything should be subsidized, it should be the consumption of news, through deductibility of subscription costs and other mechanisms, forcing platforms to compete for, and build, public trust. As for the CBC, its primary source of revenue must similarly be detached from the vicarious whims of Parliament and its sustenance placed squarely in the hands of the public.

jeffrey dvorkin responds to peter menzies

As a former managing editor of CBC Radio and former VP of News and Information at National Public Radio (NPR) in Washington, DC, I’m arguing yes to government funding for media—with strict limits.

In the 1990s we operated at CBC on the premise of maintaining an arm’s length relationship with government. We understood, as did our bosses, that our credibility as a provider of reliable information depended on maintaining public trust. The journalists who created our programs and reported the news for CBC had to act without “fear or favour” toward the government. One example of how CBC remained resistant to government pressure was during the Somalia affair. In 1993 a Somali teenager was beaten to death by two Canadian peacekeepers who were part of humanitarian efforts in that country. Captured by photos, the killing revealed internal problems in the Canadian Airborne Regiment. A CBC reporter received and reported on altered military documents, which led to allegations of a cover-up.

In the early 2000s, after moving to NPR, I found that mainstream media believed the first amendment to the US constitution gave journalists a measure of protection. American suspicion of government (quite different from the more accepting Canadian attitude) meant that US media were, for the most part, vigilant in maintaining independence.

But one particularly effective guarantee of public broadcasting’s independence from government in the US is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. CPB dubs itself “the steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting,” and it distributes public money to some 1,220 public radio stations and 361 public TV stations. These stations can raise their own operational money. Stations (notably PBS, as NPR gets less than 1 per cent of its budget from CPB) that exist in markets where fundraising is limited can ask for government funding in the form of a top-up from the CPB. This includes stations in rural areas, Indigenous communities etc. Congress allocates public funding once a year and CPB distributes it. CPB ensures that public funding is done at arm’s length from government.

Similarly, CBC’s credibility might be improved if its budgets came from an openly neutral source, one that is at arm’s length from the federal government.

Funding from government sources needs to be seen to be free from the influence of government

CBC journalists are of course aware that funding for their work comes directly from a parliamentary allocation, now more than $1-billion a year. Upper management, including the CBC’s president, go before a Heritage committee to press their case for continued annual funding for both CBC and Radio-Canada. English and French TV services alike are allowed to air ads, which bring in a few hundred million dollars. With the ad market softening, that amount has been declining.

Canadian media are suffering. The financial weakness of our broadcasters and newspapers is revealed daily. The spread of news deserts continues apace. Even the CBC is feeling the pinch. In frequent presentations to Parliament and reports to the public, the CBC says it tries to do “all things for all people,” with a range of offerings in two official languages and several Indigenous ones. This goal is clearly impossible when eyeballs and ears are attracted to social media’s more entertaining qualities.

Indeed the internet bears unique responsibility for this collapse of traditional media. Canada’s government is attempting to remedy this by redirecting funds from Meta, X and other deep-pocketed sources that it says are taking advantage of traditional news media. This hasn’t worked, as Meta won’t co-operate and most of the Google funding hasn’t yet been distributed. Increasingly in Canada, as in the US, suspicion is growing about the motives for government largesse. Sequential Heritage ministers haven’t made a strong case for how that funding will come without strings or government interference.

Meanwhile other sources of new income haven’t appreciably boosted circulation numbers or broadcast audiences. Public trust in media continues to decline due to the heightened suspicion of all major institutions, especially government. And digital continues to be the accelerant on a widespread media fire.

One solution Government could play a better role by acting in an arm’s length manner. We need a Canadian version of CPB, for all media. Funding from government sources needs to be seen to be free from the influence of government. A “blue ribbon” panel of citizens could determine how much money should be allocated to various media, including the CBC. This would help restore public trust in journalism by acting as a neutral and accountable supporter of independent media. In turn, news media must foster an environment of contextual, local and investigative journalism by and for Canadians—because the future of our democracy depends on it.

peter menzies responds to jeffrey dvorkin

There is no reason why citizens should have their tax dollars used to prop up media promoting policies—left or right—to which they are opposed. Canadians who lean to the left shouldn’t have to pay taxes to support the National Post, which leans to the right, any more than conservative-minded Canadians should have to feed the bottom line of the Toronto Star, dedicated to the advancement of left-leaning causes.

This doesn’t mean that public policy support should not be provided for the consumption of news and a shared set of facts. As I will show, the current problem is that assistance is being provided at the wrong end of the food chain and is suppressing the innovation needed during a time of historic transition. In the meantime, I will challenge a couple of points.

Yes, the government has always “funded media,” but postal subsidies were never about subsidizing journalism; they were about subsidizing access to journalism by consumers. Newspapers would have been unharmed without these subsidies, while readers in rural and remote areas would have been burdened, having to pay more for local news. The case can similarly be made regarding magazines, although, as they have transitioned to online entities, this rationale has become more questionable.

It’s true that hundreds of publications have shut down in Canada. What needs to be added to the conversation is that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 250 new platforms—most of which are better equipped for the realities of the 21st century—have launched in Canada since 2008. It’s also important to note that Canadians now have access to news from thousands of global outlets. There is no shortage of news—except at the local level, where coverage of municipal councils and courts, for example, is often rudimentary. The more subsidy is given to prop up proprietors who aren’t meeting the public’s demand for this information, the less room there will be for innovators and entrepreneurs willing to do so. The government’s thumb, through subsidies, is permanently on the scale in favour of old structures struggling to innovate while suppressing startups with new energy and ideas.

The government’s thumb, through subsidies, is on the scale in favour of old, struggling media.

Journalism is not fundamental to democracy. It exists and even thrives in authoritarian regimes. Freedom of speech, civil rights, free and fair elections and an independent judiciary are the fundamentals of democracy. Provided journalism supports those fundamentals and delivers news in an objective fashion, it is useful to democracy. When it doesn’t do so, it can harm democracy. The Tehran Times and Pyongyang Times are both examples. Pravda, of course, is legendary. All employ journalists.

Among the civil rights most vital to democracy is a free press. Our democracy guarantees that people who distribute the news are free to do so in whatever fashion they please, moderated only by their ability to meet public—and not government—expectations. Studies invariably show that consumers want news that is thorough, objective and accompanied by a balance of opinion and analysis from a variety of perspectives. Some bias one way or the other in the opinion offerings is tolerated and even rewarded, provided the news can be trusted. The greater the pressure to be trusted and serve readers/consumers in the manner they wish to be served, the better those services will be. Subsidies lessen that pressure, because they decrease news organizations’ need to build trust with the public.

The more the media is funded by the government and politicians, the less people will trust it to hold government to account.

As for the CBC, it’s one thing for a public broadcaster to exist within a news ecosystem rich with independent organizations—a mix that imposes discipline on all involved. It is quite another to declare there can be no ill effects when the entire news industry exists only thanks to subsidy. All this situation does is diminish trust, which reduces public consumption of the news, which increases demands for subsidies. It’s also worth noting that the CBC was born of a desire on the part of the government of the day to control content on the airwaves.

We agree that societies function better when citizens have a shared set of facts they can use to organize their lives and that a stable news industry supportive of democratic principles serves the public good in providing that information. What needs public policy support, however, is the consumption, not the production, of that information. Allowing each citizen to deduct the cost of subscriptions up to $1,000 annually (up from the current $500) would provide such an incentive without the damage to trust and innovation that is being inflicted by current practices. Let the most trusted news providers win and the least trusted and incapable of adaptation lose.

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Some might find it remarkable that print has survived at all. Nonetheless with the December 2022 issue of Alberta Views we completed 25 years of publishing a print magazine. In this Jan/Feb 2023 issue we mark that anniversary and reflect on the cultural revolution we’ve witnessed unfold in the first decades of the new millennium.

In our very first year Myrna Kostash described the 25-year-olds of that time as already being comfortable with technology (“The Next Alberta,” Fall 1998). Now called Gen X, they were “at home with the ubiquity of the new media and excited by the possibilities inherent in the new technologies.” She continues, “If my generation is the first to have been exposed full-time to television, Generation Next, at the end of the 1990s, is playing computer-based games and surfing the internet instead.” She has hope for this generation, but grave concern for the society they need to find a place in: “How do webheads construct community in the rubble of disintegrating public works?… in the attack on the idea of public space—formerly defined, even in Alberta, as a collective consensus to invest in institutions serving the common good.”

It was the Klein era. Following the example of Reagan and Thatcher, his aim was to shrink the role of government, to lower taxes, cut funding to services, deregulate and privatize. In those early years Alberta Views was alarmed by the attack on public institutions. We documented the cuts to the funding of healthcare, education, social services and infrastructure, and we were concerned about the lack of critical commentary in the media. In the Sep/Oct 2001 issue David Taras and Larry Johnsrude made the case that “concentration of media ownership stifles the free market of ideas and therefore is not good for democracy.” (“Are our newspapers betraying us?”)

The Conservatives practised austerity, but where they did spend big was on technology, for example, building the SuperNet. In the Sep/Oct 2002 issue Mark Wolfe and Mary Ann Moser critiqued the plan (“The Wired, Wired West: Who knew The Alberta government has a plan to make this province the most wired in the world.”)

The SuperNet was originally a $300-million project ($193-million of it public) intended to connect 420 rural Alberta communities by 2004 to a high-speed digital network in places where private companies had no incentive to build. Eventually the SuperNet cost a billion dollars, and rural households still didn’t have adequate access to the internet.

