Trudeau 'pissed off' by Bell Media's 'garbage decision' to lay off journalists

This is like getting angry at the arsonist who set fire to the town hall and asking why he started the fire. And never acknowledging that you were the one who gave the arsonist gasoline and a Molotov cocktail and defended him in court to get him off the charges and go back to setting fires at home.

The Liberals and Conservatives are in bed with corporations ... corporations actively tear apart our country for their own personal profit and control .. and the only answer the two leading parties want to give is to say that we need to help out the corporations and beg them to do the right thing.

Get rid of Bell Media and let it burn to the ground ... that stupid corporation won't benefit the people of Canada if it fails and it won't benefit the people if it continues ... we all lose whether or not government props it up with handouts or bailouts ... they believe in the blind hand of the market that can solve these problems, let them loose and see how well they can do on their own. If they are such a viable, important company then it will never fail regardless if government helps it or not.

I think CBC's article on the layoffs yesterday included the real problem:

"The source of this is a dividend policy that has really become out of whack," added Horan.

BCE will now pay a quarterly dividend of 99.75 cents per common share, up from 96.75 cents per share, the company said Thursday. Dividends are a portion of earnings that companies pay out to their shareholders, usually every quarter.

"Typically, the companies pay about 50 per cent of their earnings in dividends, and they're up to about 130 per cent right now of their earnings. So I think that's pressuring the company to produce more free cash flow."

It's technically a Canadian Press article, but the CTV copy linked here yesterday didn't have that part.

I thought the whole point of bill C-18 was to take a whole bunch of money from Google and Meta and funnel it towards media. Did it fail completely as predicted?

Why even comment on things like Bell and Metro being out of control if there is no plan to regulate them. Generating click-bait quotes is not an attractive feature in a world leader.

Just buy Bell Media then I guess. Force the Rogers and the Teluses into compliance.

Ah just don't renew station licenses or make the liscences more expensive and offer reductions on this new license hike if news broadcasts are locally produced and at noon six pm and 11 pm

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A fired-up Prime Minister Justin Trudeau unleashed on Bell on Friday, calling its move to layoff thousands of employees — including hundreds of journalists — a "garbage decision."

"We need those local voices and over the past years, corporate Canada — and there are many culprits on this — have abdicated their responsibility toward the communities that they have always made very good profits off of in various ways."

He said Ottawa is taking too long to provide relief to media companies and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission [CRTC] has reacted too slowly to a "crisis that is immediate."

On Thursday, federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge accused Bell of breaking a long-held promise to deliver quality local news.

One of C-11's main critics, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, has referred to the bill as a form of censorship because it empowers the CRTC to regulate more platforms and the content they disseminate.

He blamed Bell's cuts on what he described as a poor business environment caused by high taxes, burdensome red tape and uncompetitive policies.

The original article contains 638 words, the summary contains 171 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

If only there was one person in government that could direct the rest of government to affect positive change in our blighted hellscape of a telecom industry...