CanWest Global Communications Corp. has grown from humble origins in western Canada to dominate the Canadian communications landscape.

Over a quarter-century, Global TV has expanded into a third network that reaches coast to coast. With the acquisition in 2000 of the Southam group of newspapers (including 14 major metropolitan dailies and the National Post) from Conrad Black's Hollinger Corp., CanWest has focused on horizontal and vertical integration — the buzzword is convergence — of previously distinct media outlets.

Material from its newspapers (all but the struggling Post spun off in 2005 as CanWest MediaWorks Income Fund) and stations also fuels the canada.com web portal that functions as a multi-tier subscription service. An intermittent series of auctions, promoted through CanWest's other media holdings, are yet another source of revenue.

CanWest aims to be one of the largest media companies in North America but its ambitions are, indeed, Global. It has significant television and radio properties in Australia and New Zealand and in 2005 started buying radio stations in Turkey. In August 2006, CanWest sold its stake in TV3, a private network in the Republic of Ireland. Two years earlier, it pulled out of Northern Ireland, selling its 30-per-cent interest in Ulster Television. The Aspers' attempt to gain a foothold in Israel, with the late 2004 purchase of the long-coveted Jerusalem Post from battered media baron Black, was thwarted when an international arbitrator ruled in 2006 that they had failed to conclude phase two of an agreement that would have given them 50-per-cent ownership.

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Israel H. Asper

The late patriarch of the Asper family, "Izzy" Asper had been gradually withdrawing from day-to day running of his empire for several years. Until his death Oct. 7, 2003, he remained chairman of the board and the visionary behind the CanWest Global enterprise. Especially in his home town of Winnipeg, the self-made billionaire had a reputation as a major philanthropist as well as a hard-nosed employer.
Taken together, the Asper family owns 40-45 per cent of CanWest Global and retains outright voting control of the corporation.

Leonard Asper

The current President and Chief Executive Officer has had a relatively low profile with rank-and-file CanWest employees.
To the extent he has cut a public figure, he has followed with dad's foot-in-mouth style of media criticism. He has denounced many of the world's journalists – some by name – as doctrinaire socialists or Marxists with an anti-Israel bias.
He also has particular requirements of those who would practise journalism in the name of CanWest Global:
"Media proprietors and managers must ensure that the people they hire do not bring their ideology into their newsrooms."    
CanWest believes different rules apply to owners:
"Owners have every right to direct their operations in terms of both content and ideology." — Gordon Fisher, CanWest's president for news and information

David Asper

CanWest executive vice-president.
The elder Asper brother is now the family's most public face and infamous for alienating CanWest employees who dared criticize the decision to impose national editorials. Calling them "bleeding hearts" and "riff raff," he accused them of engaging in "pathetic politics" and "childish protest" and challenged them to quit and start their own newspapers.
In the same speech, he chortled, paraphrasing rock group REM, that the Asper ascension meant "the end of the world as they know it ... and I feel fine."
David Asper, who had been chairman of CanWest's publications committee, was named chairman of the National Post in the spring of 2003, at which point he resigned as trustee of the right-wing Fraser Institute. Editor-in-chief Ken Whyte and deputy editor Martin Newland, who had built the paper into a credible or at least well-written right-wing voice, were summarily fired. Respected columnist Paul Wells quit, leading a stampede that would include David Frum, Mark Steyn and eventually Christie Blatchford.

Gail Asper

The only one of Izzy's three children whose involvement in the media empire as director and corporate secretary is below the public radar. Said to have a passion for fundraising, Gail Asper is president of the CanWest Global Foundation and managing director and secretary of the Asper Foundation, the private charitable organization spearheading the establishment of the $300-million Canadian Museum for Human Rights to be built in Winnipeg.

Derek Burney

The Asper brothers' ties to the federal Conservative Party were strengthened Aug. 30, 2006, with the appointment of Derek Burney, 66, as chairman of the CanWest Global Board of Directors. The former chairman and CEO of Bell Canada International had earlier in the year served as a backroom organizer, helping set up Prime Minister Stephen Harper's transition to power. Burney had served as chief of staff under Brian Mulroney from 1987 to 1989, and then as Canada's ambassador to Washington until 1993, when Jean Chrétien's Liberals swept back into office.
With the death of the staunchly Liberal Izzy Asper in October 2003, the chairmanship passed to Frank McKenna, the former premier of New Brunswick. He resigned in March 2005 to take up the post of Canadian ambassador to the U.S., which he relinquished when Harper's Conservatives were elected in January 2006. David Drybrough, a chartered accountant and Winnipeg native, was named interim chairman when McKenna departed.

