The $663 Million Question: How Canada Funded Its Own Press, and Who Collected
Since 2010, the Canada Periodical Fund granted over $663 million to media. One company took 18%, another is US hedge fund-controlled, and the public tracking data is completely fragmented.
Written in collaboration with Heidi Legg.
The grant was for a farm newspaper in Ontario. $812,365, posted quietly to the federal government’s open grants database under the name Postmedia Network Inc., for a publication called Ontario Farmer. The fiscal year covered: April 1, 2023 to March 31, 2024.
Nothing about that record is technically unusual. The Canada Periodical Fund has been cutting grants to community newspapers for fifteen years. Hundreds of small papers across this country depend on it. But Postmedia is not a small paper. It’s Canada’s largest newspaper chain, and approximately two-thirds of it is owned by a New Jersey-based American hedge fund called Chatham Asset Management.
That one line in a government database is, in miniature, the whole story.
A Fund Born Before Confederation, Relaunched in 2010
Canada’s habit of subsidizing its periodicals is genuinely old. The Publications Assistance Program, a postal subsidy that kept magazines and newspapers cheap to distribute by mail, predated Confederation itself. The Canada Magazine Fund ran parallel to it for years, supporting content rather than carriage. By the late 2000s, both were looking creaky. The digital shift was gutting advertising revenue. Publishers wanted something more flexible than a postal subsidy.
In February 2009, Heritage Minister James Moore, serving under Stephen Harper, announced a consolidation. The two programs would be merged into a single, modernized vehicle: the Canada Periodical Fund. It launched in April 2010 with a combined budget of $75.5 million per year, essentially the inherited envelope of the two programs it replaced. The logic was sensible: publishers would now be funded based on a formula weighing circulation and editorial expenditures, not just postage. The rules were clear, the eligibility criteria public, and grants would flow to print magazines, non-daily community newspapers, and eventually digital periodicals.
What followed, in the Open Government Grants and Contributions database, looks exactly like what you’d expect from the outside. Steady annual disbursements near $70 million. Thousands of small grants to community papers in places like Prince Rupert, Whitehorse, and Trois-Rivières. Then, buried deeper in the data, some numbers that are considerably harder to square with the program’s stated goals.
The 18 Percent Problem
Run the full history of CPF grants and one name accounts for more of the total than any other: Quebecor Media. Since 2010, through its subsidiary TVA Publishing Inc. and roughly 20 magazine titles annually, Quebecor has collected more than $121 million in CPF grants. That’s over 18 percent of the $663 million the fund has ever disbursed, according to an analysis published by The Audit in September 2024 based on the open.canada.ca dataset.
Quebecor’s market capitalization runs near $6 billion. Its profit margin sits around 24 percent. Its TVA Publishing titles are, by the program’s rules, technically eligible. The grants flow to individual magazine titles, not to Quebecor the conglomerate, and Canadian Heritage has confirmed the formula-based allocation is applied consistently. But the concentration is striking: a single media empire, well-capitalized and profitable, has absorbed nearly one dollar in five of a fund whose stated purpose is to help Canadian publishers “overcome market disadvantages.”
Postmedia presents a different version of the same tension. Its major dailies, the National Post, Vancouver Sun, and Ottawa Citizen among them, don’t qualify for the CPF. The fund excludes daily newspapers. But Postmedia publishes dozens of community titles and specialty publications that do qualify, and in 2023 it received 20 individual CPF grants. Ontario Farmer’s $812,365 stood alone at the top of that list.
The ownership structure has been publicly documented for years. In October 2016, Chatham Asset Management quietly acquired a controlling stake in Postmedia by converting debt it held into equity. By November 2019, Postmedia’s own financial filings confirmed that Chatham held 66 percent of the company’s shares. Chatham also owns the McClatchy newspaper chain in the United States. Under Canadian media ownership law, foreign investors in a media company face voting restrictions, and Chatham is permitted to elect only one-third of Postmedia’s board. But it remains, by any measure, the dominant economic owner of Canada’s largest newspaper chain.
The consequences of that structure are not theoretical. CWA Canada, the media union representing many Postmedia journalists, laid them out in an open letter in September 2025: the company carries roughly $364 million in debt, most of it held as high-interest bonds by Chatham itself, which the fund can sell as securities. In 2024 alone, CEO Andrew MacLeod received a pay increase of $1.6 million. Newsrooms have contracted. Papers have closed or been converted to digital-only. And the CPF grants have continued.
What the Formula Requires, and What It Doesn’t
The CPF’s Aid to Publishers component distributes money through a formula that takes two inputs: the number of eligible copies distributed over a 12-month period, and eligible editorial expenditures during the same period. Canadian Heritage has declined over the years to specify the precise weighting. Wikipedia’s entry on the fund notes simply that “the heritage department has declined to specify exactly how funding amounts are determined.”
That opacity is not a bug introduced by any one government. It predates the current rules. But it matters, because the formula rewards scale. Publications with high circulation and high editorial costs get more. Small operations get proportionally less. The CPF does include weighting for Indigenous, ethnocultural, official-language minority, and LGBTQ+ publications, giving them more per copy distributed. But the core formula, applied uniformly, has a structural tendency to benefit whoever was already large.
