Canadian journalism is in danger, and has been for a while.

Canadian journalists are fighting an uphill battle to keep doing what they do, but it's not in the way most Canadian's think it is.

We are a little over a year out to a very key election in Canadian history, especially for journalists. Most Canadians who are tuned into the election pre-amble and campaign blasting happening now are aware that under Poilievre the Canadian Conservative Party is threatening to slash the CBC's funding if elected. This comes on the back of years of pedaling a dangerous and false mythos of the CBC being a liberal funded left-leaning propaganda dispenser. While the serious harms of defunding the CBC, warrants it's own story, that's not the biggest threat to quality, fact based, Canadian Journalism.

Concentration is. All over Canada local papers, who are the backbone of our nation's journalism, are being consolidated by parent companies run by hedge fund managers. These investment groups keep major (often right leaning) press afloat and inject cash into them to buy out our nations local papers. Torstar owns dozens of these papers, and was taken over by two investment bankers who promised to keep the companies neutral tone, however this has not happened. Postmedia, who's founder's columns make racist, transphobic and xenophobic remarks on the regular also owns dozens of papers. Lifestyle magazines and blogs across Ontario are being bought en masse by Zoomer Media, who openly admit, on their website, that their aim is to influence politics to please boomers.

The danger in these takeovers, aside from bias being forced upon papers, includes shady anti-competition practices these multi million dollar funds practice with the papers. In 2017 Torstar and Postmedia, each controlling dozens of papers, partook in a 'swap'. Many papers across Canada swapped hands, and what followed was 30+ regional monopolies. The two companies had planned that in regions with at least one paper from each company, both papers would end up in the same companies hands. This created monopolies where those 30+ regions now only had one parent companies papers.

These parent companies had previously, and continued after, to influence and strong hand their editors into publishing/not publishing certain materials. This partnered with the new formed monopolies had real effects. The Canadian competition bureau, of course, ruled this didn't violate it's terms, upholding the bureaus long tradition of not taking media-concentration seriously, as seen with the Shaw-Rogers merger, and the likely to pass MLSE-Rogers acquisition.

Concentrated giants are capturing entire markets, and local journalism is being neutered in order to appease bay street hedge fund managers. Not only that, but news does not operate well when treated as a financial investment. Being profitable is the ultimate goal for most papers, but these hedge funds cry out that profitability simply isn't enough, and instead constant growth is demanded. Journalism is being treated like a stock on the TSX, and it will keep being treated as such until change happens. This will result in closures, further concentrations and overall the erasure of quality local journalism, snowballing into a threat on aspects of our Canadian democracy.

Journalism deserves to be run by journalists.