Earlier this month the US State Department released its annual report on Human Rights in over 190 countries. As usual, there was a country report on Canada. What was less usual was the report’s negative focus criticizing the state of press freedoms in Canada. It seems that as press freedom has declined in the US under Trump 2.0, the MAGA interpretation of how other countries should conduct themselves has ramped up. If there was ever a case of “the pot calling the kettle black”, this is it.
The US Government, through its various departments, issues a number of annual reports, most of them mandated by Congress. Many of them, such as the National Trade Estimates Report on Foreign Trade Barriers or the Special 301 Report on intellectual property (IP), both issued by the Office of the US Trade Representative, are commentaries on the practices of other countries. While these reports can be useful in highlighting trade-distorting measures or areas of weak IP enforcement or legislation, no-one could accuse the US Government of consistency between the practices it identifies and comments on, and many of the practices that the United States itself follows. One good example is in the area of copyright law, where the annual Special 301 Report takes various trading partners of the US to task for numerous transgressions and/or loopholes in copyright protection. But as I pointed out in a blog last year (The USTR “Watch List” Designation You Will Never See), the US hardly has clean hands when it comes to some key copyright issues, such as an unwillingness or inability to institute a site-blocking regime to fight offshore streaming piracy, something that more than 40 other countries have managed to do, and the inadequacy of US law in protecting performance rights of US and non-US artists for music played on terrestrial radio stations, among other issues. The fact that the US is the leading source of online piracy globally with 13.5 billion visits to piracy sites annually does not seem to be enough to get a US site-blocking regime over the goal line in Congress.
The same is true in spades for the trade sector with the advent of the Trump Administration and its practice of unilaterally, arbitrarily and seemingly randomly setting import tariffs (Brazil 50%, Canada 35%, Mexico 30%, China 30%–for now, EU 15%, Japan 15%, Australia 10%, etc,) in defiance of just about every international trade agreement the US has ever signed.
The most recent example of this phenomenon of “say one thing but do another” is the US State Department’s Report on Human Rights in Canada particularly with respect to Section 2 and its hypocritical criticisms of Canada’s “Freedom of the Press”. A particular bugbear for the State Department is the Online News Act (ONA), legislation that came into force in 2023, based on similar legislation in Australia. (Note that the State Department’s report on Australian human rights does not even mention the similar Australian legislation as an issue).
The objective of the ONA, to quote the Canada Gazette, is to seek “to capture the largest and most prominent digital platforms that operate in the markets that have a strategic advantage over news businesses” in order to introduce “a new legislative and regulatory framework that ensures fair revenue sharing between digital platforms and news businesses”. Certain market criteria were applied to scope in the targetted platforms (annual global revenue exceeding $1 billion, must operate a search engine or social media market, minimum 20 million average monthly unique visitors in Canada). As a result, only two entities were subject to the legislation, Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram). As noted, the ONA mirrored similar legislation passed in Australia a couple of years before. It was also very similar to legislation introduced, but not passed, in the US Congress, (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act) and to legislation enacted in California. Basically, it required the large digital platforms to pay for their use of news content, content that the platforms used to attract viewers and thus sell ads.
It would be fair to say that the results of the ONA in Canada were mixed. After much uncertainty, threats and lobbying, Google carved out an exemption for itself by agreeing to contribute (CAD) $100 million annually to a fund to support Canadian journalism (while eliminating contributions it was already making to some chosen journalistic enterprises). META took an alternate route by supposedly exempting itself from the reach of the legislation by blocking all coverage from Canadian news sources, claiming that it derived no commercial benefit from having news coverage on Facebook or Instagram. This seems to reflect a global decision by the company to refuse to acknowledge any value from–or willingness to pay for–news content. META’s earlier deals in Australia are not being renewed. Australia is not amused and is considering various courses of action.
The funding from Google was welcomed by Canadian media outlets, many of them small. As in the US, most news media enterprises in Canada, whether print, digital or broadcast, are struggling as digital platforms have taken over the ad markets that previously supported news media and news journalism. Consumers have gone online for news yet are reluctant to pay for it. The Google funding, plus taxpayer-funded Local Journalism Initiative Funds and tax credits allocated to “Qualified Canadian Journalism Organizations” (QCJO), have helped prevent more areas of the country from becoming news deserts. According to CBC, eligible media outlets employing a qualified journalist will receive between approximately $14,000 and $17,000 annually per journalist from the Google funding, with smaller and digital outlets being on the higher end of the scale. You would think that these efforts to preserve independent journalism would be considered a good thing and might even be applauded by the US State Department in its report on Canadian press freedoms. You would be wrong.
The State Department’s most current (2024) criticism of Freedom of the Press in Canada contains four essential points;
- The Government of Canada used a variety of mechanisms to fund public and private sector media in the country.
- The Online News Act empowered the CRTC to set mandatory guidelines between digital platforms and news businesses.
- The Federal Court upheld the government’s decision to deny tax credits to an “independent news organization” (Rebel News–not specifically named in the State Department report) because it failed to meet the program’s criteria as a qualified journalism organization.
- The “Changing Narratives Fund” component of the Local Journalism Initiative, designed to support “diverse communities” (defined as including Indigenous, Black, racialized, ethno-religious minority, people with disabilities and 2SLGBTQI+ communities) discriminated against journalists who fell outside these “favored” categories.
