Access To Local News Has Decreased For Canadians Over The Past 16 Years.
A News Release from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA)
Posted March 28th, 2025 on Niagara At Large
Reversing the loss of local news outlets in Canada is essential to preventing the spread of misinformation.
Sad news from the CCPA’s latest report, News Deprivation: Canadian communities starving for local news. It finds, since 2008, that Canada has lost 11 per cent of its local print media outlets and nine per cent of its private broadcast news outlets.
“Nearly two and a half million Canadians live in a postal code with one, or no, local news outlets,” says report co-author David Macdonald. That’s double the proportion in 2008.
Yet the more common situation for most Canadians is to live in a state of constant news deprivation with only limited access to local news outlets relative to the size of their community.”
Examining the landscape in detail reveals that all provinces and territories except Ontario saw declines in small town news with smaller communities in Quebec, P.E.I., and Manitoba seeing big losses. However, the worst case was Newfoundland and Labrador’s small towns, which have lost three quarters of their news outlets in the past 16 years.
There’s a role for public broadcasters to fill the void.
With the decrease in private-sector news outlets across the country, there is an opportunity for the CBC-Radio/Canada to step in and fill the news void.
Hamilton is Canada’s 10th biggest city but it doesn’t have a local CBC radio station—and it’s wanted one for two decades! Sonja Macdonald and Paul Shaker tell the story in our new report Mixed Signals: Lessons from CBC’s experience in Hamilton.
“With broad support across the community, including from municipal residents, leadership from city hall, and local members of parliament, the advocacy should have easily rallied CBC to enter Hamilton’s local radio market,” said Macdonald. “Yet year after year, CBC has left Canada’s 10th largest city without local radio service from the public broadcaster.”
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