Murdoch Davis

No longer with CanWest. Was editorial vice-president of CanWest newspapers from summer 2001 to spring 2003.
Davis wrote many or most of CanWest's controversial national editorials. As the company's senior operating executive for newspapers, Davis proved a pugnacious defender of centralized opinion formation.
"Traditionally when a new (proprietor) took over a newspaper, if they wanted to influence what was said in the editorials they basically, you know, shot the editor and got a new one," he told a New York radio station. "I think we've taken a much more open and above-board approach."
Davis left CanWest abruptly in May 2003 and was named publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, one of the few large Canadian newspapers not under CanWest control.

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Why should any of this worry journalists,
much less the Canadian public?

Concentration of operations

CanWest Global has adopted an aggressive policy of centralizing customer service, payroll, accounts payable, information technology, marketing and other jobs at its corporate head office and at its Reach Canada arm in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Advertising work is being directed to CanWest Media Sales, whose operations are located largely in Toronto, Ontario. Reader Sales & Service jobs have been moved to Winnipeg from daily newspapers in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Regina, Ottawa and elsewhere.
This strategy kills jobs in communities across the country. It forces people in a broad array of newspaper careers to seek new employment in tight markets and, in many cases, forces them out of the media industry. The job toll across Canada was in the hundreds by 2004 and the company continues its drive to centralize.
The company's operations in Winnipeg and Toronto are not unionized. CanWest is not particularly union-friendly. The focus on a low-wage, replaceable workforce means young people can no longer consider some of these positions as possible lifelong careers.
While CanWest can always be counted on to campaign in its newspapers against the values traditionally championed by the NDP, it hasn’t hesitated to pocket subsidies from Gary Doer’s NDP government in Manitoba and from the City of Winnipeg.

Centralized control of editorial content

An early example was the attempt to force CanWest’s major daily newspapers to run identical national editorials up to three times a week. This plan has been shelved, whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen, in the face of universal scorn and resistance from CanWest staff, other journalists and the public.
National editorials were just a harbinger of a deep corporate drive to squeeze more money from operations, while simultaneously setting the public agenda.
Early in 2003, the Canada News Desk was established at corporate headquarters. It rewrites and recirculates copy among CanWest daily newspapers. Increasingly it is used as the distribution point for news stories and columns produced under CanWest’s direct control for publication in its newspapers across the country — often in place of local writers.
CanWest has created national critics, whose work is easier to control and direct. Local critics at major metropolitan newspapers are being eliminated.
An early example is TV criticism. CanWest newspapers are being ordered to run more 'one-view-for-all’ news and criticism rather than material from local reporters and columnists, the Canadian Press or other sources. This material is to run regardless of quality, speed of delivery or diversity.
The effect is to hollow out local newspapers. The consequences, on quality, reader choice and freedom of expression, have become all too clear. If this approach is not arrested, the effects are likely to worsen and may at some point become irreversible because of readership declines.

Ambitious goals

So far, CanWest has no U.S. stations or publications. (It did own Fireworks, a movie and television distributor that proved to be a financial sinkhole. It was deep-sixed in April 2004. Characteristically, the Asper papers put a positive spin on the story.) CanWest did file a brief with the Federal Communications Commission in the United States (the American version of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission) arguing in favour of the controversial loosening of cross-media ownership rules. These rules have already been gutted in Canada but there is still a battle over the issue south of the border.
The U.S. market could be next on the CanWest wish list. It has also made modest forays into radio.

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Concern on a global basis

Europe

Newspapers now controlled by CanWest “were used to substantial editorial independence before the Aspers took control,” said The Economist, a highly respected British publication. “Canada is a country of several distinct regions. But ownership of its media is now highly concentrated. And nobody has as much control over what Canadians read and watch as the Aspers.”

Pacific Region

"Stephen Kimber, who quit his job as a columnist for the Halifax Daily News, which is an Asper paper in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada ... appeared earlier today at the cross media hearings in Canberra, after being brought to Australia by the 'Friends of Fairfax' group. His message was simple: Before you change your media ownesrhip laws you better look at what happened in Canada." Lateline / Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Global

The International Federation of Journalists, which represents more than 500,000 media professionals in more than 100 countries, has also spoken out repeatedly, condemning CanWest’s “corporate censorship and the victimization of journalists who are trying to defend professional standards.”

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