Wolfe was skeptical from the get-go. “Leaving aside the wider question of general technological intrusion on our lives, I seriously question the planning process around the Alberta SuperNet. Keep in mind, the networks being constructed comprise only the hardware component of the project. In itself, there’s nothing terribly questionable about building for high-speed internet-like access at reasonable cost. If I lived in rural Alberta, I’d be delighted. What is questionable is the project’s planning process and the number of blind spots in its conception—in user expectations, efficiencies and social impact.”

Moser countered that the project wouldn’t provide service to individuals: “[The SuperNet] will connect a local school, hospital, library or municipal office, forming a hub that will allow internet service providers to offer rates in these communities competitive with those offered in cities. The strategy is designed to provide the same advantage to rural and urban dwellers alike.”

Wolfe was right to have reservations. Having not fulfilled its promise, by 2011 the government wanted even more money for the SuperNet. David Climenhaga observed, “Now that someone wants us to spend more money on it, it’s being described as a flop that made it no further than the town office and the public library in Smallsville and Elk’s Knuckle.”

By 2018 CBC reported that according to that year’s auditor general’s report, “Service Alberta did not properly manage and monitor the $1-billion in contracts the government signed with private companies to build the SuperNet…. Problems with the contracts extended over 17 years, from when the initial agreements were signed in 2001 to when a new contract was finally signed in 2018.”

Recently while COVID-19 raged, rural Alberta was still suffering from digital poverty. The CBC reported, “Charlene Smylie, who is running as councillor for Parkland County’s Division 5, said during the pandemic she’s seen local students without good internet access sitting in school or library parking lots to access wifi for remote schooling.”

At the same time as they were cutting funding for education the Conservative government was buying computers for schools. Despite cutbacks in other areas of education, the government injected $125-million between 1996 and 2001 into educational technology, including computers.

Linda Flanagan warned in the Sep/Oct 2002 issue (“Problems and Potential of Digital Technology for K-12”): “But technology cannot be a substitute for experiences in the physical, social world. Young children especially need to move, play, build, discuss and read. As we move deeper into the 21st century, public educators and those who support them must continue to look for ways to improve student learning and better prepare graduates for participation in the knowledge era. Clearly, the investment must be in people as well as machines. Only by understanding the new digital techniques and recognizing both their potential and their danger can schools take charge of computers to obtain the maximum benefit for students.”

The wired generation makes little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.

From its beginning, the Internet revolution was wreaking havoc on the print universe. The rise of digital technology exacerbated the fall of the city newspaper. The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald had been considered good papers when Southam owned them. In 1996 Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. bought them both, cut costs and reduced staff. In 2000 they were sold again to the Asper family’s CanWest Global and were required to run “national editorials,” compromising the independent voice of each newspaper. In 2009 a bankrupt CanWest sold its newspapers to Postmedia, which consolidated operations. Though they had promised not to, Postmedia merged the newsrooms of the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald and the two cities’ Suns.

We chronicled the decline of print newspapers over many years. In the May/June 2004 issue, Lisa Gregoire asked, “Are Alberta’s two big dailies telling you what you need to know?” (“The Slipping News.”) She quoted Robert Bragg, a former Calgary Herald reporter: “He says local coverage has become trite and forgettable: the entertainment section is obsessed with ‘looking up the skirts of famous actresses’ rather than covering the vibrant local arts scene; and city news doesn’t adequately reflect Calgary’s growth and diversity except in boosterism or tokenism. ‘It’s an embarrassment for a city this size to have a paper this shallow, this out-of-touch with whatever’s going on…. They don’t put enough resources into it.’”

Circulation was plummeting. At one time almost everyone read their city paper, but by 2003 only a third of households in both Edmonton and Calgary subscribed. By 2008 this was down to only a quarter of households, 26 per cent for the Journal, 27 per cent for the Herald. By 2015 paid circulation was down to less than a fifth of households.

What was contributing to this decline in circulation It was a vicious cycle: as quality went down, readers cancelled their subscriptions. As readers cancelled their subscriptions, quality went down. But really there were fewer readers because of online news. In the December 2008 issue Susan Ruttan argued that even though they were in decline, newspapers were more necessary than ever (“The Case for Newspapers”). Ruttan was there in the Hollinger era. “In the months after Black took over, a kind of panic gripped many of the senior managers of the chain; they knew Black’s libertarian views clashed radically with the mild-mannered liberal stance of most editorial pages.” She deplored what happened to the papers but she still believed in them.

“The traditional model of a newspaper, the thing that thumps on your doorstep at 6:00 a.m., may go—but that’s not the essence of newspapers. The essence is the content, the daily reporting by trained journalists who have sat through council meetings, read secret government reports, attended press conferences, interviewed parents of murder victims and cultivated contacts on their beat. No amount of chat room pontificating (or CNN talking head) can replace that grunt work. You may say ‘Mayor Bronconnier’s a good guy’ or ‘Edmonton needs a downtown arena,’ but how do you know Few people have the time to regularly watch Bronconnier at city hall, or to talk to experts about arenas. A reporter will do that for you. Increasingly, we turn to the internet, not newspapers, for our information. That’s the new battleground for the news business.”

In that same 2008 issue Todd Babiak reiterated that young people prefer online news to papers—if they read at all. (“Black and White and Dead All Over.”) He anticipated the coming age of fake news: “Canadian newsrooms are shrinking. Newspapers are shrinking. The move to websites has been vigorous. Young people—even smart young people—are getting their information from social networks. But even social networking needs a primary source. Where does it originate A growing cadre of citizen journalists, who are bound by neither training nor libel laws, took to the internet. They blogged, inventing and repeating rumours. They guessed. They commented on Facebook sites. For at least two generations of wired North Americans, there is little or no distinction between citizen journalists and professional journalists, between rumour and reporting.”

We focused on one of the better citizen journalists in our June 2009 issue. (“Citizen Bloggers: Online social media and networks provide new ways for Albertans to get political.”) Dave Cournoyer argued that online citizen journalists could fill the information gap as local political news coverage fell victim to cutbacks and layoffs at daily mainstream newspapers. He became a blogger because “I felt that with the consolidation of ownership of the daily newspapers and local television stations, the political discourse in Alberta was becoming narrower by the week. With a quick visit to the Blogger website, within minutes I had registered and launched my very own blog, www.daveberta.ca.”

Cournoyer demonstrated how out of touch certain politicians were by telling an amusing story. He’d registered the domain name www.edstelmach.ca for approximately $14.78 four months after Ed Stelmach became premier. When he was threatened with litigation, he went public, posting the letter from Stelmach’s lawyer on his blog.

Cournoyer was upbeat about the digital age. “Fully 85 per cent of Calgarians and 78 per cent of Edmontonians over the age of 16 go online. The percentage of citizens who use the internet to search for information about government or to communicate with politicians is also rising. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of the internet’s vast potential for citizenship.” He went on to show how politicians were using Facebook and Twitter and how like-minded citizens were finding each other on networking sites.

“Twitter has even made its presence felt in the Alberta Legislature. Using the tag #ableg, Twitter users across Alberta comment on and debate issues under discussion in the Legislature and Question Period. Citizens can follow live discussions in the Legislature and post ‘tweets’ instantly so that citizens in other cities know what’s going on under the dome before the mainstream media are able to tell them.”

He articulated the optimism current at that time about the promise of the internet and social media: “This is an exciting opportunity: the decentralization and democratization of news coverage is a positive evolution in media. The internet rewards innovation, and well-written and credible blogs could carry the same weight as a city newspaper. Now that citizens are realizing the power they hold to publish their own content and commentary, they will continue to contribute to and affect the dialogue.”

In what must be the understatement of the decade, Cournoyer observed, “Facebook allows citizens to find like-minded people by cross-referencing information such as ‘political orientation’ with ‘location’. The implications for citizenship and politics are vast.”

As unlikely as it was that the insights of bloggers could carry the weight of a traditional newspaper with its army of reporters, factcheckers and editors, newspapers were indeed dying. We asked if it was the end of our city newspapers again in the March 2017 issue (“Paper Thin: Deathwatch for Alberta’s big-city newspapers”). Ian Gill argued the firing of so many staff with the consolidation of newsrooms was the culmination of a steady decline in quality and readership.

“The newsroom mergers—a mushing of distinct journalistic formats, cultures and audiences—heralded the end of Alberta’s big-city newspapers as we had known them. When the dust settled, Edmontonians and Calgarians had to adjust to uniformity in their leading newspaper titles. The quality of the Journal, Herald and Suns, already in decline, fell precipitously.”

One long-time Journal subscriber explained why he wasn’t renewing his subscription: “Seeing someone who had written for the Journal for 30 years now appearing in the Sun as well was like having Wayne Gretzky playing for both the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames.”

Two of our own columnists had different opinions about the seriousness of the loss of the daily city newspaper. Fred Stenson in “Survival of the Richest: One future for newspapers” (May 2018) said newspapers were obsolete:

“Well, there’s this digital thing that puts news into your home, car or purse. Such news is all but instant. Tsunami on the other side of the planet. I’ve got it in my pocket minutes after the waves hit shore. I’d go so far as to say that if Kim Jong Un or The Donald accidentally starts a nuclear war, I’ll find out on Twitter before I hear a siren—and, as for finding out in the newspaper, maybe never. Newspapers—printed onto paper, wheeled out of a press, put into trucks to travel far distances… If the idea of news is that it be new, the cumbersome daily production and transportation of printed pages is a whole lot more than a small problem. Whalebone corset, steamboat, stagecoach, draft horse, transistor radio, typewriter, newspaper.”

