And we’re seeing it in real time in Canada.
In August 2021, in an EconLog post about Canada, I wrote:
Government can’t subsidize newspapers without putting its thumb on the scale.
The post was titled “Canada’s Decline in Press Freedom.” In that post, I discussed the Canadian government’s system of subsidies to newspapers. I followed up with a further post in December 2021 in which I quoted a critic of the subsidies, Peter Menzies, who quoted a critic named Tom Korski who put the problem succinctly: “You only need one customer and that’s the [federal] Minister of Heritage.”
To his credit, Menzies has been tracking this issue. In a post on “The Line,” a Canadian Substack that follows Canadian politics closely, Menzies quoted a Member of Parliament who is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Menzies wrote:
“Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary,” he wrote.
The “he” who tweeted this was Taleeb Noormohamed, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville. He was replying to a post on X “by Terry Newman, National Post’s new senior editor of its Comment section, promoting a column she had written outlining the incredible damage ‘a party and a minister can do to a country in nine years.’”
Menzies wrote:
Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in perfect alignment in the view that were it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau government, Postmedia (and likely the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. Some of its titles may have sold for parts, but most of its zombie products would have been dispatched long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to spring forth from decay.
About that, he was not wrong, even though what he did was very inappropriate, even more so because Noormohamed is not just some schmuck MP making up the numbers in a minority Parliament. He’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Heritage, Pascal St-Onge, in whose office most of the decisions regarding the plethora of funding arrangements for Canadian news media are made. (bold added)
The title of Menzies’s Substack post was on target: “The Liberals Say the Quiet Part Out Loud.”
Freedom of the press in Canada is dying. And, as Noormohamed’s threatening tweet points out, silencing critics of the government is one of the main purposes of government subsidies.