Journalism in jeopardy
The vast majority of Canadians believe that journalism plays a vital democratic role for the country. An Angus Reid survey last month found that 94 per cent of respondents say the media performs an important function in our democracy. It sends a clear signal to elected officials that journalism is a crucial part of Canada’s democratic fabric.
But in the past 10 years, 238 local news outlets have closed their doors, according to a Ryerson University media watchdog. Of those, 212 were newspapers that were either closed entirely or closed due to mergers. The remaining 26 closures were TV, radio and digital outlets. More than 16,500 jobs in the media sector have been eliminated since 2008, according to the Canadian Media Guild — nearly half of those are in print media.
It’s not a healthy picture for preserving our democracy. The reasons are obvious —a decline in ad revenue, a shift to digital, and the powerful online presence of Facebook and Google. Media groups, especially newspapers, have rushed to adapt to the digital age but the turmoil has seen newsrooms close and journalists laid off.
What are media outlets to do? For starters, they have adapted and diversified to publish their material in various platforms such as print, mobile, digital and video. And following consultations with news organizations, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage produced a positive report last year with recommendations for federal action to support media in local communities.
News organizations had offered practical, low-cost solutions for Ottawa to consider, such as amending the Canadian Periodical Fund (CPF) to include daily newspapers, copyright protection, closing loopholes, tax changes and reversing the digital-first strategy for government advertising. One such loophole allows billions of dollars in ads to flow to foreign internet sites, which hire no Canadian journalists, at the expense of Canadian media outlets.
News Media Canada, which represents community and daily newspapers, proposed remaking the CPF into the Canadian Journalism Fund and giving it a new mandate to support local journalism, along with $350 million in funding. But the federal budget brought down Tuesday was far below what news industry leaders had sought or expected. It offered $50 million over five years to independent, nongovernmental organizations to support local journalism in under-serviced communities. There is no indication of who those organizations will be.
On a positive note, government will explore allowing charitable support for journalism and local news, thus avoiding direct funding to news organizations that are fiercely protective of their independence from government.
Government likes to tout its support for journalism by pointing to increased funding for the CBC. But most community reporting is being done by newspapers, which won’t be found anywhere else. The mistaken focus of government is on communities that have already lost newspapers, rather than supporting existing newspapers and their journalists to allow them to continue to provide local news in their communities.
The industry wants to boost journalism, which supports democracy; yet the government seems content to let market forces run their course.
It’s a potentially dangerous situation. And not just for those behind pens and computers.
Here’s a look at what was making the news 25 and 50 years ago in the Hants Journal.
25 years ago
(March 3 and 10, 1993 editions)
• Windsor town council considered a new road proposal from landowner Philip Burgess. The property owner wanted to build a 1500-foot gravel road at the end of Payzant Drive so that the Church of the Latter Day Saints could build a $1 million church on a parcel of his land.
It was noted that without a proposal with drawings, the town engineer couldn’t comment on the matter.
• Two men were charged following an early morning break-in at Gibson’s Irving in Newport Station. A quantity of cigarettes was stolen.
• Children were being warned of stranger danger after two young children were approached in the Windsor Forks area and asked to get in a man’s car. They ran home.
• A new $5.3 million elementary school was to be constructed in Lantz. It was to replace the 1941-built elementary school in the community.
• East Hants Liberal MLA Jack Hawkins announced he was worried about Nova Scotia’s immigration program, saying Canada has become an international joke. He claimed 5,000 jobs in Nova Scotia were being “lost to immigration.”
• Joan Langille was elected as the new Windsor and District Board of Trade president – marking the first woman president of the board.
• Tara Lynn Tousenard, a well-known Nova Scotia fiddler, was to headline the entertainment at the upcoming Princess Windsor coronation.
• Nancy MacNeil, of Windsor, was one of 10 medical students in Canada to receive a 12-week scholarship. The firstyear medical student was planning to study the sanitarium in Kentville where tuberculosis patients were once treated, which was more or less in isolation.
• Schools throughout Hants County had guinea pigs placed in their Grade 5 classes as part of a science project. Students attending Windsor Forks Elementary School were happy to see their guinea pig give birth to triplets.
• The Nan Hughes Trophy was awarded to Mary Kenny, second; Pauline Middleton, lead; Isabel Palmeter, skip; and Cheryl Palmer, mate, during a Windsor Curling Club bonspiel.
• King’s-Edgehill School students presented the play The Death of Colonel Simon Willoughby (1881-1946).
• Windsor Forks Elementary School
A friend recommended reading The Last Canadian Knight, which is a recent biography of Hantsport resident Sir Graham Day.
Having enjoyed reading it, she offered a loan. I’d met Sir Graham several times in the past and found him witty, intelligent and in possession of a decisive sense of humour, so I was glad to borrow the book by Gordon Pitts.
Little known in Canada outside boardrooms, even in the Maritimes where he also made his mark, Sir Graham made his name in England as one of Margaret Thatcher’s wizard in privatization.
According to Pitts, he had a better track record than a fellow Canadian tycoon of an earlier era, Lord Beaverbrook, performing first in the reorganization of shipyards and then, for a decade, running mammoth companies until 1993.
Sir Graham was loyal to the Conservative Thatcher, who aimed to take under-performing, nationally-owned companies and sell them. While Thatcher certainly had her detractors, Lady Ann Day told Pitts that her husband would have “gone through fire for her — and he did.”
