And we’re seeing it in actual time in Canada.
In August 2021, in an EconLog publish about Canada, I wrote:
Authorities can’t subsidize newspapers with out placing its thumb on the size.
The publish was titled “Canada’s Decline in Press Freedom.” In that publish, I mentioned the Canadian authorities’s system of subsidies to newspapers. I adopted up with an extra publish in December 2021 by which I quoted a critic of the subsidies, Peter Menzies, who quoted a critic named Tom Korski who put the issue succinctly: “You only need one customer and that’s the [federal] Minister of Heritage.”
To his credit score, Menzies has been monitoring this situation. In a publish on “The Line,” a Canadian Substack that follows Canadian politics carefully, Menzies quoted a Member of Parliament who’s a part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s authorities. Menzies wrote:
“Your paper wouldn’t be in business were it not for the subsidies that the government that you hate put in place — the same subsidies your Trump-adjacent foreign hedge fund owners gladly take to pay your salary,” he wrote.
The “he” who tweeted this was Taleeb Noormohamed, the Liberal MP for Vancouver Granville. He was replying to a publish on X “by Terry Newman, National Post’s new senior editor of its Comment section, promoting a column she had written outlining the incredible damage ‘a party and a minister can do to a country in nine years.’”
Menzies wrote:
Nothing Noormohamed stated was unfaithful. He and I are in good alignment within the view that had been it not for the patronage of the Justin Trudeau authorities, Postmedia (and certain the Toronto Star) would by now have ceased to exist. A few of its titles could have bought for components, however most of its zombie merchandise would have been dispatched way back with a chapter bullet to the mind, permitting new media to spring forth from decay.
About that, he was not fallacious, regardless that what he did was very inappropriate, much more so as a result of Noormohamed is not only some schmuck MP making up the numbers in a minority Parliament. He’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Heritage, Pascal St-Onge, in whose workplace a lot of the choices relating to the plethora of funding preparations for Canadian information media are made. (daring added)
The title of Menzies’s Substack publish was on course: “The Liberals Say the Quiet Part Out Loud.”
Freedom of the press in Canada is dying. And, as Noormohamed’s threatening tweet factors out, silencing critics of the federal government is without doubt one of the important functions of presidency subsidies.
