Senator Simons: That is a very good question. I wish I could answer in French, but I think it would be better for everyone if I answered in English. It will be easier for both of us.

[English]

You are right. I have also been critical of the idea of the government funding journalism through the local journalism fund.

It is a very difficult proposition to have an independent press that is reliant on government subsidies, no matter how arm’s-length they are.

It is also very problematic to have newspapers be so dependent upon two corporations instead of on the traditional subscriber base and traditional advertisers.

I have spoken with academics such as Vivek Krishnamurthy at the University of Ottawa, who suggests that the more appropriate model would have been tax credits — very robust and generous tax credits, so that if you subscribe to a Canadian publication, online or in print, you would get money back. And if you were an advertiser and you placed your advertising in your local weekly newspaper or your local daily newspaper or on your local radio station, you might also get a subsidy back from that. That would allow consumers of news and purchasers of advertising to vote with their eyes and vote with their feet and have there be a direct correlation between what people want to read and what people want to support and getting money back from the government so that it sort of — it washes the money, like Pontius Pilate.

We have painted ourselves into this corner. I have spoken recently with publishers of small-town community newspapers who are in despair because one of the bread-and-butters of their market was that the local town would advertise in the local paper. If you had a bylaw hearing, if you were announcing some city change, the town spent money in the local town paper. Now they do not do that. They buy a much cheaper ad online or they don’t even buy an ad; they just make a post on Facebook. As a result, if we do not support our local media, it dies. If we are going to make a choice in this country that we do not care about having local news, then that is exactly what we’ll end up with, with no local news.

I also met a couple of weeks ago with Jordan Bitove, the new owner and publisher of The Toronto Star, a very big name in the Toronto business community, who said that he is knocking on the door of the big banks and the big car companies, saying, “Hey, put your display advertising back in the paper because if you don’t, there won’t be a paper.”

We have choices to make too, and I’m not sure that we have made the right ones.