Stenson saw no difference in reading a newspaper online or on paper. “It isn’t whether paper newspapers survive [but] whether iconic newspapers can buy enough time to lure their customers across to a digital platform.”

Graham Thomson in “Who’s Keeping Watch?” (May 2020) had a different perspective on this. Online newspapers had not maintained the quality of the old print newspapers. In 1992 there were at least 25 members of the Alberta Legislature press gallery. “Alberta’s four major newspapers had a dozen or so reporters and columnists based at the Legislature. Today, those four papers are all part of the Postmedia chain, which has assigned just two reporters to the Legislature. It makes it harder for journalists to make sense of what’s happening and to hold a government to account…. You could argue that in a digital age, when news conferences are livestreamed on Facebook, you don’t need reporters assigned to the Legislature. But you do. Reporters know the players, the issues and the context.” Thomson agreed with Ruttan that what is essential is daily reporting by trained journalists who have witnessed what’s going on. This is the opposite of what’s happening online.

Because of digital media, a huge segment of the population is now badly misinformed.

Anyone can generate content on digital media such as Facebook and Twitter and TikTok. Smartphone cameras now meet professional requirements for news picture quality. The most politically charged news events of our time have been captured on the cellphones of bystanders. When “everyone is a content creator,” some believe that smartphones can make up for the absence of reporters, just as Cournoyer believed that blogs could replace newspapers.

But there’s no guarantee of accuracy or factuality in online social media reports. Certainly in the beginning nothing obligated those platforms to ensure that the information people see was verifiable. Being outrageous is more interesting than being accurate. Conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies spread faster than truth. People are vulnerable to believing this misinformation (accidental inaccuracy) and disinformation (purposeful deception). So now we have a huge segment of the population badly misinformed.

One of the most important functions of the daily city newspaper was to provide a shared text for citizens. When everyone read the same paper every day, they had a common base of information to discuss a problem. The proliferation and variety of sources of digital online information mean that citizens no longer have a shared text to give them a common understanding of reality.

“Big data” technology enables the sending of news to digital devices tailored to the preferences of the owner of the device. So you get information only about subjects you’re interested in and opinions you agree with. Far from having a shared text, each of us gets different texts reinforcing our biases. This fragments society. Narrowminded groups are convinced that only they are right and others holding different views are crazy.

By 2016 digital media had ushered in the Trump era and the gaslighting of the entire world. Trump’s communication medium of choice was Twitter, a platform that even its new owner Elon Musk called a potential “free-for-all hellscape.” Musk is a “free speech absolutist,” but free speech must have limits. As Evan Osenton observed in his editorial in our September 2018 issue, “Governments in Canada can restrict speech when it does real harm to other people—not just psychological harm (through denying facts), but exposing them to the risk of violence.”

Who could have anticipated the evils unleashed by the technological revolution and the rise of social media—polarization, lies, seemingly the end of truth? In the post-truth world, objective facts have less influence in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Truth is not determined by evidence, but rather by the number of people willing to believe and share an idea. That’s a dangerous world, one of division, demonization, fragmentation, breakdown.

The demise of print and the rise of digital paralleled the demise of “we” and the rise of “me.” Individual freedom was beginning to take precedence over the common good—the well-being of society as a whole. The libertarian idolizes the rugged and willful, independent individual. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There is no such thing as society.” Her view was that we’re only an aggregate of separate autonomous individuals responsible only for ourselves.

But tell that to an epidemiologist. Disease behaves differently in different societies, as we learned so well in the pandemic. The COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population, as at November 5, 2022, was 326 in the US, 123 in Canada and 37 in Japan. Your chance of being sick has less to do with you as an individual and more to do with the society of which you are a part. That society affects you in myriad ways.

For example, in our November 2021 issue, we found that the pandemic had exposed systemic horrors in long-term care in Canada (“Fixing Long-Term Care”). “Of all countries in the world, Canada had the highest percentage of its COVID-19 deaths coming from long-term care: 80 per cent…. In our most-stricken long-term care homes, staff walked away, patients died of starvation and dehydration, in their own excrement, alone—in Canada! … We’re a profoundly ageist society. We do not value older adults; we value them less when they’re not ‘unit-producing individuals’…Neither does our society value the work of caregiving, work often done by women—and in the case of long-term care, almost entirely by women, over half of whom are women of colour.”

If we’re going to improve conditions for individuals, we have to change society. And one of the only ways to do that is through good government. An effective response to COVID-19 required effective collective action. When a plague sweeps through, it can’t be every man for himself. We are literally in it together. This is anathema to the fans of Ayn Rand, including our unelected premier.

Digital media created a wildfire of misinformation about COVID. Timothy Caulfield from the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta said at the time that “misinformation is a dire, imminent threat to the lives of all Canadians and is proven to be one of the factors fuelling COVID-19 infections, and dissuading Canadians from getting vaccinated.”

The protests against health restrictions, the occupation of Ottawa by the truckers “freedom convoy” and the Coutts border blockade were all fuelled by digital misinformation. The situation is made worse when politicians lend their support to these misguided efforts because their right-wing ideology meshes with the libertarian sentiments of the protesters.

About digital misinformation Caulfield says, “It’s exhausting to see the rage and the consistency of the messaging. They always fit into this one basket. If you think vaccines don’t work, you think monkeypox is a conspiracy, climate change isn’t real… you can go down the list and tick the boxes. You’ve got to counter this stuff, even if you think it’s absurd.” Caulfield has spearheaded a campaign to counter the “infodemic” with evidence-based content. He refers to the conspiracy theory that COVID-19 vaccines were a cover to implant trackable microchips in the population. “It was almost laughable, but a big hunk of North American society is at least open to it.”

Do our current leaders pretend to believe conspiracy theories to appeal to the duped masses, or do they actually believe, having been duped themselves Premier Danielle Smith presents herself as a sympathizer with the “freedom convoy,” seems to admire Putin, says cancer is preventable,  believes that the World Economic Forum is a secret cabal exploiting the pandemic to dismantle capitalism, and asserts that the unvaccinated are the most discriminated-against group she’s ever seen.

Believers in reason were gratified when, in October 2022, Alberta Court of King’s Bench Justice Grant Dunlop ruled that the UCP government’s order to lift mask mandates for school children was unreasonable. He made it clear that such a decision is not for politicians to make, but for the chief medical officer of health, who has the knowledge and the authority. The top doctor’s concern is the health of the entire public, unlike the partisan politician seeking popularity with her base. The justice also found that UCP Education Minister Adriana LaGrange created “widespread misunderstanding” by saying that schoolboards could not impose their own mask mandates when her statement didn’t, in fact, carry legal weight.

Almost immediately Premier Smith objected and asserted “our government’s full authority with respect to this and other health and education matters.” For her, individual wilfulness takes precedence over the rule of law and the well-being of society. Given her susceptibility to the questionable information circulating in the online digital world, what kind of leadership can she provide?

As citizens concerned with our shared public life, we need valid information based on sound reasoning and solid evidence. In a secular pluralistic society, we need to respect agreed-upon criteria for determining whether a statement is credible. We have to be able to come to agreements in order for society to function.

It’s not enough to access information online. Print publications are still valuable.

Over the 25 years that we have been publishing Alberta Views, the digital realm has triumphed. But we still stand by print. It goes without saying that we can’t know what’s happening in the world without trained reporters and qualified journalists paid by publishers. But beyond that I would also argue that it’s not enough to access information only online. Print publications are still valuable.

Digital publication is fast and cheap, but it is also ephemeral. Digital media can modify or delete contents and they disappear. Browsing online content on a digital device with texts pinging in, it’s easy to be distracted. An online article has links that take you down the rabbit hole. More importantly, we don’t retain or even understand online material as well as print. A mounting body of research bears this out.

The opportunity to investigate the different effects of print and digital arose in schools. Some school districts no longer provide students with textbooks; they issue iPads with downloaded e-books. Studies comparing the performance of students learning from hard-copy books and those with only digital versions show the consequences. An overview of the research by Bella Ross et al. in 2017 found “an overwhelming number of studies reviewed suggested that print-based texts contributed more to increased comprehension and recall than e-texts. For example, Singer and Alexander (2016) found that students were better able to recall key points linked to the main idea and other relevant concepts when reading print. Students reading print-based texts performed significantly better on a reading comprehension test than those reading e-texts.”

Screens and digital media also cause stress and exhaustion. More time on screen is having a bad effect on how well we sleep, so much so that doctors recommend no screen time for at least an hour before you intend to fall asleep.

Part of the difficulty of reading on screen is that you can only see a certain amount of material at a time and you don’t know where you are in the document. In a print publication you know where you are. It’s easier to find a passage on a print page. Print gives you a better mental spatial orientation to the physical layout of a text. If you need to reread a section to better understand an idea, it’s easier to find that section in a physical document, or to flip ahead to get an overview.

Print has other advantages. Since we have to spend so much time on screen for work or school, print is a relief. It is a slow medium, conducive to thoughtfulness. A print document conveys a sense of significance.

Sitting in a chair with a book or magazine is a pleasurable experience. The mind is far less likely to wander reading print. It’s not just that the reader can focus on the text without the distractions and interruptions of a digital device. Reading print is a visceral experience that involves sight, touch and smell. The thickness of the document, the feel of the paper, its texture and scent engage the senses and draw the reader to pay more attention.

