Canadian Heritage committee  I'm a total dork. That's okay.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. I'm okay. I'm interested in the motion. I'll just stay.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think what the government can do—or parliamentarians, I should say, not government—is focus on news literacy education. That's different from media literacy. That's not about how to use your iPhone and what platforms to go to. It's about the mechanics and the study of what journalism is, what a lead is, why you have both sides or why you don't have both sides.

Canadian Heritage committee  I worry about what news deserts would look like without the LJI. There are so many small news organizations right now that are hoping, praying and waiting for some acknowledgement and understanding about what's going to happen with this program. There are hundreds of journalists who have moved to places like Churchill, Manitoba, or to The Pas because they had a job there.

Canadian Heritage committee  It's getting to the point where something needs to happen. We need some action. Otherwise, I see a generation of journalists coming out of journalism school unsure about the future. I was talking to a colleague who is the same age as I am. We couldn't believe what we were hearing from some young journalists currently in journalism school or running community newspapers about the challenges of getting a job.

Canadian Heritage committee  Absolutely. I think there are people who aren't just exploring them; there are people who are actually doing them, and there are several examples. There was a great piece in the Globe and Mail a couple of days ago about journalists going about it in their own different ways.

Canadian Heritage committee  I'd like to answer in English, because it's quite a technical question.

Canadian Heritage committee  I think what we need to understand about content in the grand scheme of things is that opinion is cheap. It doesn't cost a lot to produce. I can rip off an opinion column in an hour and a half about an idea I have. I think what is really more important is something that the witness from the FPJQ mentioned.

Canadian Heritage committee  To be brief, I think any idea of abandoning that is pretty facile and doesn't understand the economics of how journalism works or how Canada has traditionally operated. I look at the United States. California is introducing bills to support local journalism, and Illinois, New York state and Utah, and I believe there's another one as well, but I could be mistaken.

Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you. Thank you to everybody on the committee for providing me with the opportunity to explain to you my view on the current crises—and I use the plural here—facing the Canadian media industry right now. I am speaking to you today as president of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, I think that would be a fair assessment. To reiterate my point, we need to move toward a culture of openness and default to openness. Otherwise, situations will only continue to get worse.

Information & Ethics committee  Absolutely. This has not been a very good ad for Bell Internet, I'll have to add. To the point about openness and transparency, I think we've definitely moved far away from the default being openness. That's a mistake that needs to be corrected right away. I think we're increasingly turning the citizen's right to know into the government's right to say “no” to legitimate requests for government information.

Information & Ethics committee  I might add, of course, the Prime Minister, Mr. Trudeau, as this is something that's currently ultimately on his desk and in 2015, upon taking office, he promised to make his tenure one of Canada's most transparent governments in history. To date, I have failed to see much action on that front.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, thank you. I would like to echo a lot of Dean's comments about the challenges facing...the decline of access to information documentary journalism. In many ways, just to finish off what he was mentioning, the idea is that a poor access to information system transforms a lot of what could be considered day-to-day journalism into the need for investigative journalism, which, in the current economic climate of news, is largely unsustainable.

Information & Ethics committee  Of course, we have to recognize that the system we have always needs to be reevaluated. We've seen repeated instances with governments of all stripes. The greatest opposition issue of all time, I would say, is access to information and transparency. It does take a concerted effort on the part of policy-makers to say, yes, we're going to do this differently and we believe in keeping some of the promises that are often made to journalists and to citizens in Canada because, so far, it has repeatedly fallen short.