The recent national panic over alleged foreign influence on our elected officials has seen politicians and journalists alike issue calls to name the suspected “traitors,” but it turns out that the worst traitors of all may actually be in our own news media. “While allegations of interference involving elected officials have dominated public and media discourse, the reality is that misinformation and disinformation pose an even greater threat to democracy,” wrote Justice Marie-Josée Hogue in her long-awaited report on the subject that was released this past week in no fewer than seven volumes. “Some spread disinformation about candidates and elected officials who express views that diverge from their own interests. Their goal is to try and prevent these candidates from getting elected, and to affect policy choices and positions.”

Hogue was named in 2023 to head a public inquiry into allegations of foreign political interference which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had tried to address with a quick investigation by former Governor General David Johnson, an old family friend. Concern built last June when the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians released a report claiming that some MPs had been “semi-witting or witting” dupes of foreign powers attempting to interfere in Canadian politics. While heavily redacted, the NSICOP report pointed a finger directly at foreign-funded Canadian news media, most notably by China, and its earlier report on the subject named the “China Watch” inserts carried by some major world newspapers, including the Globe and Mail, which were bought and paid for by the Chinese government.

As if on cue and to prove Hogue’s point, our other national newspaper, the foreign-owned National Post, ran a scathing front-page screed the very next day by Jordan Peterson denigrating numerous core Canadian values. The controversial psychologist lambasted what he called our “highly dysfunctional, expensive and increasingly unsustainable social safety net” and our “essentially socialist sentiment and moral superiority” in all but urging that we take up Donald Trump’s offer to become a 51st state. That might be preferable, he suggested, to “the continued privilege and expense of subsidizing Québec, half of whose citizens constantly clamour to secede from the country, while we impoverish ourselves for their benefit” and the “idiocy that is making us poor, weak, irrelevant on the international stage, and contemptible to our neighbours.” Canada has become “a country that despises its own history, economy and people,” Peterson argued. “For the last nine years, Canada has been run by exactly the type of contemptible elitists who are, if anything, even more anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, and anti-industrial state than the typical Canadian.” Peterson, whose diatribe unusually ran to more than 3,000 words, was named by Trudeau in testimony to the Hogue commission last fall as having received funding from Russian broadcaster RT. “Enough idiot green moralizing,” Peterson’s rant continued. “Enough carbon tax. Enough bloody net zero. And how about this? Enough multiculturalism and destruction of the Canadian identity.”

No, really, US hedge fund owners, tell me more about what a mentally unwell celebrity YouTuber who moved to the United States because his neighbours thought he was such an asshole has to say about Canadian patriotism. pic.twitter.com/VpSlR0Ee4z

— Will Greaves (@WillWJGreaves) January 29, 2025

The National Post is notably owned 98 percent by US hedge funds, as are most of the rest of Canada’s largest newspapers, despite a 25 percent limit on foreign ownership in this politically influential industry. The Postmedia chain that publishes it has steadily increased its stranglehold on Canada’s press, taking over the Sun Media chain in 2015, the Brunswick News chain in 2022 and Atlantic Canada’s dominant SaltWire Network last year. Postmedia’s majority shareholder by far, with 65 percent ownership, is New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, whose manager Anthony Melchiorre is a Trump ally whose supermarket tabloid National Enquirer suppressed allegations of sexual impropriety against Trump during his first presidential bid in 2016.

Postmedia was formed in 2010 by a consortium of creditors and debt holders of Canwest Global Communications, the previous owner of the historic Southam newspaper chain. The debt holders were mostly US hedge funds which had bought up Canwest’s bonds for pennies on the dollar before it went bankrupt in 2009, then used part of the debt they held to finance a bargain-priced takeover of the company. They cagily got around Canada’s 25 percent foreign ownership limit by forming Postmedia as a publicly-traded company with two classes of shares, including “variable voting” stock for foreigners which supposedly keeps their “control” of the firm under the limit. They then kept the rest of their hundreds of million in high-interest Canwest debt on the new company’s books, as I showed in my 2023 book The Postmedia Effect, in order to siphon off the vast majority of the company’s earnings in payments that have by now totalled more than $500 million.

Our limit on foreign ownership was imposed in the 1960s after US chains threatened to take over newspapers here. A 1999 study of coverage in Canadian-owned US newspapers of the Québec independence referendum noted that most countries prohibited or limited foreign media ownership “at least partly out of fear that foreign owners would use those outlets to manipulate public opinion in times of national crisis.” It indeed found evidence that foreign ownership “influences newspaper coverage and editorial commentary about key political issues in the parent company’s home country.”

A 2011 survey found that 77 percent of Canadians felt our media was “too important for culture and national security” to be foreign owned, with only 23 percent saying they believed media owners should be able to sell to foreigners in order to be competitive. Media owners, however, have long pushed to eliminate foreign ownership limits here in order to increase their share value on a global market. Canwest founder Izzy Asper, a former Winnipeg tax lawyer, notably managed to circumvent such limits in buying Australia’s Network Ten in 1995, forcing that country to change its laws.

With its earnings declining, Postmedia has had to make endless cost cuts and layoffs to keep up the $30 million in debt payments owed annually to its hedge fund owners, so CEO Paul Godfrey orchestrated an intense lobbying campaign that resulted in a five-year $595 million federal bailout for the industry in 2019. The bailout was increased in 2023 and extended for another five years after Ottawa passed the Online News Act designed to force Google and Meta to instead subsidize Canadian news media, only to see Meta block news here on its Facebook and Instagram social networks. Postmedia’s debt payments should now be mostly covered by the increased federal bailout funding, provincial subsidies and the payments from Google, which recently started to flow.

Postmedia has largely replaced local news coverage with paid content, including a long-running campaign for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, and under new CEO Andrew Macleod ordered its editors to hew even harder to the right politically. We are thus in effect paying foreign-owned media to feed us propaganda, an irony perhaps not lost on Justice Hogue. Her description of media that “spread disinformation about candidates and elected officials who express views that diverge from their own interests … to try and prevent these candidates from getting elected, and to affect policy choices and positions” could have been written with Postmedia, the National Post and Jordan Peterson in mind. “If we do not find ways of addressing it, misinformation and disinformation have the ability to distort our discourse, change our views, and shape our society,” she added. “In my view it is no exaggeration to say that at this juncture, information manipulation (whether foreign or not) poses the single biggest risk to our democracy. It is an existential threat.”

The solution to the Postmedia problem, as I have been saying for years, is as simple as disqualifying foreign-owned media companies from receiving our subsidies.

Marc Edge is a journalism researcher and author who lives in Ladysmith, BC. His books and articles can be found online at www.marcedge.com.