But it’s no save for indy news, says Tory MP and former broadcaster
OTTAWA – While the news media are under attack from President Donald Trump’s administration in the U.S., their counterparts in Canada have found a strong ally with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
In Wednesday’s fall economic statement, Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced a multimillion-dollar investment in Canadian journalism for both producers and consumers of news.
Starting in the 2019-20 fiscal year, the federal government proposes to allocate $14.6 million over five years to help create a Francophone digital platform with French-language global broadcaster, TV5MONDE, to boost the presence of Canadian content, as well as to “increase the ‘discoverability’ of and ease of access to Francophone and Canadian programming generally,” according to the 2018 fall fiscal outlook.
Ottawa also plans to allow “trusted” and “professional” non-profit journalism organizations, including those that generate local news, to issue tax receipts to donors and qualify to receive further funding from registered charities.
Starting on Jan. 1, profit and non-profit news organizations will have access to a refundable tax credit to “support labour costs associated with producing original news content.” Before that occurs, “an independent panel will be established from the news and journalism community to define eligibility for this tax credit, as well as provide advice on other measures.”
Subscribers of “eligible” digital news media would get a break too through a “new temporary, non-refundable 15-per-cent tax credit.” (So, good news for Cartt.ca subscribers, we think, depending on if we’re “eligible”, whatever that ends up meaning.)
The CWA Canada, the country’s only all-media union, welcomed the financial assistance but stopped short of fully endorsing the package that will cost the federal government about $595 million over the next five years and the details of which will be outlined in next year’s federal budget.
“We don’t want the money being used by companies like Postmedia to pay their hedge fund masters or to further line the pockets of top executives, and we have told the government that,” union president Martin O’Hanlon said in a statement.
Conservative Member of Parliament and former broadcaster Peter Kent doesn’t believe the money Ottawa earmarked for the media will “save an independent Canadian news industry.”
A former anchor of CBC-TV’s The National, Kent referred to the network as the country’s “biggest digital newspaper” and accused the CBC of “misappropriating” between $150 million and $200 million of the annual federal funding it receives toward “a digital news service” for which it has no mandate.
In an interview with Cartt.ca, Kent said that the CBC should be “stripped” of running commercials online because it places private broadcasters seeking ad dollars at a further disadvantage. (Ed note: CBC CEO Catherine Tait had a different take on that last month.)
“All of the traditional mainstream companies that are struggling to adapt to the new technological reality by creating digital platforms are being out-funded massively by the CBC, who are then compounding the damage to the others they are competing with wrongly by selling commercials,” he said.
Kent, who worked for NBC-TV News as a reporter in the 1980s, also called on the federal government to stop providing tax credits to Canadian companies that are spending an estimated $500 million annually to buy online ads with digital media, such as Google and Facebook, outside the country.
Advocacy group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting said the same. “If the government was serious about protecting truthful, trustworthy, Canadian journalism, they would stop showering democracy-killing companies like Facebook with billions of dollars in tax breaks and regulatory exemptions,” said Friends spokesman Daniel Bernhard.
Closer to home, Kent views with suspicion the government’s proposed panel to determine eligibility for the newsroom tax credit, which in an election year, looks like the governing Liberals “are trying to influence favour with an industry that is not going to be saved by nearly $600 million in largesse.”
The tax credit would create “a dependency” that journalists and news organizations “might resist as an attempt at being manipulated for the benefit they’re receiving,” said Kent. “It just looks terrible, and is in some way, a corrupting of the craft.”
BUILDING OUT NEW FIBRE NETWORKS also got a boost in the economic statement today. The government will introduce an Accelerated Investment Incentive to support all capital investments where those investments will generally be eligible for a first-year deduction for depreciation equal to up to three times the amount that would otherwise apply in the year an asset is put in use. “Tripling the current first-year rate will allow businesses to recover the initial cost of their investment more quickly—reducing risk and providing businesses in Canada with a true incentive to make capital investments,” reads the statement.
The statement said that means the normal deduction for new fibre, in its first year built, will go from 6% to 18% and "data network infrastructure equipment" from 15% to 45%.
“It is expected that accelerated depreciation for investments in fibre connectivity, wireless service and broadband infrastructure will particularly benefit more remote communities, while helping to strengthen Canada's economy more generally,” reads the report. “The Government has had positive discussions with Canada's telecommunications sector with regard to investment incentives and will work with the sector to ensure that the proposed incentives result in accelerated deployment of next-generation digital technology and rural broadband/rural wireless services across the country.”