Born in Halifax to an English father Grade 5 students attending Windsor Forks Elementary School show off the class’ guinea pig, which gave birth to triplets in 1993. Guinea pigs were placed in Grade 5 classes across the county as part of a science project. Pictured are, from left, Richard Vaughan, Devon Schofield, Mark Benedict and Kristi Shay.
students raised $122.35 through a lip sync contest and jelly bean guessing contest. The money was donated to the Windsor food bank.
• Hawboldt’s Furniture was having a truck load RCA sale. A 33-inch home theatre stereo TV featuring VHP (very high performance) and 181 channel tuning capability, was on sale for $999.95. For those on a budget, a nine-inch Color Track TC was available for $299.95.
50 years ago (Feb. 28 and March 6,1968 editions)
• The Windsor Post Office ws one of 113 post offices in the province that was going to be keeping its lobby open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was an “experiment” that was national in scope. It was designed as an opportunity for box holders to pick up their mail at a time convenient to them.
• Four people, including two from East Hants, died while travelling on the Bicentennial Highway near the Kearney Lake overpass.
• Former Windsor resident Charles Eric Boulden was honoured by the Nova Scotia Agricultural College. The new animal husbandry building was posthumously named after him.
• The calendula (Scotch marigold) was selected to be Hants County’s flower by the area’s rural beautification committee.
• Family and Childrens’ Services of Hants County was looking to survey about 500 people aged 65 years and older to learn the problems faced by people in the age bracket and discover the reason why many are able to “get along with relatively little difficulty.”
• PFC Gary F. Shaw, 19, was killed in action in Vietnam. The army paratrooper from Toledo, who was born in Windsor, had been twice wounded in action. and a Nova Scotian mother, Sir Graham was a child of the Depression. His high school experience was not exactly positive and his time at Dalhousie University did not begin favourably. One of his early notable successes was working in music theatre and television, such as Singalong Jubilee.
It wasn’t until he began to study law that he found his métier. One sympathetic professor helped turn his academic life around and so influenced him that, later on, Sir Graham would find time for mentorship himself.
His initial legal experience was in a small-town office in Windsor and he found that he was adept. The Days married and started a family, but life with that narrow a focus was not to be.
The contacts Day had made at Dalhousie Law School led to a troubleshooting role with Canadian Pacific. After a time with a Canadian shipbuilding firm, he was needed in that sector in Britain. I was interested to read how he won over an embittered workforce by being himself. As a Canadian, he was not easily categorized and Day did the unusual — like having a longtime cleaning woman christen a new boat.
Whether at the board table or back in 2014 when Hantsport’s finances turned the town into a village, he called it like he saw it.
“Timid or tentative CEOs cannot thrive in the face of the Day bulldozer. They roll over too quickly. It is easy to assume that ‘Sir Graham knows best’ because of his rich experience, but even Day concedes he is sometimes
• The Windsor Royals advanced to the Metro Valley Junior Hockey League finals against the Halifax Colonels. It was to be a best of three series. The winner of the series would play Truro.
• The Imperial Theatre in Windsor was showing Hells Angels on Wheels, featuring an all-star cast, Born To The Saddle, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Honey Pot (which was billed as “a motion picture with some sting in it”), The Dirty Dozen, Tristie (a matinee about a tiny outlaw adopted by an elephant), The Reptile, and The Girl and the General.
• In the Hants History column dating back to 1943, it was noted that the month of February had “fair weather and bright, mild days.” The lowest recorded temperature was -18 C.
In military news of 1943, it was reported that Hants Journal employee W.L. Henderson was serving overseas and had been caught in a bombing raid at the Waterloo Station in London.
In February 1918, there were several tragedies reported. Harry Rolph was killed while working in the Hantsport shipbuilding mill of Farquhar and Porter. The home of Mortimer Parsons, of Cheverie, was badly damaged by fire. Capt. David Scott and his crew aboard the steamer Acadien were given up as lost.
In wartime news from 1918, Percy Chisholm, who had been twice wounded in France, returned to fighting on the frontlines. To view more photos from 25 and 50 years ago, be sure to visit wrong, and faces up to it,” Pitts wrote.
Over the years in Britain, he served with the Rover Group, British Aerospace, PowerGen and Cadbury Schweppes. Here in Canada, he was involved with the Bank of Nova Scotia, Sobeys Inc., Moosehead Breweries and the Jodrey group of companies.
“There are many Graham Days, depending on the job to be done. Like the musical stage director he once was, being a senior manager in a corporation meant playing many roles. They all drew on part of his personality,” Pitts observed.
Sir Graham was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1989 for services to British industry. He has nine honorary degrees (only one Canadian) and can list six honorific sets of letters after his name — a pretty remarkable fellow.
Twenty-five years ago, when he was 65, the Days moved back to the home they’d built in Hantsport in the 1970s, but he hardly retired. His focus shifted to directorships with Canadian and Maritime firms and he became counsel to the Atlantic Canadian law firm Stewart McKelvey.
In 2010, a scholarship fund was raised to recognize his immense contribution to Nova Scotia business. He dedicated the fund to the Faculty of Management at Dalhousie University, where he was chancellor for two terms. I think it’s wonderful that Pitts, an award-winning business writer, chose to celebrate Sir Graham — the man and the business titan. The Last Canadian Knight is worthwhile reading.