just about every walk of Atlantic Canada’s industrial life, and a stranglehold on East Coast journalism that once attracted the attention (and repelled the recommendations) of not one but two federal commissions of inquiry—the Davey Report (1970) and the Kent Commission (1981). The ownership concentration of Irving-owned Brunswick News was left unimpaired by Senator Keith Davey’s recommendation of passing legislation that would “require the break-up of regional monopolies, such as that of the Irving family in New Brunswick, by prohibiting the ownership of two or more newspapers having 75% or more of the circulation, in one language, in a defined geographical area.”6 Instead, Brunswick News today has 20 titles big and small, and boasts that “more than 60% of people in New Brunswick’s major cities read one of the publications” owned by the company.7 Good for them, you might say, but not so good for the citizens of New Brunswick, who are notoriously poorly served when it comes to anything approaching objective reporting about the biggest economic operator in the province—the owner of all its newspapers. “The newspapers shy away from covering internal divisions or leadership issues within the Irving family and companies,” Bruce Livesey wrote in Report on Business,8 then quoted Ken Langdon, a former publisher of one of the Irving papers, as saying, “The problem with the Irvings owning the papers is that none of that ever comes out.”
New Brunswick, which the Davey Report described as one of two “journalistic disaster areas” at the time (the other was Nova Scotia), was the subject of an episode of Jesse Brown’s cage-rattling podcast Canadaland in November 2014.9 “It’s like North Korea. It’s like the hermit province of New Brunswick,” Brown said. His show recounted a pretty thorough litany of all the ills you would expect of a powerful, rich, “notoriously secretive,” politically manipulative family monopoly. But it was an exchange from a later Canadaland episode that stood out for me. In February 2015, during a live broadcast from St. Thomas University in Fredericton, there was a panel discussion about a local controversy regarding the awarding of timber licences (the Irvings are major landowners, forest harvesters, and lumber millers, among many other things10). One of Brown’s guests was Green Party MLA David Coon, who had sponsored a bill in the legislature that would have favoured small, independent forest owners and operators. Coon complained that his bill was barely, and poorly, covered by the Irving-owned Telegraph-Journal. There is, Coon said, “a chill on the way that people speak about Irving-related businesses or forestry activities that they [Irving companies] are engaged in.”11
Coon: It’s also not just the way that Brunswick News is covering the stories but also what they’re not covering . . . Like in BC, the land has never been ceded by the First Nations in New Brunswick, but you would never know that was the case or that there were even First Nations in New Brunswick by reading Brunswick News.
Brown: The [proposed] legislation is directly contrary to the interests of the Irvings, and they did cover it in their paper. Your complaint is that it’s on page 5, it’s marginally covered, and the way it’s covered characterizes it as something of interest to fringe voices and nothing to be taken too seriously. Is that accurate?
Coon: Media tends to talk to the powers that be and tends to reflect the conventional wisdom. If you are not connected to the powers that be, or if you are not speaking in the narrative or the voice of conventional wisdom, then you don’t tend to have much of a place in the media.
Or much of a place in New Brunswick society at all if you are an Aboriginal person whose existence, according to Coon, is effectively unacknowledged by a media monopoly whose owners happen to have a competing interest in the land and its uses. As for an Aboriginal narrative contributing to the province’s conventional wisdom, let alone being acknowledged as part of Atlantic Canada’s traditional wisdom, or Canada’s, that evidently is in no danger of occurring through New Brunswick’s conventional media channels.
In a way, the Black and Irving newspaper oligopolies serve to rather tidily bracket a Canadian media landscape that is shockingly out of step with developments occurring around the world, and that profoundly ill serves Canadians. The West and the East aren’t the only places where media concentration exists in Canada (more on that below), but they are arguably where its worst effects manifest themselves in the connection between powerful industrial, natural resource, and other economic interests; those interests’ ownership of local media; their subsequent authorship of dominant local, regional, and national narratives; and their overt use of that confluence of interests to comfort themselves and afflict Canadians, a mari usque ad mare, with a narrow, self-serving, pro-business (theirs), monocultural view of Canada. If Keith Davey were alive today, he might be heard to utter, “Plus ça change.”
Newspaper ownership concentration mattered in 1970, when the Davey Report was issued, it mattered in 1981, when the Kent Commission recommended breaking up monopolies, and it matters now. Ownership concentration harms democracy, which thrives on a free press. But “in a country that has allowed so many newspapers to be owned by a few conglomerates, freedom of the press means, in itself, only that enormous influence without responsibility is conferred on a handful of people,”12 as the Kent Commission concluded 35 years ago. The commission also said flat out that “Industrial conglomerates produce poor newspapers.”13 Twenty-five years later, a Senate report on the state of Canadian media revealed how little things had changed, referring to the Irvings’ holdings as an “industrial-media complex.”14
Dancing with the Devil
CONCENTRATION DOESN’T JUST allow owners and publishers to peddle their impoverished (but self-enriching) views of the world; it also gives rise to brazen political interference. Look at the notorious directive made in October 2015 by Postmedia CEO and president Paul Godfrey that a ll 1 6 major newspapers in his stable endorse Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives in their doomed bid to retain power in Ottawa.15 Even more egregious was what John Barber described in the Guardian as “the company’s chain-wide blitz supporting Harper [that] culminated a few days before the election when virtually all Postmedia publications replaced their front pages with a pro-Conservative advertisement masquerading as an official notice from Elections Canada, the independent agency managing the vote.”16 This struck many Canadians as a new low for newspaper journalism, or at least for newspaper publishing. In fairness, says Margo Goodhand, who was editing the Edmonton Journal at the time, “while Godfrey ordered up pro-Tory editorials in all four of his papers in May [during the Alberta provincial election] and across the country federally in October, he was willing to sell any and all front pages to any political party that asked . . . Because the Tories bought so many front pages that day in the East, it has become some kind of urban legend that Godfrey gave away his papers to the Tories in a political move. Purely fiscal.”17
Meanwhile, also on the eve of the federal election, the Globe revealed the extent to which it has become little more than an oil-soaked rag when it plumped for the Conservatives in its pre-election editorial. Its former editor, John Stackhouse—then recently departed to the hallowed halls of Canadian banking—writes in Mass Disruption, a memoir that came out in October 2015, that “editorial boards at major newspapers . . . [remain] the high church of journalism,”18 stating that a “well-argued editorial” helps define an organization, by which measure the Globe confirmed its status on October 16, 2015,19 as Canada’s village idiot for the day—on arguably the most important day of the year for political journalism save election day itself.
For working journalists, how their paper’s owners spend their editorial coin can be utterly demoralizing, and decrees like Godfrey’s only illustrate how downright desperate the business prospects are for major newspapers—some would say deservedly so, given the soul-selling behaviour of the Postmedias of the world. “Eight of Canada’s daily newspapers disappeared last year,” Barber wrote in 2015, “and the leading titles are all operating at [a] loss.”20
Godfrey’s Postmedia already owned