But the pleasure of print pales when considering its most important characteristic: the fact that the printed page exists in the physical world. Once we commit something to print and publish it, it’s out there. It can’t be changed. So we take extra care to factcheck, to verify information. That makes print more trustworthy.

And we need trustworthiness now more than ever.

Jackie Flanagan is the founder of Alberta Views and for years was its editor. She doesn’t own a cell phone or visit Twitter.

The post Publishing Through a Cultural Revolution appeared first on Alberta Views.

Today conventional broadcasters—private radio and TV stations across Canada—are in crisis. They’ve lost advertisers to Google and Facebook and audiences to streaming services such as Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Disney, Prime and Apple. The CRTC doesn’t regulate these international giants, and they don’t have to pay hefty licence fees or pay into Canadian production funds the way conventional broadcasters do. Technically, the companies have an exemption—but it’s an open question whether the CRTC has the authority to regulate them at all.

Bill C-11 would bring big corporate streamers within the ambit of the CRTC. The bill will, eventually, compel big corporations that want to operate in Canada to tithe into production funds that support Canadian filmmakers and recording artists. The government estimates—rather optimistically—that this could amount to $1-billion a year in funding for Canadian creators.

Bill C-11 will also demand that streamers make CanCon more “discoverable” on their sites, potentially by tweaking their algorithms to serve up more Canadian digital content to Canadian consumers—whether they want it or not.

I find it hard to embrace legislation that aims to spoonfeed Canadian content to audiences, as though CanCon were prunes or kale or cod liver oil, which we have to be coaxed to consume because it’s “good for us” rather than something we want because it’s cool and creative.

I worry too that the discoverability provisions could backfire. If YouTube, for example, keeps serving up CanCon you aren’t interested in, and you don’t click, you could actually prejudice a Canadian artist’s chances of being seen, by sending the algorithm the message that this isn’t content people want.

So, yes. There are lots of pros and cons to this legislation—and lots of room for the Senate to improve the bill by clarifying its provisions and ensuring it doesn’t have unintended consequences.

But for months now the debate about C-11 has been hijacked and poisoned by political actors, first in Ottawa, later in the Alberta UCP leadership race, who keep pretending the bill does all manner of nefarious things that it simply doesn’t do. My email, voicemail and social media feeds have been overwhelmed with thousands of messages from people who honestly believe C-11 is a censorship bill or Communist plot or scheme by the World Economic Forum to destroy Canadian democracy, to eliminate free speech and to end Canadian society as we know it.

This disinformation campaign has convinced many that C-11 will allow the government to remove their Twitter or Facebook posts, to censor their YouTube videos, to control everything they watch or read or listen to online, even to punish them based on vaccination status. None of that is true. The bill has nothing to do with text-based sites such as Twitter. It specifically exempts video posts made by non-commercial users. It has no provisions that censor anything. It does not regulate political speech. Yet the hysteria has reached such a fever pitch that politicians have been receiving threats of violence.

Our political ecosystem is now awash in paranoia, conspiracy-mongering and dark QAnon fantasies.

Bill C-11 is the latest whipping boy. But it’s part of a pattern. Our political ecosystem is now awash in paranoia and conspiracies and dark QAnon-adjacent fantasies. Mundane bills are misrepresented and distorted beyond recognition, turned into bogeymen, all the better to terrorize and bamboozle frightened, angry, vulnerable Canadians. As an independent senator, it’s my job to hold the government to account, and I’ve not been shy to point out flaws in C-11 and other federal legislation. But it’s damnably difficult to have a good faith debate about any public policy these days, drowned out by the cacophony of shrieking about cabals and treason and the WEF.

“Mainstream” politicians who cynically stoke these flames are playing with fire. Because once you destroy public trust and confidence in our political and democratic institutions… You won’t just get it back if and when you’re in charge.

So by all means let’s have vigorous, impassioned debate about the issues that matter most. Let’s oppose bills we don’t like. But let’s argue about what’s actually in those bills, not about international plots and global conspiracies and imaginary monsters. We have enough real problems in our province and country without inventing phantoms to haunt our dreams.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

The post Let’s Debate CanCon appeared first on Alberta Views.

Historically, along with writing local news stories, journalists at rural newspapers also wrote thoughtful, independent columns that stirred the political pot. That’s never been easy in Alberta. In High River in 1902, journalist and satirist Bob Edwards first published his newspaper the Eye Opener. Today the national Bob Edwards Award is given annually to “provocative individuals who are not afraid to speak their minds.” But back then he left town within a year, in 1903, according to his biographer Grant MacEwan, after finding himself on the wrong side of “the town’s two personalities… One, with the sparkle of good champagne, recognized real worth in the man who had been guilty of creating a certain amount of social turmoil; the other, serious and humourless, seemed to resent anything that was unconventional.”

In times of political turmoil, however, columns in rural papers helped sway public opinion. When the Ku Klux Klan brought an ideology of hate to Alberta politics in the 1920s and 1930s, editors at the Lacombe Western Globe, the Vegreville Observer and the Drumheller Mail wrote editorials that undermined the Klan. “What is more humorous than hearing of a group of full-grown serious-minded men,” wrote Archie Key of the Mail, “solemnly conclaving in inverted sugar bags and 19th century nightgowns—but the most humorous aspect of the Klan to our mind is the fact that they believe they have a God-given right to regulate public morals, influence local politics and attack any organized faith with which they disagree.”

In 1937 William Aberhart’s Social Credit government brought forward the Accurate News and Information Act—intended to make journalists reveal their sources to the government and require newspapers to print government press releases verbatim. Ninety community papers in Alberta joined with the Edmonton Journal in writing sharp editorials and launching a court case that helped kill the Act. For this the Journal won a Pulitzer Prize and the community papers were awarded a special Pulitzer certificate for “defense of the freedom of the press” in 1938.

Such pointed local commentary is now rare in rural Alberta. In part this is because of the relentless decline of print newspapers, which across Canada have been cutting staff, amalgamating and even closing under severe financial stress—a situation made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. But the scarcity of critique in the local paper may also be due, perhaps, to newspaper owners afraid to “rock the boat” in places where conservative parties usually win electoral majorities.

Simon Ducatel, the Editor of the Sundre Round Up from 2015 to 2020, has seen the decline of newspapers—and column-writing opportunities—over the course of his career. He graduated from the SAIT journalism program in Calgary and got his first job as a local reporter and semi-regular column writer at the Vulcan Advocate, a Postmedia paper, in 2007. “When I started,” he says, “production was in-house, we had a production person doing ads and laying out pages. Within a year that person was gone. Production got outsourced to High River, then centralized into Calgary. It was kind of depressing, all these people losing their jobs around you. That trend didn’t really change when I came out here [to Sundre].”

Sundre (pop. 2,729) is a town in the lower foothills, in Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre, a constituency where in 2012 the Wildrose Party and the Progressive Conservatives combined got 92 per cent of the vote. In 2019 the United Conservative Party’s Jason Nixon (now Alberta’s environment minister, who lives near Sundre) won with 81.6 per cent. In this context Ducatel was the sole full-time reporter at the paper. He covered local news and wrote weekly columns with headlines such as: “Wealth inequality drives poverty”; “Public servants worth investing in”; “Conserving natural resources shouldn’t be controversial” (the title of his column about the need to protect the Bighorn country west of Sundre, a favourite haunt of off-highway-vehicle users); and “Acceleration of climate change [a] legitimate cause for concern.”

“I want to try and provide a different perspective,” he says, when asked about his choice of topics. “I don’t want to contribute to the echo-chamber.”

Local feedback on his columns was both positive and negative, he says, “but I have to give credit to the late Myron Thompson [the former Reform Party MP who was then a Sundre town councillor, retiring in 2017]. He and I butted heads, but for the most part it was amicable. If I wrote an editorial he didn’t like, he didn’t have any qualms about coming into the office and saying, ‘I want to talk to you about this.’ I told him my perspective and he told me his. At the end he’s no longer mad, we shake hands, and we say, ‘Until next time you come in.’ Once in a blue moon he would say, ‘Young man, you hit the nail on the head.’ Which goes to show there’s some hope—you have to be able to have those conversations and start from a place of mutual respect.”

In spring 2020 Great West Media closed five community newspapers, including the Sundre Round Up, amalgamating them into a regional paper, The Albertan, for which Ducatel remains the Sundre correspondent. One of his last columns was in May of that year, after the UCP tore up the government’s contract with the Alberta Medical Association, and doctors at the Moose and Squirrel clinic in Sundre said the UCP’s new physician funding framework meant they would have to withdraw some medical services. Nixon told local doctors, “Now is not the time for division”—a statement that Ducatel said was “a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.” The column was online for two hours and then taken down—a disappearance noted by readers in the rest of Alberta, who briefly made “Ducatel” a trending topic on Twitter. 

Ducatel no longer writes columns. “The role of journalism here is to tell people what’s happening in this community, whether it’s town council, or sports, or features on local people. That’s my focus,” he says. “But I miss writing columns and opinion pieces. I definitely didn’t want to stop. I was told my columns weren’t needed anymore [because of] the restructuring.”

The regional paper now publishes a syndicated columnist, the Calgary-based Chris Nelson, whose work also runs across Canada in the National Post. 

