MONTREAL — Community newspaper owners claim Canada Post is helping to drive some of them out of business thanks to a new partnership it forged with the country’s largest printing firm. Last month, the Crown corporation launched a joint venture known as Raddar with Transcontinental Inc., which saw Canada Post start delivering the company’s flyer package across the country. Community newspapers have traditionally relied on flyer bundles to fund the weekly publications, which are delivered free to millions of readers in urban and rural communities.
Paul Deegan, CEO of News Media Canada, which represents scores of community papers among the 550 news titles it advocates for, says those outlets are now losing ad clients after being undercut by a government-backed enterprise. The revenue loss threatens to shutter news outlets and leave residents less informed about their communities, he said. “Essentially what’s happened is that publishers that would have had a number of flyers as commercial inserts, those orders have all but dried up.
It’s literally fallen off a cliff,” said Deegan. “Our folks feel it’s anticompetitive behaviour. They’re trying to squeeze us out.” As the latest casualty, Deegan points to Winnipeg’s Community Review, which was slated to shut down on Friday.
The closure will end delivery to 200,000 households and leave more than 800 part-time delivery workers out of a job less than two months after Raddar’s arrival, according to the industry association. Community papers farther west are feeling the pinch too. Great West Media, which owns nine publications covering Alberta communities from Banff to Barrhead to suburban Edmonton and Calgary, has seen large retailers abandon its flyer offering and switch over to Raddar — a sleek, thinner package that’s easier for mail carriers to haul than traditional flyer bundles.
“That’s cut our flyer volumes by about 80 per cent, because now all that volume has shifted over to Canada Post,” said Evan Jamison, co-owner and vice-president of manufacturing at Great West Media, a family operation going back to the 1960s. “It could be existential for some of them,” he said of the newspapers. “Some of them may not survive.” Canada Post notes that many community news groups have relied on it to bring papers to doorsteps rather than on their own delivery systems.
As some news companies opt to shut down papers or scrap pr…
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