Let’s look at these allegations in turn. The Government of Canada, as is the case with many governments including, until recently, the US Government (which fully or partially funded media organizations including National Public Broadcasting, PBS, and Voice of America), provides various support measures for Canadian media and publishing, such as the Canadian Periodical Fund, the Local Journalism Initiative (LJI) and the Journalism Tax Credit. To ensure that only bona fide organizations qualify for the tax credit, there are transparent criteria to become a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization (QCJO). An independent advisory board composed of journalism experts drawn from current and retired faculty members from post-secondary journalism schools across Canada, as well as some in the journalism industry, makes recommendations as to who qualifies . As for the LJI, it is also adjudicated by an independent panel of experts.
With respect to government support programs, the State Department alleges that “News organizations faced direct and indirect pressure to conform their political speech in order to gain or maintain access to these funds, leading to self-censorship”. How did they reach that conclusion. Who knows? Not the slightest evidence is put forward to support this dubious proposition.
As for the Online News Act, the report states that “The law empowered the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission to set mandatory bargaining guidelines between platforms and news businesses and to otherwise enforce and set regulatory guidance for the act, including codes of conduct and eligibility of news businesses to participate, powers which could be used to discriminate against political speech or disfavored independent media outlets.” Huh? The only funding that emerged from the ONA was Google’s $100 million. The CRTC has no role in its distribution. It is administered by a non-profit organization, the Canadian Journalism Collective, established for this purpose by a group of independent publishers and broadcasters, and selected by Google to manage distribution of the funds. As for META, which stonewalled the ONA process and eventually picked up its ball and went home, blocking distribution of Canadian news on its platforms to avoid paying a nickel to support news gathering in Canada, the State Department manages to blame Canada for the resulting news blackout, which it equates with “censorship”;
Rather than participate in government-mandated bargaining, some American digital platforms announced that they would no longer make news content available to Canadian users, leading to substantial censorship of news content including local news content.
This is a quibble, but censorship is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news etc that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable or a threat to security“. What META did by blocking all Canadian news was certainly unacceptable but it definitely wasn’t censorship.
As for the State Department championing Rebel News (an alt-right website often compared to Breitbart News in the US) in the website’s attempt to qualify for the journalism tax credit, is the US State Department implying that the Canadian court system does not support freedom of the press? These are the facts. Rebel News appealed the denial of QCJO status to the Federal Court. It lost for good reasons. The Federal Court upheld the decision of the Canada Revenue Agency to deny the outlet’s application for QCJO tax credits because it failed to meet the key criteria of producing original news content. On a review of 483 articles published by Rebel News, less than one percent was deemed original, the rest being either opinion or republished material. (These are the very same tax credits that earlier in the Report were criticized for leading to self censorship of news organizations, so according to the State Department, it’s bad if you take them and it’s bad if you can’t get them.).
As for the Changing Narratives Fund, it is an additional $10 million (i.e. new money) in funding over 3 years provided to the Local Journalism Initiative. It is hard to understand how that undermines press freedom in Canada.
Let’s look at the equivalent State Department Report on Canadian human rights in 2023, which had this to say about press freedoms;
“An independent media, an effective judiciary, and a functioning democratic political system combined to promote freedom of expression, including for media members. Independent media were active and expressed a wide variety of views without restriction”.
Gee, how could it all go so wrong in just a year? The tax credits and local journalism funding have been around for quite a while. The ONA brought in around $100 million in new funding to journalism. There is room for valid criticism of the role of the press and press freedoms in Canada (the RCMP have been pretty heavy-handed with journalists at protest sites for example) but what really changed was the arrival of the MAGA crowd in Washington.
But if the criticisms of Canada’s press freedoms reek of the Trump Administration’s domestic US agenda, it is the hypocrisy of attacking the freedom of the press in Canada that really sticks in my throat given the current declining state of press freedoms in the US. Apart from the fact that– according to the Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index— the US places 57th out of 180 countries (Canada ranks 21, UK 20, New Zealand 16, Australia 29), there is plenty of evidence that press freedoms in the US are on a steep decline, despite the courage of some US media outlets in fighting back. I personally don’t give the Press Freedom Index that much credibility (it strains credulity to place the US below Panama, Moldova, North Macedonia and a few others), but it is more difficult to dismiss the views of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists who report that 100 days into Donald Trump’s administration, press freedoms in the US are no longer “a given”. The Committee’s Special Report, “Alarm bells: Trump’s first 100 days ramp up fear for the press, democracy”, states clearly that;
“The first 100 days of the Trump administration have been marked by a flurry of executive actions that have created a chilling effect and have the potential to curtail media freedoms. These measures threaten the availability of independent, fact-based news for vast swaths of America’s population.”
Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, cravenly settled by Paramount, is one prominent example. There are many others. The White House banned Associated Press reporters from the press pool after the outlet refused to follow an executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. The Wall Street Journal was banned from the press pool covering Trump’s recent trip to Scotland over its coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein affair, which Trump didn’t like. As Donald Trump has weaponized the US government against any elements of the US media he doesn’t like, at any given moment in time, the US reputation as the “gold standard” for press freedom and investigative reporting is dropping like a stone. Now it appears that the US State Department has been enlisted to do the Administration’s dirty work, and to peddle its view of how the world should be run, through its Human Rights Report.
I don’t really blame the authors of the report. If they hadn’t already been fired for not being doctrinally correct, they were just doing what they were told to do—push the Trump agenda by whatever means available. In picking on freedom of the press in Canada, they come across as particularly hypocritical and biased, undermining whatever reputational impact the State Department’s Report on Human Rights used to have.
If this is not a case of the pot calling the kettle black, (with very little substantiating evidence to back up the accusation) then I don’t know what is. Maybe it’s just a lot of hypocritical hot air.
© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved
This post originally appeared on the Hugh Stephens Blog and is reproduced with permission and thanks
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