Department of garbage decisions

The prime minister rings a Bell

Well, so much for the health-care announcement

The Prime Minister of Canada would like a word with Bell.

“I’m furious. This is a garbage decision by a corporation that should know better,” Justin Trudeau said Friday at Seneca College, where Ontario became the fifth province to take health-care money in return for promising to do what provinces already do in health care.

Trudeau was not actually speaking about health care during this small portion of his morning’s remarks, but rather answering a reporter’s question about the latest really enthusiastic round of layoffs by Bell. The smartphone company is cutting 4,800 jobs, selling 45 radio stations, ending noon newscasts outside Toronto, cancelling W5, and so on. The layoffs follow the previous layoffs and the dismissal of the iconic anchor and the trouble here and here and the layoffs and end of paper publication ici and the mises à pied là and the really big mess over at the publicly-funded place here and it just goes on and on.

I propose that every year on the anniversary of the day Trudeau’s previous heritage minister promised to keep newsrooms open, the employees of the nation’s large news organizations get a day off work without pay, because there’ll be plenty more days like that soon enough.

But I was telling you about the prime minister. He was in a genuinely scrappy mood today, or had been told to approximate one, so he kept going about Bell’s obligations.

“We have seen over the past years journalistic outlets, radio stations, small community newspapers, bought up by corporate entities — who then lay off journalists, change the offering, the quality of offering to people. And when people don't watch as much, or engage as much, the corporate entity says, ‘Oh, see? They're not profitable any more, we're going to sell them off.’

“This is the erosion, not just of journalism, or quality local journalism — at a time where people need it more than ever given misinformation and disinformation — but it's eroding our very democracy.

“Our abilities to tell stories to each other, of how people's lives are, stories that reflect our own communities and not central offices in our biggest cities, is part of what binds this country together from coast to coast to coast.

“With incredible diversity of experiences, of geographies, we need those local voices. And over the past years, corporate Canada — and there are many culprits on this — have abdicated their responsibility toward the communities that they have always made very good profits off of in various ways.

“As a government we have been stepping up over the past years, fighting for local journalism, fighting for investments that we can have while all the while fending off attacks from Conservatives and others who say, ‘No no no, you're trying to buy off journalists.’ We're trying to support journalism in this country and across this country. But no government can do it alone. Canadians need to demand better — as we will be demanding better from corporate leaders like in this case, Bell, that are eroding Canadians' ability to know each other, to trust each other, and to trust in the country and the future we are building together.

“So, yeah, I'm pretty pissed off about what just happened.”

The small thing that’s happening here is that somebody has finally told Trudeau, in his ninth year as prime minister, that when he speaks in the soothing tones of a statesman people start to nod off. Hence his use today of words like “furious,” “garbage decision” and “pissed off.” Here the PM is catching up to Jagmeet Singh who is catching up to Pierre Poilievre. By the next election, all of our leaders will be pissed off and ready to call out the corporate greed that’s responsible for garbage decisions, and we’ll be governed by people who tell it like it is and stand up to fat cats, and everything will be fine because that’s what’s been missing: leaders who talk like Chicago gangsters from the 1920s.

The bigger thing that’s happening is that the government has moved into what I call the “C’mon, guys!” era of governance.

Here, government has begun to believe the problem is not that the policy framework is chock-full of incentives for lousy or unproductive behaviour — or even that Canada can sometimes be a hard country to govern — but rather that people with retail clout in our society use it badly. So businesses must be scolded or, at least, implored to use their power in beneficial ways.

One example is Chrystia Freeland. The finance minister used to plunk down multiple tens of billions of dollars on large mechanisms designed to encourage companies to invest in Canada — a Canada Growth Fund, a set of investment tax credits. Now she has added a powerful new tool to her arsenal: Wishing it were so. On Tuesday she told a news conference, “We’d like to see more Canadian businesses investing more in Canada.” Me too! Can I be finance minister? Her colleague François-Philippe Champagne is hoping to attract foreign grocery retailers to expand into Canada, through the simple expedient of asking them to move here.

