And we’re seeing it in real time in Canada.
In August 2021, I wrote in an EconLog post about Canada:
The government cannot subsidize newspapers without putting its thumb on the scale.
The post was titled “Canada’s Decline in Press Freedom.” In that post I discussed the Canadian government’s subsidy system for newspapers. I followed up with another post in December 2021 in which I quoted a critic of the subsidies, Peter Menzies, who quoted a critic named Tom Korski who put the problem succinctly: “You only need one customer and that is the [federal] Minister of Heritage.”
It is to his credit that Menzies has followed this problem. In a post on “The Line,” a Canadian Substack that closely follows Canadian politics, Menzies quoted a member of parliament who is part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Menzies wrote:
“Your newspaper wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the subsidies that the government you hate has put in place — the same subsidies that your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners love to use to pay your salaries,” he wrote.
The “he” who tweeted this was Taleeb Noormohamed, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville. He responded to a post on X” by Terry Newman, National Post new editor-in-chief of the Comment section, which promoted a column she had written outlining the incredible damage “that a party and a minister can do to a country in nine years.”
Menzies wrote:
Nothing Noormohamed said was untrue. He and I are in complete agreement that, were it not for Justin Trudeau’s government, Postmedia (and probably the Toronto star) would no longer exist. Some titles may have been sold off in parts, but most zombie products would have been shipped long ago with a bankruptcy bullet to the brain, allowing new media to emerge from decay.
In that respect he was not wrong, even if what he did was very inappropriate, especially since Noormohamed is not just some idiot MP who makes up the numbers in a minority parliament. He is Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of HeritagePascal St-Onge, in whose office most decisions about the plethora of Canadian news media funding schemes are made. (bold added)
The title of Menzies’ Substack post was spot on: “The liberals say the quiet part out loud.”
Press freedom in Canada is dying. And, as Noormohamed’s threatening tweet indicates, silencing government critics is one of the main purposes of government subsidies.