 Medicine Hat—Where Drew Barnes (Cypress-Medicine Hat, Independent) and Michaela Glasgo (Brooks-Medicine Hat, UCP) are the local MLAs—is another conservative jurisdiction where local columnists have drawn attention since the UCP formed government. Scott Schmidt, the layout editor for the Medicine Hat News, began writing a weekly column, “Laying It Out,” in September 2019. An early series of columns focused on Premier Jason Kenney’s promise to balance the budget by 2023. “According to the recently released MacKinnon Report, that feat needs to be accomplished in the public sector through attrition, farming out services to the private sector and salary restraint of employees,” wrote Schmidt. On “attrition”—public sector job cuts where the job task doesn’t disappear—he wrote, “The only possible outcome in these situations is having another job (person) absorb new, added work. I mean, really, most of us work in the private sector, which is supposedly more efficient (it’s not, but that’s for another time) and I can’t be the only one around here who has witnessed job elimination followed by extra work, followed by lower morale, followed by decreased quality in product. Am I?”

Along with then-Medicine Hat News reporter Jeremy Appel, who also wrote critical columns, including the widely shared “Energy war room an expensive joke at best,” Schmidt got a lot of attention from readers across Alberta, and the paper got a bump in digital subscriptions. Schmidt and Appel also started a podcast, The Forgotten Corner, in which they talk to progressive Alberta activists, journalists and politicians. Speaking on the podcast in early 2021 to Jeremy Klaszus, editor of the independent online Calgary news site The Sprawl (where Appel is now a reporter), Schmidt mused on the “interesting circumstances” created at the paper by the popularity of the columns. “What do you do when you are a daily newspaper in the conservative epicentre of the most conservative place [in Canada],” he said, “and you’ve got these columnists that go against the grain What do you do when that’s simultaneously getting complaints and is the most well-read thing by a long shot It brings in the readers, [but] people don’t phone in to say, ‘I’m keeping my subscription because of Scott.’ They phone in to say, ‘Tell that socialist to fuck off or I’m leaving.’”

In 2021 parent company Alberta Newspaper Group cut the newsroom staff at the Medicine Hat News to three full-time reporter positions, the bare bones for the paper in a city of over 63,000 people. Schmidt kept his layout job, and column, but on his podcast he spoke to political blogger David Climenhaga about the cuts. “COVID hit and pretty much everyone got laid off,” he said. “You start really eyeing your own journalistic mortality at that point, especially when you’re two years into writing a column that has guaranteed you’ll never get hired at another newspaper in your life. Like, this is it—if the Medicine Hat News is done, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need a new career.” 

On February 27, after the UCP delivered the 2021 budget, Schmidt wrote that “slashing the public sector while simultaneously adding record debt” had brought Alberta “[a] big deficit and none of the rewards…. Austerity during recessions is a path to failure.” On May 15 he wrote that the UCP government “is exactly what a Wildrose government would have looked like.”

“A lot of people think I’m doing this because I want the NDP to be in charge,” he says, in a phone interview. “That doesn’t have anything to do with it. This isn’t about partisan politics. It’s about people realizing that our conservative politicians across North America have shifted so far out of whack to the right. And people don’t want that. It wasn’t just COVID that ruined Kenney’s poll numbers. He was crashing before COVID hit. His ideology is bad for people.”

Roughly a two-hour drive due east of Red Deer, in the constituency of Drumheller-Stettler, the town of Coronation (pop. 940), may not be an obvious place to find hope for independent media that feature diverse political voices. In 2012 the Wildrose and the PCs got 93 per cent of the vote between them in Drumheller-Stettler. In 2019 Nate Horner garnered 76.7 per cent of the vote for the UCP. In this context, then, it’s perhaps unexpected to read an editorial on March 20, 2020, in the East Central Alberta Review—the riding’s largest paper, published in Coronation—which began: “As Premier Jason Kenney dribbles out budget cuts in dribs and drabs, it intentionally makes it hard for Albertans to realize the cumulative damage he is doing to the soul and fibre of Alberta’s rural communities.” 

Other weekly editorials are also surprising, such as the April 27, 2021, edition, “Individuals can’t solve systemic problems,” or the one from February 3 this year, which argued: “COVID-19 showed everyone just how poorly provinces have managed long-term care and the absolute need for national standards under the Canada Health Act…. It also exposed the lie of ‘efficiency’ preached by private sector providers, when, in fact, efficiency is simply cutting staff and lowering standards of care…. ‘Efficient’ is code for siphoning as much taxpayer dollars as possible into shareholder returns.”

Brenda Schimke is the editorial writer at the East Central Alberta Review. She was “born and raised in rural Alberta” and, in the latter half of a varied career working in “management or finances or administration” at places such as public and Catholic schools and an oil and gas company, she began writing a column for the paper in the late 1990s. Since then, she’s won three awards from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. “I have a publisher who believes in publishing different opinions, as long as we don’t cross the line of libel and our facts are right,” she says. “My primary interests are public healthcare, public education, long-term care and the environment. If I don’t have something on those topics, I’m [also] passionate about all the misinformation around financial issues. It drives me crazy that the government so misrepresents how equalization payments work.”

Schimke’s column provokes fervent feedback. “Sometimes the [local] comments can be very harsh,” she says, “especially when they come from people I know well—a relative or a long-time friend. But I lick my wounds, and then I go back to the place that differing opinions are critical in a functioning democracy.”

The publisher of the paper, Joyce Webster, says that “differing opinions” are also good for business. Webster bought the independent weekly community newspaper in 1985, when it was the Coronation Review and had a print run under 1,000. Today, the renamed East Central Alberta Review is both a digital local news site and a print paper that’s distributed free to 27,500 homes in over 90 towns, villages and hamlets from near Red Deer to the Saskatchewan boundary. Webster attributes the growth—an anomaly in the newspaper world—in part to “a niche market out here in east central Alberta,” where agriculture service providers target ads to a large farming population. But she also credits columnists such as Schimke and Herman Schwenk (a local farmer who wrote a conservative-minded column from 2003 until he died in March 2021). The columnists “generate a lot of feedback,” says Webster, “from letters to the editor and whatnot. That’s so important in a community newspaper, to get people to think, to read different views and come to their own conclusions…. I think that’s what grew our strength in readership—because of the columns, we didn’t lean all one way.”

Though revenues initially declined with COVID-19, in 2021 they’ve returned close to pre-pandemic levels and Webster remains optimistic. “I think newspapers will survive,” she says, “because I think social media can’t maintain democracy like newspapers can.”

“That’s probably why I keep writing,” says Schimke. “I’ve been around since the days of Ernest Manning [premier, 1943–1967], and the area I come from only has one viewpoint most of the time. If you’re never exposed to another viewpoint, then we’re going to continue to not have an option to make things better.”

The post The Cracks in the Culture of Conformity appeared first on Alberta Views.

Something the two dealers probably knew when they made their swap was that it would do no good. Why Well, there’s this digital thing that puts news into your home, car or purse. Such news is all but instant. Tsunami on the other side of the planet. I’ve got it in my pocket minutes after the waves hit shore. I’d go so far as to say that if Kim Jong Un or The Donald accidentally starts a nuclear war, I’ll find out on Twitter before I hear a siren—and, as for finding out in the newspaper, maybe never. Newspapers—printed onto paper, wheeled out of a press, put into trucks to travel far distances… If the idea of news is that it be new, the cumbersome daily production and transportation of printed pages is a whole lot more than a small problem.

Whalebone corset, steamboat, stagecoach, draft horse, transistor radio, typewriter, newspaper.

For those of us who grew up with the physical newspaper, this evolutionary trend away from one’s tangible morning friend is a sad business. A little panic-inducing, even. What will I do with that part of morning But, really, aren’t we being disingenuous Most of us have already absorbed the fact that when we open the door and grab our freezing newspaper, half of what’s in it we already know. When we go to the coffee shop, no longer is a free newspaper lying there. Nor are we all that willing to be the guinea pig who finds the necessary coins and goes back outside to find the box on the corner, and… What the hell Bang! Bang! Bang!

Instead, we pull out our computer or cell phone, tap into the free wifi, and find out what’s happening now! Do that enough times and the allure of a digital newspaper becomes real, something we may even be willing to subscribe to.

We’ve got more than a hundred billionaires in this country, many already involved in media. If they want into the newspaper play, they’d better step up.

The truth is I’m not going to go to any trouble to acquire a physical newspaper from now on. It would have to be on a table two feet away and, even then, because it is probably a newspaper whose values do not intersect mine at any point, I would only be reading it to stimulate my bile gland—not with an eye to subscribing or buying it in future.

So what’s the issue, really It isn’t whether paper newspapers survive that matters; that eagle has flown or is flapping mightily to get away from bankruptcy. The real question is whether iconic newspapers can buy enough time to lure their customers across to a digital platform. That question matters, and the answer is not obvious.

The fate of the truly great newspapers (international and national) is being decided this minute. Consolidations, since about 2008, have not been about making paper editions profitable but about making the most admired brands able to win the race for the digital news market. Witness how hard The New York Times, The Guardian and the New Yorker have been advertising their digital editions.

Also, look at the folks who have been acquiring the best-known newspapers and magazines. Start with Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world’s most wealthy person according to Forbes. In 2013 he purchased the Washington Post. A person with his business acumen probably wants more than another way to transmit the news that The Donald is off his nut. Truth is, American billionaires have been buying a lot of top newspapers and magazines in the last while. Not long after Bezos bought the Post, John Henry (owner of the Boston Red Sox) bought The Boston Globe. A Mexican billionaire owns the biggest share in The New York Times. And so on.

