We can no longer count them: week after week, announcements of staff reductions, bankruptcies and closures within the information sector multiply. While some still believed that the crisis only affected the written press and its paper age, the announcements of the abolition of hundreds of positions, from TVA to Bell Media, will have demonstrated the opposite: all media are unfortunately affected, radio and TV included.
In Quebec alone, over the last 10 years, the media will have seen 75% of their advertising revenues sucked up by digital barbarians. A loss of 800 million.
Clearly, the system through which access to information was ensured is broken. And given the height of the shortfall, only our governments have the structural capacity to remedy it.
Strengthen the tax credit for newsrooms
As part of its next budget, Quebec must renew the tax credit for the payroll of the journalistic workforce. But if this mechanism has been relevant to supporting the written press since 2019, it is clear that it is today proving insufficient.
Excluded from the program, TV and radio newsrooms must now be able to benefit from it for their staff working on the production of journalistic content. Just as affected by the loss of income (125 million in TV, 65 million in radio), the newsrooms of these media, particularly in the regions, are seeing their staff constantly reduced.
The massacre is even worse on the written press side, as evidenced by the closure of numerous regional weeklies, the bankruptcy of Métro Média and the rationalization process at CN2i. As the written press has no other main activity than the production of information content, we are asking that the tax credit be extended to all jobs necessary for the operation of the company.
Both Ottawa and Quebec must, in their respective upcoming budgets, strengthen the tax credit program based on the urgency of the situation.
Info fees to support information
The arrival of Web giants has completely changed the way we consult and access information. Just as the Government of Quebec has the obligation to preserve our culture in this new universe, it has the responsibility that citizens can have access to information content produced here.
While Minister Mathieu Lacombe is currently looking into the issue, we suggest the establishment, by the Government of Quebec, of a reserved and recurring fund financed by the introduction of 2% info fees applied to device purchases. equipped with a screen (phones, tablets, computers) as well as on Internet and mobile services. Across Quebec, such a fee would generate revenues of around 200 million per year.
Interesting precedents exist: think of the royalties on blank cassettes, VHS and audio introduced to support creators at a time when piracy was starting to rage. Or even eco-fees collected in Quebec in anticipation of the end of the useful life of batteries or other electronic products.
Obviously, the parameters of this information support fund remain to be established, collectively, by all stakeholders in the field, as do its accountability mechanisms and the precise objectives to which it must aim. . From the outset, these seem numerous to us, whether supporting media threatened with disappearance, countering the appearance of media deserts in the regions, tackling disinformation or even responding to the challenges brought about by the dislocation of distribution networks. .
For a government advertising purchasing policy
Advertisers in the private sector who have left the media should benefit from incentives to return there: for example, they should be able to deduct from their taxes double their expenses made with local media and they should no longer be able to deduct the money spent with delinquent foreign giants. Within reach of the governments of Quebec and Canada, such measures would encourage the channeling of advertising budgets towards our media.
But the real question remains this: how many ministries and public bodies, all levels of government combined, continue to place advertising with a company which, after having dislocated our information sector, continues to behave like a real brute in the face of a law duly adopted by our parliamentarians?
Faced with the scale of the crisis, our governments — including cities! — must stop procrastinating: they must adopt a real responsible advertising purchasing policy in support of our media and they must stop doing business with these barbarians who refuse to comply with the tax rules in force in Canada.
While information workers continue to play the role of canary in the mine, the World Economic Forum recognized last month that disinformation has risen to the top of the list of global threats. When newsrooms disappear one after the other, our access to local, rigorous and diversified information declines. It is our democracy that is dangerously declining. There is still time to pull ourselves together. And to provide a response commensurate with the current crisis.