Back in the 1980s, getting news from Canada was near impossible here in Japan. When veterans like me first arrived, we had to beg friends flying in on Canadian Airlines to snag the Globe & Mail off the plane. Or else sit in the Embassy lobby reading week-old copies. Otherwise, Canada was rarely mentioned in The Japan Times. So I spent countless hours fruitlessly trying to get Radio Canada International on shortwave.

This was more than just heartache for homesick Canadians. While the USA was constantly in Japan’s spotlight, Canada was effectively cloaked in darkness. With little presence in Japan’s media, the few reports about us reaching Tokyo were from trading company ‘shosha men’ – like 19th-century dispatches from the Upper Congo. This was a huge impediment to trade and tourism growth – and it underlines why Canada’s participation in Osaka Expo ’70 was so pivotal. 

Enough about the bad old days though. Today, the Internet puts a plethora of choices at our disposal. So what should we choose? And what can we trust? By way of answer, here is an unabashedly subjective scan of Canada’s news media menu – mainly English sources plus some notes on French-language media from francophone friends.

Although much is now online, as most print outlets are hidden behind paywalls you need to be choosy. Radio is wide open though and YouTube carries lots of video news for free. But let’s start with two Toronto-based dailies: The Globe & Mail and Toronto Star.

The Hogtown rags…

Beyond merely a lifelong Globe reader, I’m descended from a downtown Toronto family that has subscribed since the paper was founded in 1844. These days though I’m underwhelmed by what was once our city’s ‘paper of record.’ Billing itself as “Canada’s National Newspaper,” Toronto (aka Hogtown) is now barely covered as the self-regarding Globe focuses on federal doings in Ottawa. National coverage is likewise patchy with few boots on the ground beyond Toronto and Ottawa. Some worthy foreign correspondents are still on staff, like Eric Reguly in Rome and Nathan Vanderklippe, who covers the U.S. after 8 years in the Globe’s vaunted Beijing bureau. But with Beijing now closed, Asian coverage is sparse and reporting from Japan is, as always, near non-existent. When I asked Vanderklippe why he’d never been to Japan, he said the Globe wouldn’t cover the airfare.

These days I click on more items in the Toronto Star, back in fine form after years teetering on the brink. It covers both the city and Ottawa well, with superb columnists like Althia Raj, Susan Delacourt, Martin Regg Cohn, Richard Warnica and, occasionally, Robin Sears. Plus some of Canada’s best investigative journalism by pros like Kevin Donovan. 

For decades The Star was by far Canada’s largest-selling broadsheet and a stalwart Liberal Party backer. Today, it still sits slightly left of the establishment-oriented, business-friendly Globe. 

And then there’s almost all the rest of Canada’s daily newspapers.

Postmedia’s Conservative Colossus

Name a major Canadian city and chances are Postmedia Network Canada Corp. has a monopoly on its daily newspapers. In Vancouver, it owns both The Sun and The Province. In Edmonton, both The Journal and The Sun. In Calgary, The Herald and The Sun. Both major Saskatchewan dailies. In Ottawa, The Citizen and The Sun. Montreal’s only English daily, The Gazette. In Atlantic Canada, almost every daily. Only in Winnipeg Postmedia has no paper, and in Toronto its sole title is The Sun tabloid. But then Postmedia’s National Post is in every city. 

With more than 100 Canadian papers, Postmedia’s titles all share some key traits. Not only is the same content featured across the chain, every paper has a staunchly conservative editorial stance. And not by chance. This would seem to defy commercial logic. Surely, with two titles in the same market it would make sense to have one skew right and the other left to catch readers at both ends of the spectrum. But that would not fit the agenda.

Whose agenda? In 2018, Postmedia CEO Andrew MacLeod reportedly decreed that its papers were “insufficiently conservative” and assigned political editors to ensure the chain’s coverage became more reliably conservative. What might have prompted that move?

Postmedia, debt-ridden and floundering, was effectively taken over in 2016 by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey-based hedge fund. Chatham acquired a 66% controlling stake through clever ownership structuring to circumvent federal regulations that limit foreign ownership of media outlets to 25%. The Trudeau government, elected a year earlier, failed to block the deal. Postmedia then went on a buying spree, snapping up media assets nationwide.

Where this becomes disturbing is that Chatham is controlled by Anthony Melchiorre, a major Republican Party donor… who is reportedly close to Donald Trump.