The legendary newspapers and magazines are probably a good buy for those who can afford them, because those are the brands consumers are most likely to choose when they start paying for digital news. Witness the early success of the digital Guardian. Also interesting are startup entrepreneurs floating new brands (iPolitics comes to mind). These newbies are attracting customers the old-fashioned way: with timely and reliable news, clever analysis, good writers.

The question in Canada is why the billionaire thing isn’t happening here. Or, wait a minute; maybe it is. Note that Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the enormously wealthy Thomson family’s investment company, bought the last 15 per cent of The Globe and Mail (the shares it didn’t already own) in 2015.

We’ve got more than a hundred billionaires in this country, many already involved in some aspect of media. If they want into the newspaper play, they’d better step up. Otherwise their buddies will get there first.

Fred Stenson’s most recent novel is Who By Fire (Doubleday).Other books include The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

The post Survival of the Richest appeared first on Alberta Views.

“Came here Saturday night to see the play A Christmas Carol. The theatre is a little small, lots of walking up stairs if you are seated in the higher rows. They need more bartenders and servers during the intermission though as there were huge lines. They do one thing that I never seen before, you can pre-order your drinks before the play starts and they will be ready for you during intermission. I thought that was an excellent idea to avoid the long lines. Overall, nice theatre, a little dated but the play was good.”

—Yelp review, Theatre Calgary, by Mary S. in Ontario

Is this the future of arts criticism in Alberta? For people seeking an informed opinion on visual arts, classical music or theatre, pickings are slim. The province’s major dailies have cut arts coverage severely, and the free daily Metro favours popular music, movies and TV shows over local shows. Edmonton still has Vue Weekly, but Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly folded in 2015. CBC Radio’s local arts coverage is inconsistent. Nationally, The Globe and Mail ventures west to review the odd performance, but not enough to provide an informed perspective on the province’s culture.

In the absence of critical analysis, we may be left with online reviews by audience members such as “Mary S. in Ontario,” or commentary in 140 characters or fewer via Twitter.

“Everyone can review something,” says Jessica Goldman, a former Calgary theatre critic now based in Houston. “Everyone can say, ‘I liked it, the costumes were great, the singing was wonderful, it was a great show, go see it.’ Everyone can do that. That’s not criticism.”

Goldman arrived in Calgary in 2010 and soon started her own blog (applause-meter.com) to add “quality critical information” on the performing arts. “When I first got to Calgary there was still a holdover from a time when arts writing felt it needed to be cheerleading instead of critique,” she says, adding the city suffered from a “we’re the small guys” mentality.

During the four years she lived in the city, Goldman became the theatre critic for CBC Calgary’s Eyeopener morning radio program and was a founding member of the Calgary Theatre Critics’ Awards—The Critters—along with Bob Clark and Stephen Hunt of the Calgary Herald and Louis B. Hobson of the Calgary Sun. Goldman covered the local scene on air and online until 2014, when her husband was transferred to Houston. When Hunt, the Herald’s sole remaining theatre critic, lost his job in 2016, she says Hobson was left with the “impossible” task of covering theatre for both dailies.

A theatre critic considers a show deeply and intellectually, Goldman says, looking at the playwright and the company, asking why the play is being staged now, what’s different, what audiences get from it and what questions it raises. Good criticism can be read not only before the show but afterwards for context and perspective. Now, “We’re losing that. And, so all you get is somebody’s opinion in the moment.”

Although theatre is gradually disappearing from the dailies, it gets more ink than classical music or visual arts. The Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra presents several concerts a month, but few are reviewed. In August 2016 the CPO paid for a Q&A with Rune Bergmann, the new music director of the CPO, to appear in the Calgary Herald. The newspaper offers the service as a marketing tool that promises to get “brand messages to audiences across a myriad of touch points.”

In Edmonton, an online petition called on the Journal to reverse proposed cuts that would eliminate previews and limit reviews of classical music events. Musicians count on coverage for publicity, says petition organizer Isis Tse, who plays cello in the U of A orchestra and as a freelancer. With just 735 supporters by April, the petition has failed to sway the Journal.

Tse is also student representative for the Edmonton Chamber Music Society, where she works to engage a younger audience—people who tend not to read newspapers. Now they have an alternative. In January 2017 a new website (edmontonclassicalmusic.org) launched, featuring classical music reviews by Mark Morris, a writer, award-winning librettist, music critic and theatre director who also freelances for the Journal.

Visual arts exhibitions are getting even less attention. The Alberta dailies have no one left to critique these, although previews appear occasionally, especially for big shows. Many more are missed, such as the Glenbow exhibition of “Rough Country: The Strangely Familiar in Mid-20th Century Alberta Art” in Calgary, featuring notable artists Maxwell Bates, Laura Evans Reid, John Snow, W.L. Stevenson and Dorothy Henzell Willis. It’s even tougher for smaller galleries and artist-run centres such as Edmonton’s Latitude 53 or Calgary’s Truck Gallery.

Sarah Adams is a visual artist and arts advocate who graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2006 and now works at the Rozsa Foundation. At school, she says, students discuss each other’s work and share ideas on how to improve it. When students graduate, those critical voices go silent. “Criticism is often looked at as a negative, when actually it’s a huge positive.”

Arts critic, journalist and independent curator Nancy Tousley has been writing about the visual arts since the 1970s, including more than 20 years at the Calgary Herald. She earned a Governor General’s Award in 2011 for her contribution to visual and media arts. In a nomination statement, independent curator and writer Peter White wrote that Tousley demonstrated critical intelligence informed by theory, a strong historical consciousness and a wide range of art production. “Rather than judgmental, [Tousley’s voice] has always been characterized by good judgment and fairness,” he wrote.

Tousley majored in English at Vassar College and took fine arts courses, then attended the Brooklyn Museum Art School and later worked at the museum’s department of prints and drawing. She moved to Toronto in 1975 and worked as a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Two years later she moved to Calgary and started freelancing for the Herald, becoming a staff arts writer in 1980. In 2010 she left the paper and became the first critic-in-residence at ACAD. Today she curates exhibitions and writes for publications such as Canadian Art and Border Crossings.

Tousley describes a critic as an “advanced member of the audience” for art. She says visual arts criticism requires good writing skills, knowledge of art history, an ability to provide context, and the insight to engage with a work at all levels: aesthetic, cultural, social and sometimes political. “The best arts criticism is not about handing out a report card.”

She has watched as arts coverage disappeared from newspapers. “It’s one of the first things to go in tough economic times,” she says.

“The best arts criticism is not about handing out a report card.” —Nancy Tousley

Theatre critic Liz Nicholls left the Journal in December 2016 after more than three decades. That followed the January 2016 departure of Stephen Hunt from the Herald after 10 years there. The Critters folded that fall. Since losing his full-time job, Hunt has been hired by Herald owner Postmedia as a freelancer to write branded arts content, including the Rune Bergmann article. “It’s kind of like getting divorced and then continuing to date your ex,” he says.

This year the High Performance Rodeo hired Hunt as its writer-in-residence to cover and review shows in the January 2017 festival. To counter the obvious conflict of interest, managing producer Ann Connors gave Hunt free rein to write what he wanted, even if it was negative.

Hunt acknowledges it was a “strange situation.” Although Connors stayed true to her word, he says he felt more likely to “self-censor” his reviews. But he argues that if nobody provides local coverage, shows that don’t have “brand recognition” risk being overlooked. “I’m sure what it eventually leads to down the road is… less adventurous programming, less small stuff, a tougher time for emerging artists.” For example, Hunt says Brotherhood: The Hip Hopera, a show by a young artist coming out of the National Arts Centre, wasn’t polished but was worth seeing because the artist showed great potential. “They’re original—and the original is what’s going to go away.”

Hunt, whose criticism tends to be more gentle than scathing, has since been hired as writer-in-residence at Rosebud Theatre.

Funding of arts criticism by non-profit organizations is being tried on a larger scale as well. In October 2016 the Boston Globe announced a pilot project in which the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism and the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation would help it pay the salary of a music critic for 10 months.

This type of arrangement reflects the desperate situation facing critics and arts organizations everywhere, but it raises red flags about conflict of interest. Jessica Goldman says the idea makes her “very wary” because it leaves writers beholden to their funders. As a critic she maintains strict ethical standards and does not socialize with people in the theatre community. The no-fraternizing practice was her one “bone of contention” with her fellow former Critters—Hunt is married to an actress and Hobson writes and directs plays.

Blogs and websites are also filling some of the void left by shrinking newspapers. Goldman sees their potential, but says the challenge for readers is figuring out which ones are worth reading. “The concern, always, is the quality—and how you find the quality.”

The stories and reviews on Hunt’s blog (thehalfstep.live) also appear on a local arts and lifestyle website (theyyscene.ca) run by Mike Bell, a former music critic at the Herald, and Kari Watson (the two previously worked together at Fast Forward Weekly). In Edmonton, Nicholls started a theatre blog (12thNight.ca) featuring theatre previews, reviews and features.

Hunt says he is happy to write reviews for his blog and share them with theyyscene.ca when he is being paid by an organization to do so, but he can’t keep it up at the same rate when he isn’t. He says a fund should be established to pay bloggers who write about publicly funded Canadian art.

