Canada is not only going the way of Europe with the country's draconian speech laws, it is in many ways surpassing the suppression and censorship across the Atlantic. The speed at which the population is being robbed of their freedoms is staggering, and much of this is being done through backdoor bureaucracy.
One factor that consistently frustrated the globalist Trudeau regime during the pandemic lockdowns was the Canadian public's access to national and international independent media. Even with political leaders working directly with social media giants to censor users, truthful data outside of the institutional filters was still being effectively spread by alternative journalists and news sites.
This ultimately led to a large enough backlash in Canada and the US that eventually, covid mandates had to be abandoned. Indie journalists were central to the effort to expose pandemic fallacies promoted by politicians as "science".
It would seem that in Canada, the elites are quickly working to close that loophole.
Mere proximity to the US makes censorship projects more difficult for the Canadian government, though incrementalism is well underway and "hate speech" laws in Canada are used on occasion to silence dissent, specifically on transgender issues. But officials are utilizing two sneaky policies as a way to subvert indie media outlets without directly shutting them down.
The first policy is the Canadian Online News Act passed in 2023. This bill was presented as a way to force Big Tech intermediaries like Google and Facebook to share profits they derive from the flow of content created by mostly smaller digital media providers (indie media). It requires large online platforms to compensate Canadian news outlets for making their content available—through links, snippets, sharing, or search results.
The Act argues that platforms benefit from news content (driving engagement and traffic) without fairly sharing value with creators. It's supposed aim is to sustain journalism, especially local and independent outlets.
However, the opposite has happened. Big Tech companies are blocking Canadian media instead, making it difficult or impossible to maintain traffic to their websites. Google has cut a $100 million deal to avoid settlements with individual outlets, but once it is spread out, this money is nowhere near enough to make up for the ad revenues losses they face.
Larger corporate media outlets are able to survive because they have the money to advertise and generate their own views. Indie outlets rely on word of mouth and link sharing, which is now being eliminated because of government regulation.
The second policy which is crushing indie media in Canada is the use of government subsidies as a designator for "official journalism".
Two major federal departments - Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Global Affairs Canada (GAC) - have quietly updated their media accreditation policies to prioritize or limit government responses to journalists. Canadian bureaucrats are increasingly restricting which outlets they will talk to and will only work with those designated as Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations (QCJO).
QCJO is a government program (administered by the Canada Revenue Agency) tied to tax credits and subsidies for journalism and it's linked to broader media support efforts, including overlapping with the Online News Act.
To put it plainly, government institutions in Canada are saying that only certain media outlets that receive subsidies are considered "real news". Eligible outlets get favored access to officials and information. In other words, the government decides who is a journalist and who is not.
Backlash forced the government to back-peddle and clarify that QCJO status is strictly for tax/funding eligibility and not a press pass or accreditation tool to determine who qualifies as a "legitimate" journalist. Critics argue, though, that the framework for this government filter is still in place even if they are not currently using it.
If subsidies become a press pass, then only government funded and controlled media outlets will be able to operate in the Canadian system.
One might question why anyone outside of Canada should care about how they regulate or manipulate their news platforms. After all, Canada is a tiny country their impact on the rest of the west is minimal. But this is a short-sighted way of thinking.
It might be wiser to look at Canada as a kind of political petri dish; a beta test for regulations and controls that are likely to be tried in other countries in the near future. Canada enforced some of the most stringent and authoritarian covid mandates of any western nation (except perhaps Australia and New Zealand). Though this ultimately failed, it still shows that globalists view Canada as a testing ground.
Today, the top goal of far-left governments is clearly the sabotage of independent media. They've realized that they cannot assert dominance in other areas of life without first fully silencing free media.