"On a day when Nortel has filed for bankruptcy protection, Canadians have good reason to fear that their daily newspapers and radio and TV stations may also disappear if things continue on this path," points out CWA Canada director Arnold Amber.

CanWest reported a net loss of $33 million for the first quarter of the fiscal year and said that it "may not be able to comply with its existing quarterly total financial leverage ratio covenants in fiscal 2009." This follows on the heels of a reduction to CanWest's credit rating by Moody's on Monday.

There has been much talk about the state of the North American auto industry, but there is very little discussion about the serious pressure on Canada's news media. In addition to CanWest, there have been significant cuts to operations over the last year at CTVGlobemedia, Quebecor and Torstar, among others. The pressure comes from two key sources:

• a drop in advertising revenues for traditional media (newspapers, TV, radio) caused by the economic downturn and competition from the internet;
  
  
• enormous debt loads, especially at CanWest, due to a frenzy of media mergers over the last decade.

"Given the importance of information to the functioning of our society, we should not take this particular crisis lightly," Amber argues. "We need to start considering new ways to finance the gathering and reporting of news in this country or else our sources of quality information could dry up."

CWA Canada represents employees at three major newspaper chains, CanWest, Quebecor/Sun and Irving, as well as at public and private broadcasters and news agencies in Canada.

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