It’s now six years since Trudeau’s government set out to save local journalism, with the net result being the absolute goat farm I described above. So now he’s broken out the nuclear codes and is escalating to the next level: saving local journalism by wondering aloud, in colourful language, why corporate Canada won’t save local journalism. That should work.

Who could ever have foreseen the situation Trudeau described at Seneca? Whomst amongst us couldst ever have foreseen-eth? Who would ever have thought that the day would come when corporate Canada’s fat cats would (a) pocket millions in subsidies for journalism; (b) lay off employees; (c) cash bonuses for top bosses; (d) leave the government sputtering and out of pocket?

I did. It wasn’t hard.

In November 2016, a couple of weeks after I first heard that the Trudeau government was thinking of propping up the news business, I wrote this column for a former employer. “To my great surprise, Justin Trudeau’s government seems to have decided it needs to be in the business of helping news organizations succeed,” I wrote then. At the time, the fashionable villain was Postmedia, not Bell, though they tend to rotate seasonally. Postmedia had followed its latest round of layoffs with $2.3 million in bonuses to senior executives.

I asked: What if those layoffs and bonuses had followed a round of government subsidy payments? And added:

Imagine that last year… somebody did the sums and decided Postmedia would get $3 million and change for calendar 2016. But imagine further that this year, the results came in a little dryer than hoped, and the great company was stuck laying off dozens all the same. All the while handsomely rewarding its executive team….

I suspect there would be hell to pay. How could all that taxpayer money have gone down the drain to no discernible effect? How could the government underwrite this wholesale transfer of wealth from the fabled middle class to the fat cats? There’d be calls to kick Postmedia out of the subsidy program. Or to put a couple of deputy ministers on the company’s board. To find some way of ensuring this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.

Which is how your arm gets sucked into a coffee grinder. A government full of sunshine and hope, with nothing in its heart but love for the working stiff with a press card jammed into the hatband of his fedora, suddenly finds itself owning a part of the company’s fortunes.

Eight years ago, ladies and gents! Nothing up my sleeve! But predicting this sort of thing is a parlour trick, although I’m obviously pleased with how it worked out. What’s harder is determining how to respond once it’s happened.

The problem with Bell is that it has been doing some things that are profitable and some things that aren’t, so it has decided to do fewer of the latter and more of the former. It’s fair to wish it would do more of the unprofitable stuff, but probably unrealistic to expect much of it. I myself used to work for Bell’s main competitor, until they sold most of their print media operation to a passing circus, sparking my late-career entrepreneurial instincts. The prime minister was not yet, at that point, in the habit of getting pissed off over garbage decisions. Fortunately business over here has been good, thanks. Speaking of which:

Things a government could do that could actually influence Bell’s decision-making would include: (a) opening telecomms in this absurd country to real competition, for God’s sake, at last; (b) informing CTV the prime minister will be unavailable for a year-end interview this year or, in fact, ever again. I know somebody who could take up the slack; (c ) busting the ridiculous state monopoly on terrible, terrible English-language leaders’ debates that rewards CTV for simply existing, every election cycle; (d) I should probably stop there, because I’ve obviously started using this paragraph to prosecute some grudges instead of thinking clearly. But we had fun, didn’t we.

More earnestly, I would gently remind all those who govern us or would like to govern us that if you value journalism, answering journalists’ questions in non-satirical ways would be a good way to start. I see the PM’s main challenger, whose press office lately plays a pretty good tribute to John Cage whenever I have a question, says he’ll improve Canada’s access-to-information system. Counterpoint: No, he will not. Tuck that one away for future reference.

The news from south of the border is instructive. Traditional media are in trouble everywhere. I have been amazed and saddened to see magazines I used to treasure — National Geographic, Popular Science, more recently the online Pitchfork — and Sports Illustrated, which was never my thing but has been one of American culture’s cornerstones for decades — close or shrink to insignificance. I’m not sure you can blame Mirko Bibic for all of it. Large, obvious things are changing in the media landscape around the world. Government subsidy programs that amount to pennies on the dollar of real need — and were, I will always believe, a terrible idea in the first place — will not fix a once-in-centuries upheaval in the way people get their information. It is childish to respond with tantrums.