Although Postmedia has relaxed its conservative orthodoxy somewhat, should we be concerned? This at a time when Trump is waging economic war on Canada and threatening to annex us. And amid reports the U.S. is covertly supporting Alberta separatism… can we accept that a Trump acolyte controls most of Canada’s newspapers?

This coinciding with a campaign to “Defund the CBC.” Proponents accuse Canada’s public broadcaster of left-wing bias and unfair competition against private players… like Postmedia.

The CBC menu: what you get for a dime a day

Like Japan’s NHK and the UK’s BBC, the CBC and French-language Radio Canada are Canada’s public broadcasters. But where NHK and BBC collect license fees from the public, funding in Canada comes from the federal budget. Consequently, it’s a low priority, with funding per person of just $34 a year – 10 cents a day per Canadian – versus $79 on average in comparable Western nations. Even so, in both official languages CBC manages to provide a wide range of news and public affairs programming: TV, radio, online text and service to remote communities. And it’s trusted by Canadians: 78% of francophones trust Radio-Canada, versus 67% of anglophones who trust the CBC. 

Most important: while commercial outlets have scant coverage beyond major cities, CBC/Radio Canada has reporters in 70 communities nationwide, including places like Iqaluit, Kuujjuaq, Inuvik and Dawson City. Defund the CBC and much of the nation will have no news. 

Here’s some of what your CBC dime gets you.

Radio: Pick a local station in someplace you love – Corner Brook, Saskatoon or Iqaluit – and tune in on Radio One or CBC Music to livestream local and national content. Programs like The World at Six newscast, followed by As It Happens, an iconic news magazine featuring quirky phone interviews. Or Quirks & Quarks, the long-running weekly science program.

Text: My morning starts at CBC.ca/news which gives me a useful selection of local, national and international text stories… with no annoying paywall.

TV: Much of the CBC’s video content is “geo-restricted,” which means you can’t watch from Japan without a VPN. But YouTube carries popular news programs like Power & Politics, The Fifth Estate and The National, CBC TV’s lead nightly newscast – which I watch every evening at 6pm Japan time.

These days, The National drops on YouTube fairly reliably about 5pm our time. But for years, to my great annoyance, it only appeared when the techies in Toronto got round to it, never at any predictable hour. So I hounded CBC News General Manager Brodie Fenlon endlessly, demanding for Canadian expats at least the same standard as Newfoundland broadcast viewers, i.e. 30 minutes after the mainland. To his credit, Fenlon replied with friendly messages, but it took him years to solve this simple problem.

Problem: CBC can’t see us expats or aspiring migrants

An underlying problem seems to be that CBC cannot even see Canadians expats. StatsCan says there are over 4 million of us, 11% Canada’s population, more than most provinces. Since our right to vote in federal elections was restored in 2014, arguably we have a duty to keep up with events at home. Helping us do that surely falls under CBC’s mandate.

Add to that, millions of people worldwide who aspire to enter Canada as immigrants, asylum seekers or students. When they arrive, the more they know about the country the better. But how can they learn when cultural icons like Son of a Critch are geo-restricted on CBC?

Where other nations strut their ‘soft power’ with global TV offerings like NHK World, BBC World, France 24 and Deutsche Welle, Canada’s power is pitifully flaccid. Then again, you get what you pay for… and Canada pays precious little for the public broadcasting it enjoys.

Thinking back to how news-deprived I was in 1986, at the end of each day I now enjoy a glass of wine while tuning in to stories told by diverse, authentically Canadian voices on The National.

Et puis en Français…

Malheurusement, my French reading ability isn’t what it was, and I know little about Canada’s French-language media. So I asked francophone members of our CCCJ community for advice.

Among Quebec media, a key differentiator is the editorial stance on sovereignty. Now back in Quebec after 23 years in Japan, Vincent Poirier puts the difference between two leading journals this way: “La Presse is federalist but open-minded, while Le Devoir is sovereignist but open-minded.”

La Presse was cited by Vincent, Anne Parent, Laurent Trempe and Marc Bolduc as their favorite journal. It used to be a major print daily but now La Presse is online only and supported by reader donations. Laurent notes that it has a free app that works well, adding that Le Devoir “has some free content but walls it off a fair bit.”

Everyone speaks highly of public broadcaster Radio Canada. Laurent says, “The short version for francophones in Japan: Radio-Canada online plus a VPN if you want the TV stuff and you’re set.” 

Me, I miss Montreal’s gritty crime tabloid, Allo Police. Neither federalist nor sovereignist but fully brutalist, it’s long buried… in a shallow grave, sans doute.