That’s the idea behind a manifesto published in January 2016 by the Canadian Theatre Critics Association, of which Hunt is a member, calling for the creation of a Canadian Council for Critics. Under the proposal, the council would receive 1 per cent of the Canada Council for the Arts budget—about $2-million—to give small grants to bloggers. “We as a country have decided it’s in the public interest to create publicly funded Canadian art. Our children go to school and study to join the arts sector, which is now a multibillion-dollar national industry that employs thousands of people,” wrote Hunt in an October 2016 Globe and Mail op-ed. “If bloggers… podcasters and freelancers are willing to write about that art at a time of diminishing cultural criticism, it’s in the public interest to create a framework, at a modest cost, that allows them to do that.”

Other organizations are exploring different ways to support writers. From September 15 to 17, Contemporary Calgary is planning to host a national symposium on critical writing in the visual arts. Calgary’s Rozsa Foundation, which is dedicated to building capacity in the arts, is working to create opportunities for visual artists who are interested in critical writing, says board chair and recently retired executive director Mary Rozsa de Coquet.

She says students need a place to write, collaborate and see their words in print, and people need criticism to provide context and make art more accessible. “Increasingly, these kinds of critical thinking skills are crucial for us to move forward as a society…. You want people to be able to look at a visual work and become immersed in it and understand enough of the nuances that they can interpret it themselves.”

Lack of arts coverage leads to “less adventurous programming, a tougher time for emerging artists.” —Stephen Hunt

Sky Goodden of Toronto is publisher and editor of Momus, an online international arts publication launched in 2014 that “stresses a return to an art criticism that is evaluative, accountable and brave.” According to its website, Momus is supported by esteemed collectors and arts patrons and has 500,000 readers.

The shift from print to online hasn’t been smooth as publishers and writers grapple with issues of credibility and remuneration for writers, says Goodden, but discerning readers will take note of a publication’s contributors and track record. The shift online also forces critics to be more responsive, as any mistakes are quickly exposed on social media. “Our audience really holds us accountable,” she says. “You can’t get away with anything.”

While online arts readership is still small, Goodden argues that a mass audience isn’t necessary. “I think there needs to be some perspective in terms of balancing our nostalgia for staff writers and print publishing of print criticism, because in fact it was always niche.” Meanwhile arts lovers can run across a story on Facebook the same way they once did in newspapers.

Goodden sees no reason why an online arts publication couldn’t zero in on a community such as Calgary or Edmonton. So far, however, no substantial alternative to the popular press has emerged in Alberta. For Nancy Tousley, that means we’re neglecting a critical piece of our culture.

Tousley says the arts engage important ideas and issues not just for its audiences, but for all of society—and arts criticism helps facilitate the discussion. When the public has access to a regular critic, that critic’s voice, ideas and attitudes become familiar, which gives people something to measure their own ideas and attitudes against. “The conditions for a dialogue are set up even if it’s not direct,” she says. “And that’s very healthy.”

Without those critical voices “I think our cultural fabric loosens.”

Maureen McNamee is an associate editor at Alberta Views. She wrote about the arts for 19 years at Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly.

The post The Disappearing Critic appeared first on Alberta Views.

Black Tuesday wasn’t just about wrenching layoffs. The newsroom mergers—a mushing of distinct journalistic formats, cultures and audiences—heralded the end of Alberta’s big-city newspapers as we had known them. When the dust settled, Edmontonians and Calgarians had to adjust to uniformity in their leading newspaper titles. The quality of the Journal, Herald and Suns, already in decline, fell precipitously.

It’s no mystery what’s behind all this: Postmedia has been slashing costs across the country. CEO Paul Godfrey said in October, “You don’t know when you’re cutting to the bone until you’ve done it. We’ve said over the last five years, three or four times, ‘God, we can’t go any further, we can’t go any further.’ And yet we always have been able to.” After he bought Sun Media promising that he would not merge newsrooms, Godfrey was paid a $400,000 bonus.

Newspapers don’t willingly reveal their newsroom staff sizes any more than Postmedia breaks out profits and losses for individual papers. But a former Herald editor responsible for “cityside” reporters—the core daily news team—recalled having about 35 reporters in the late 1980s “to cover a city of 700,000 people.” Today, half a million more people live in a city covered by far fewer reporters. “My most recent information,” the former editor said in confidence in late 2016, “is that the city-reporting complement for both the Herald and Sun is around 15 people.” These reporters, he added, “work much harder than we did, because there’s so much to cover and so few of them. They also do more, including visual journalism, social media and other chores.”

A former editor at the Journal, who also asked for anonymity, remembered having a cityside staff of about 40 in the late 1980s. Her rough count towards the end of 2016 put the Journal’s cityside roster at around 15.

This wholesale contraction of journalistic capacity is happening across the country—Postmedia’s full-time-equivalent staff has dropped by more than half, from 5,400 in 2010 to 2,500 in 2015. An estimated 10,000 journalists in all Canadian media lost their jobs between 2008 and 2013 alone. Alberta’s situation is arguably the worst.

Some might say: What sector doesn’t suffer from workforce, market or technological disruptions The Internet has changed the business model for journalism worldwide. Meanwhile, the profession is consistently ranked among the least trusted, behind police, bankers and lawyers, and only marginally more trusted than corporate CEOs and politicians. A pox on all their houses.

“You don’t know when you’re cutting to the bone until you’ve done it.” —Paul Godfrey, Postmedia CEO

But good journalism matters precisely because there is a pox on all these houses. Journalists hold those in power accountable. A 2009 report by the US-based Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy wrote that news and information are “as vital to the healthy functioning of communities as clean air, safe streets, good schools and public health.” Newspapers perform an essential public service.

“Our society needs journalists… because journalists are the only real-time truth seekers and truth tellers we have,” Sean Holman, a Mount Royal University journalism professor, told the CBC last October. “If you don’t have newspapers, you are eliminating a huge chunk of the accountability mechanism that is supposed to exist in Canada via the media.”

You also risk exacerbating a shrinking interest in public life. A 2016 study by the US Pew Research Centre noted that “two particular aspects of civic engagement stand out as most closely associated with the habit of reading local news: a strong connection to one’s community and always voting in local elections… In local communities, the civically engaged—the people who vote, volunteer and connect with those around them—play a key role in community life.” These social actors read news to be informed about their own civic lives.

Another trait closely associated with broad community attachment is how well people know their neighbours, which is itself a function of an interest in the news. Pew reported, “Fully half (52 per cent) of those who know all their neighbors, for example, follow local news very closely, compared with 32 per cent who don’t know any of their neighbors.” But the collapse of newspapers is treated with little more than a shrug—particularly in Alberta. Statistics Canada reported in 2013 that only 53 per cent of Albertans follow news and current affairs daily, the lowest level of interest in the country. As Holman said of the plight of local newspapers, “The real troubling question is whether Albertans are actually going to care.”

Back in 1970 Senator Keith Davey conducted a landmark commission into the state of Canada’s media. Each daily newspaper edition, Davey said, was “the result of hundreds of human decisions, each calling for swift judgment, instant clarity and the fine balancing of other people’s perceptions. Journalism, however humble, is a sort of art; there can be very few occupations that are so demanding in terms of speed and judgment … The wonder is that newspapers are as good as they are. They really are a daily miracle.”

In the 1980s in Vancouver, having learned at least something about miracle-making in my native Australia, I worked for Southam Inc., at that time owners of the Vancouver Sun and its rival, the Province, and also owners of the two big-city papers in Alberta. The Vancouver Sun was a broadsheet, the “newspaper of record” for BC, just as the Journal once purported to be in Alberta. We employed experienced reporters and photographers and civic sages; we had bureaus in Ottawa and Victoria and our journalists travelled widely. Those “hundreds of human decisions” allowed us to chase breaking stories, dig up new ones, report them, factcheck them, tighten prose, apply consistent grammar and style, weigh the risk of libel (and usually take the risk anyway), lay out pages, run the presses, get the papers out and then reset for another edition—a constant sea of barely controlled chaos that was about as exciting a vocation as you could find that came with a desk.

We had a library (“the morgue”) where mostly sour-faced but unbelievably resourceful researchers could recall and find the most obscure references to inform a breaking story, to add context and depth to history being written on the fly or illuminate an investigation that might be months in the making. The service desk at the morgue was also one of the Sun’s and Province’s few shared spaces. Other than a random encounter there, or a ritual one at the press club bar across the street, we took pains to never meet. We had the same owners but competed fiercely, and our journalism was better for it.

“If your local paper shares the same design and same pages as the one in Ottawa… is it still your local paper#8221; —Margo Goodhand, former Edmonton Journal Editor

As the Sun’s assistant city editor and assignment editor for a time, I had more than 70 reporters and photographers to deploy, and was surrounded by acerbic, cantankerous and occasionally brilliant copy editors on the “rim” who saved young reporters from their exuberance and old ones from their laziness. We put out a pretty good paper and set the daily agenda for other media. Radio hosts read out our headlines; producers in TV and radio followed our lead. In cities across Canada and around the world, newspapers were the hearts of any news ecosystem. Now they often resemble nothing so much as an appendix.

Canada has for decades had an unconscionable level of media concentration—you can go all the way back to 1970 and Keith Davey’s The Uncertain Mirror: Report of the Special Senate Committee on Mass Media, for the first warnings about the dangers of too much media ownership in too few corporate hands. In 1981 the Kent Commission warned that “industrial conglomerates produce poor newspapers.” In 2006 another Senate report on Canadian media said much the same thing.

In 2016 three separate government-sponsored inquiries were wringing hands over the state of Canadian media. If history is any guide, nothing useful will come of the exercise. Canada has let the market have its way.

