It is with interest, and a huge astonishment, that we learned of the chronicle of Professor Pierre Trudel published on April 22 and entitled “Close Radio-Canada” in The duty. If several of the reflections proposed by the author bear witness to the importance of the mandate devolved by the State on Radio-Canada (SRC) as a public diffuser or the devastating effects of the American dissemination platforms in our ecosystem, how can it ignore the essential and historical role played by private broadcasters in the Canadian radio industry?
While the media environment, here as elsewhere, is jostled by deep changes and weakened by, among other things, the drying up of advertising revenues, the regulatory heaviness and the proliferation of disinformation, it is more than time, for the future, even for the survival of our system, to ask a wider question than simply that of the financing or the definancing of radio-Canada.
The laws and rules that supervise our broadcasting system provide for the coexistence of private and public components. They also provide, by the definition of the mandate of Radio-Canada, a complementarity between the state-owned company, beneficiary of large public denarii, and private broadcasters. It is largely through this complementarity that our broadcasting system can hope to remain relevant and register in rampart to foreign giants to preserve our content of entertainment of quality and local information, while ensuring the maintenance of jobs and creation with us.
However, this complementarity between Radio-Canada and the Private is lacking. The state -owned company acts as a private broadcaster by racing on listening ratings, production acquisitions and advertising revenues. By registering in commercial and unfair competition with private companies, the SRC jeopardizes our television system. This situation is untenable and the federal government must implement several of the recommendations made on this issue for years, including those, among others, of the former Minister of Canadian Heritage and those of the Yale report of 2020.
One of the changes that are often mentioned and that we demand is the withdrawal of advertising on all Radio-Canada platforms, as is already the case for its radio. For what ? Because advertising is still the main source of income for private diffusers.
These advertising income has also been widely monopolized for several years by American platforms like Meta, whose reliability is not measured by the credibility of the media from here. Professor example: despite its growing market shares in Quebec, TVA Group continues to see its advertising revenues fall dramatically. The federal government must curb this bleeding and revoke the tax deductibility of advertising expenses to foreign companies while adding a tax deduction for investments in companies here. In a world where publication and tolerance in the face of false news disseminated on social media is denounced, how can we accept that our public institutions continue to encourage them and that our governments provide them with inequitable tax treatment?
Another incongruity of our system, while our television is struggling, but remains the main source used by 38 % of the Canadian population to learn, as revealed Digital News Report Canada 2024it is absurd to note that the governments of Quebec and Canada have still not expanded the tax credit for journalism from the written press to TV journalism, while this media provides essential information content to our democracy. The current political context shows us the need to have access to reliable and quality information. To maintain it, the work of journalists, regardless of the platform, must be supported fairly.
The place of choice that TVA and LCN occupy in the daily life of Quebecers is an eloquent reminder of the force, even today, of our television. VAT news meetings attract five million weekly viewers on our channels, far beyond the listening ratings of the SRC. With eight market share in the winter of 2025 – a record of the last 20 years -, LCN has established itself as the essential reference in information, ranking second in the most watched channels in Quebec during the day, just after TVA, but in front of the SRC.
These figures testify not only to the confidence that citizens give us, but also to the importance of the private sector in the production and maintenance of entertainment and information emissions.
In the end, any reform concerning Radio-Canada and its mandate cannot be done by obliterating the private broadcasters who are struggling to survive in a surregled, surcharged and deficit broadcasting environment, and where its business model has long reached its obsolescence.
Pierre Trudel columnist replica
The main objective of the chronicle was to alert, very real, of a pure and simple dismantling of public service. It is noted that for 20 years, faced with the non -supervised presence of American online platforms, all of the Canadian media have been experiencing heartbreaking declines. If we were able to read in this point any condemnation of private broadcasters, this is unfortunate. Private broadcasters play an essential role in Canadian media ecology and they have heavily suffered from launching policies that have prevailed in the American platforms. The strengthening of the public service, as well as an authentic refocusing towards public service missions rather than a positioning of commercial competitor of private broadcasters seems, however, constituting the way to favor the system of broadcasting as a whole.