About 900 Canadian publishers and industry associations received more than $87 million in CPF subsidies in fiscal year 2022-23, according to Public Accounts data cited by Canadian Dimension. The top of that list: TVA Publications at $6.8 million. Postmedia at $1.3 million, in addition to more than $7 million in payroll tax credits. And one entry that raises its own version of the formula question.
Zoomermedia Limited, which publishes Zoomer magazine, a lifestyle title aimed at baby boomers and seniors, received $864,851 in CPF grants that year. It has received close to a million dollars annually since approximately 2018. Zoomer is a legitimate Canadian publication with a national print circulation. By the fund’s rules, it likely qualifies. But the gap between what Ontario Farmer or the Prince Rupert Northern View represents, and what Zoomer represents, is a reasonable place to ask whether the formula is still serving its original purpose. Canadian Heritage has not revised the methodology in any publicly documented way to address that gap.
The Whole Picture Is Scattered
None of this is secret. Every figure cited above is drawn from public sources: the open.canada.ca grants database, Public Accounts of Canada, the CPF program guidelines on Canada.ca. The problem is not concealment. It’s architecture.
The CPF grants sit in one database. The Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit, projected to cost $65 million in 2024-25, runs through the CRA and doesn’t appear in proactive disclosure at the grant level. The Local Journalism Initiative flows through third-party organizations. The Google fund disbursements under the Online News Act were not voluntarily disclosed by recipients. When The Hub contacted the Globe and Mail, Postmedia, and the Canadian Journalism Collective in 2025 asking how much each would receive from the Google fund, none responded.
A recent estimate from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute put total federal spending on private news media at $325 million in fiscal year 2024-25: $154.1 million through the Canada Media Fund, $86.5 million through the CPF, $65 million through the Journalism Labour Tax Credit, and $19.6 million through the Local Journalism Initiative. That figure doesn’t include the CBC’s annual subsidy of approximately $1.4 billion.
The records exist. They’re in different rooms, filed under different programs, governed by different disclosure rules. Pulling them together takes time and a tolerance for government CSV files.
Part Two of this series does exactly that, focusing on the newer entrants to the funding ecosystem: digital-first outlets registered as charities under a post-2019 tax framework, the foreign funding rules that govern them, and what happens when the money flowing into journalism begins to look a great deal like the money flowing into any other advocacy sector.
That piece publishes soon.
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Source Documents
Canadian Heritage. (2026, March 9). Canada Periodical Fund. Canada.ca. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/funding/periodical-fund.html
Clinton, D. (2024, September 8). Nearly a Fifth of All Canada Periodical Fund Payouts Went to One Company. The Audit.
CWA Canada. (2025, September 29). Open Letter on Postmedia’s Abuse of Canadian Taxpayers’ Money. https://cwacanada.ca/2025/09/29/open-letter-on-postmedias-abuse-of-canadian-taxpayers-money/
Dubé, C. (2024, July 15). Canada runs on subsidies. Why shouldn’t news media get them? Canadian Dimension. https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/canada-runs-on-subsidies-why-shouldnt-news-media-get-them
Snow, D. (2025, April 22). Government subsidies for Canada’s media were supposed to be temporary, but they keep on growing. The Hub / Macdonald-Laurier Institute. https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/government-subsidies-for-canadas-media-were-supposed-to-be-temporary-but-they-keep-on-growing-and-could-be-here-to-stay-dave-snow-in-the-hub/
Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat. (2024). Grants and Contributions Database. Open Government Portal. https://search.open.canada.ca/grants/
Wikipedia contributors. (2025, December 27). Canada Periodical Fund. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_Periodical_Fund
Wikipedia contributors. (2026, April 8). Postmedia Network. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmedia_Network
I have received Zoomer as part of my membership in CARP. I found it to be a glossy advertising flyer wrapped around some editorial content. I will not renew my CARP membership nor my subscription to Zoomer.
This is an important contribution to public discourse, and the kind of investigative work that independent media does better than anyone right now.
I firmly believe in public support for Canadian local and regional publications. That support has a real history and a real purpose. But public money needs to serve public goals, and this piece makes clear the current formula is not doing that as well as it should.
When a program designed to help smaller publishers overcome market disadvantages ends up channelling the lion's share of funding to companies with billion-dollar market caps and profit margins in the double digits, something has gone sideways. Not through fraud or bad faith, but through criteria that haven't been revisited in fifteen years while the media landscape transformed around them.
The Postmedia situation is its own category of concern. A company majority-owned by an American hedge fund, carrying hundreds of millions in high-interest debt to that same fund, continuing to qualify for Canadian public support on a technicality of voting rights versus economic ownership: that gap alone warrants a policy review.
Smaller Canadian independents building local readership on shoestring budgets are exactly who this program should be prioritizing. Revising the criteria to better serve them isn't an argument against public support for journalism. It's an argument for spending that support wisely.
Looking forward to Part Two.