Way back, under the long-time ownership of the Southam family, the Herald and especially the Journal developed reputations as better than decent newspapers. When I worked at the Vancouver Sun,we were always glad to lure a reporter or columnist away from Edmonton, which had a track record of turning out terrific journalistic talent.

Then came Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. in the mid-1990s. The news became “much more ideological,” said David Climenhaga, a former Herald reporter and editor who says both papers turned sharply to the right and became “less interested in coverage of a whole range of stories.”

The Journal and Herald were profitable in their own right, and had historically been “the big money makers for the chain,” said Gillian Steward, a former Herald managing editor. In 1998 Black launched the National Post. All Hollinger papers had to feed money to the National Post to keep Black’s vanity project alive. The National Post “was and still is an unfathomable and unsustainable albatross,” according to Margo Goodhand, former Journal editor-in-chief.

The 1999–2000 Herald strike destroyed journalists’ faith in that paper (over 90 per cent of editorial staff didn’t return to the job) and is credited with alienating many of the paper’s readers.

Then in 2000 came CanWest, debt-saddled and dumb as a hammer. Its strategy seemed hell bent on “sucking all the initiative, not to mention life and personality out of their big-city news teams,” Goodhand wrote in a Walrus article in early 2016. This included a centralized (in Hamilton, Ont.) copy-editing service for the chain, and a central desk in Toronto to produce each paper’s non-local content.

Postmedia bought out CanWest in 2010 and sold off most of its newspapers’ physical assets—office buildings, printing plants—to reduce debt. Debt then ballooned again when it bought the rival Sun chain in April 2015. At the time, Postmedia CEO Godfrey assured everyone (including Canada’s dim-witted Competition Bureau) that the Sun newsrooms would remain separate from the big-city broadsheets’, and, according to Goodhand, promised “they’d be competitive, distinct and entirely independent.” That pledge lasted less than a year.

“The Sun merger bombshell… really hurt the Journal base,” Goodhand told me.

One long-time Journal reader, Grant Ainsley, wrote a blogpost in October 2016 called “My Divorce from the Edmonton Journal.”

“I recently received my notice to review my annual subscription,” he wrote. “It’s for $403.20. It seems like a lot of money but it’s only about $1.33 per paper. After a lot of thought, I’ve decided not to renew. For the first time in over 50 years, I won’t be reading the Edmonton Journal every day.” Ainsley says it’s because veteran reporters were let go; because the two dailies have “basically the same stories written by the same reporters. Only the front pages look different”; because “I can’t remember the last time I saw a real scoop on the front page of the Edmonton Journal”; because of layout mistakes and because seeing someone who had written for the Journal for 30 years now appearing in the Sun as well was like having “Wayne Gretzky playing for both the Edmonton Oilers and the Calgary Flames.”

Concluded Ainsley: “What we’re left with is a product that’s not as good as it used to be, one that’s provided less often, and at a price that continues to increase.

…If a dedicated newspaper reader like me is leaving the Journal behind, there can’t be many others left.”

“What we’re left with is a product that’s not as good as it used to be… at a price that continues to increase.” —former Journal reader, Grant Ainsley.

The former Herald editor who spoke with me anonymously said the same is happening in Calgary. “I can tell from reading the Herald regularly that coverage is down, and that’s clearly attributable to the number of people involved in producing local and Alberta news, not the effort those people are putting forth,” he said. “Another yardstick I follow is the number of stories I see each day that involve research that isn’t based either on institutional coverage (city hall, the courts, the legislature) or news releases. There hadn’t been a great deal of that for some time already, but it’s down almost to zero now. The two papers closely mirror what we see and hear on local TV and radio. You can decide for yourself if you think that adds value.”

Another merger of sorts—the intrusion into Postmedia’s local papers of section inserts from the National Post—was a “brilliant corporate move,” Goodhand told me, because it boosted the Post’s circulation. “But there’s the rub. If your local paper doesn’t look local anymore—if it shares the same design and many of the same pages as the one in Calgary, Ottawa etc.; if it shares all of the same business, arts and sports stories and columnists; if its editors can’t respond to your concerns about content because they have no say in that content; if your salespeople are trying to sell the Journal and also its 30-year rival the Sun tabloid; if your Canada/World section now looks like a mini-replica of the National Post—is it still your local paper …I heard from a number of unhappy readers, but most hung on to their beloved Journal. Some cancelled because, as they said, if they had wanted to subscribe to the National Post, they would have.”

Postmedia touts its “nationwide readership of 11.1 million people on all platforms,” claiming readership gains of 19 per cent at the National Post alone. “Readers across Canada are responding to the quality of our journalism,” Gordon Fisher, president of the National Post, told one of his own reporters in 2016, “and we are very hopeful our story of growth will be of high appeal to our advertisers.”

Readership, however, is not the same as circulation, which historically has been the benchmark indicator of the health of a newspaper and thus its viability to advertisers. Readership includes people in doctor’s offices, family members, library readers—all sorts of people can read a paper without having paid for it. Circulation tells another story.

The Journal’s “Advertise with Us” webpage states that the paper’s average daily circulation as of 2015 is 94,891. The Herald, meanwhile, claims average daily circulation in 2016 of 113,579. Both cities have over one million people. Each title, in other words, claims circulation totalling about 10 per cent of its city’s population.

But even these numbers are misleading. A 2015 report by Newspapers Canada puts the Journal’s average weekday circulation—print and digital—at 91,776, but of that, only 59,244 is paid circulation; the other 32,533 is non-paid print and digital circulation to classrooms, public locations (e.g., libraries) and “copies served to employees, retired employees, independent agents and correspondents.” So more than one-third of the Journal’s claimed circulation is essentially given away.

The Herald’s claim is even shakier: Its average weekday circulation—print and digital—is actually 107,954, according to Newspapers Canada, but of that, only 58,865 is paid. So the Herald gives away 45 per cent, or almost half, of its average weekday circulation.

As Steward said, “It seems like it’s free everywhere all the time, so why would you subscribe?” She still looks at the Herald online but prefers, and pays for, the New York Times online, which “makes me realize what we’re not getting” in Calgary. Steward said she doesn’t expect the Herald to be the Times, but she wants something better than a paper that rewrites press releases and lets industry get its story across largely unchallenged.

There’s another way to measure the health of Alberta’s newspapers. Each city, according to the 2011 federal census, had around 450,000 households. In both cities, total paid circulation of the broadsheets is around 60,000; if you add in the paid circulations of the Sun (26,925 in Edmonton; 23,541 in Calgary), you get about 85,000 apiece. That means roughly 19 per cent of households subscribe to a newspaper in each Alberta city. In 1995, 50 per cent of households subscribed to the daily local newspaper. Media analyst Ken Goldstein predicts that if these declines continue, circulation will amount to only 5–10 per cent of households in 2025—too little, he concluded, “to support a viable print business model for most general interest daily newspapers.”

Meanwhile what of those advertisers responding to readers’ appreciation for the “quality” of Postmedia journalism One reason for the round of layoffs last October was that in the previous quarter, revenue from ad sales fell 20 per cent. No matter what Postmedia claims, advertisers aren’t fooled.

As Postmedia declines, newspapers such as the Herald and Journal could shut down on its deathwatch, like switches being thrown on the lights in a ballpark. “The lights are pretty dim right now,” said Steward. Calgary is a complex, fascinating place, she says, and if nothing else its publications “should be North American authorities on the energy industries and the environment.”

Mack Male, who blogs about media in Edmonton, said the Journal remains Alberta’s newspaper of record only “in the absence of anything else. It’s certainly not what it was.” What’s left Just one legislative reporter and columnist. More “prurient” coverage of the courts, in the words of ex-staffer Karen Unland. Sloppy editing and poor grammar, according to Brian Gorman, who teaches journalism at MacEwan University. Gorman placed summer students at the Journal in 2016 who reported back that “morale was low and nobody had any time for them.”

The Journal no longer does sponsorships or aids local charities, Goodhand told me, which “might have saved head office some money, but the Journal lost face in the business community.” And there was, of course, the infamous edict that all Postmedia titles endorse Stephen Harper in the 2015 election, which came on the heels of Godfrey, in the words of Goodhand, “assuring the public that all the papers… would retain their editorial independence and integrity.”

Postmedia has said it won’t close the Herald or Journal—but it said it wasn’t going to merge its newsrooms either. “At every step they’ve gone and done what we didn’t think was possible,” said Male. Gorman said the fact that none of its four Alberta dailies are unionized makes it easier for Postmedia to try to find the “bone,” as Godfrey would have it, because “they don’t have to negotiate… I think the best thing for Canadian newspapers is if Postmedia would just die, and these things (its daily newspapers) would come up for grabs.” Or as Unland told me, “It doesn’t have to be normal, this chain ownership. I mean, the economies of scale made sense until they didn’t. It’s not a bad idea that local journalistic outputs should be locally owned.”

Steward told me, “To be honest, I don’t see how the newspapers in Alberta can recover.” Edmonton’s two main papers “are in tremendously awful shape,” said Goodhand. “I don’t know what will emerge in Alberta when Postmedia finally goes under.”

The current majority shareholder of Postmedia—and thus the real owner of the Calgary Herald and the Edmonton Journal—is GoldenTree Asset Management, a US hedge fund.

A sliver of hope is that readers have lost their trust in newspaper owners rather than in newspaper journalism itself.

Ian Gill is a Vancouver-based critic and the author of No News Is Bad News: Canada’s Media Collapse—and What Comes Next (Greystone, 2016).

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