Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge is concerned about the difficult situation at Quebecor, which announced Thursday that TVA Group would be forced to cut nearly 550 jobs to ensure its sustainability.
At a news conference in Montreal on Friday, Ms. St-Onge spoke of “real difficulties” and “bad news,” particularly for information in the regions.
“I am supportive, touched and sad that this situation is happening to them,” Ms St-Onge said during a scrum.
She recalls that the Trudeau government is committed to modernizing the Broadcasting Act and creating a negotiating framework with web giants to help finance Canadian media.
“We are gaining momentum, it is important that we move forward. We remain committed to ensuring that we create successful conditions for our audiovisual industry in the coming decades, in a context where the web giants really take up all the space, and we must ensure that French-language content, content from Quebec and Canada can be easily found online,” she added.
Pascale St-Onge had nothing new to announce regarding Google other than that “negotiations continue.”
The online news law comes into force on December 19th. “By then I hope we have found common ground. At Facebook we’ll see what happens next. Ultimately it’s about balancing the market. We want to ensure that our news media and our audiovisual companies have fair relationships with the platforms that are extremely rich, global, powerful and extremely profitable.”
Facebook has been blocking news from all Canadians since last summer in a dispute with Ottawa over Canadian media not having to be paid for their news content.
Major VAT reorganization
Remember that TVA will cut 547 jobs, mostly in production, as part of a major restructuring that will also affect its newspapers, websites and magazines. Quebecor President and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau said Thursday that these difficult decisions are aimed at “saving TVA.”
Cable subscriptions fell by 10% while advertising revenue fell by 25%, according to figures from the entrepreneur, who attributed his media group’s setbacks to competition from platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney, Tou.tv Extra or Crave. Web giants now monopolize 80% of advertising revenue in the country.
TC Transcontinental announced on Friday the end of its agreement with Publisac, ceasing distribution from May 2024. This could have an impact on the distribution of local and regional newspapers.
Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge, together with Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, attended the signing of a modernized Canada-Swiss audiovisual co-production agreement at the Cinémathèque québécoise in Montreal.
More details to follow.