OMG. Ha ha! Who would have thought forcing people to pay for a product they don’t use won’t make them use it?

Ottawa is now into the hundreds of millions annually in direct and indirect newsroom subsidies: periodical funds, labour tax credits, the Local Journalism Initiative, the Canada Media Fund, plus the fixed $100M a year from Google under the Online News Act. This is on top of the CBC parliamentary grant.

The average newspaper reader is 55-years-old, but 65-year-olds and up are the only ones who trust the press.

You can throw billions at a rotting corpse. It’s not coming back to life. Subsidies are going to payrolls that reproduce 1995 workflows instead of 2035 infrastructure.

The design overwhelmingly favours incumbents with large headcounts, because money is distributed “in proportion to the number of journalists” they already have. That’s pure path dependence: the bigger your legacy footprint, the more you are rewarded for not changing.

In the meantime, the federal government isn’t investing in the future, as in different modes and models of journalism. It’s like letting an infant run neglected and feral and you spending all your resources on your late grandpa.

The federal Liberals do claim they are into this whole AI thing, but their minister is a legacy journalist and what’s been happening so far in Ottawa is sketchy, at best. If legacy media cannot survive, let it fall, and let it be replaced with a different model. Enabling has never saved any industry; it just prevents organic renewal.

Canadian legacy outlets talk about “embracing AI,” but their own policies treat it almost solely as an internal research or automation tool, tightly cordoned off, with outright bans on AI‑generated writing, images, or video in output. That’s not ecosystem‑level experimentation; it’s risk management for an existing product.

You can pour $170 million into a rotting newsroom model, but you’re not reviving it; you’re embalming it at public expense.