After more than 90 minutes of discussion, Prince George city council rejected a proposal to reinstate the advertisement of public notices in The Citizen by a margin of six to three at its Monday June 9 meeting but passed another motion calling on staff to prioritize local media over American platforms.
Councillors Brian Skakun and Trudy Klassen gave notice they were bringing several related motions at the May 26 council meeting.
The councillors’ original motion called for up to $100,000 of annual public notice advertising to be reinstated in The Citizen as well as redirecting 50 per cent of ad money spent with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, towards local media outlets.
In 2022, BC’s provincial government amended the Community Charter to remove a requirement for local governments to place public notices in a newspaper running at least once a week.
After that, Prince George city council passed a bylaw stating that the city only had to place notices on its website and social media accounts.
In the lead-up to the June 9 council meeting, Citizen owner and publisher Cameron Stolz said that the newspaper played no role in the councillors bringing forward the motion.
However, he said that advertising with all local media outlets would align with another motion passed by council on May 5 prioritizing spending with local suppliers when possible.
Speaking at the meeting, Klassen said she was inspired by previous discussions about spending more of the city’s money locally and that she thought the council of the day had gotten it wrong when they moved away from placing notices in the paper.
She highlighted a Citizen editorial talking about the benefits of advertising in a paper of record — public notices published in the paper end up getting archived and form part of the city’s historical record.
The city’s manager of legislative services, Ethan Anderson, said the city already archives its public notices online and that those notices could also be added to Prince George’s open data website.
He added that some records are stored inside a fireproof vault.
City manager Walter Babicz said the city has a records room for items that need to be archived and there is also a digitization project for important documents, which is still ongoing.
In response, Klassen said there have been items that were missed that might have been caught had there been a continued paper record.
She used the construction of the new Fire Hall No. 1 as an example, saying that the discovery of a former landfill at the chosen location added to the complexity of the construction as well as the infamous downtown parkade project that went over budget.
“I know it’s expensive, but I think that it pays for itself in the value that it provides to citizens,” Klassen said. “We’re not just caring about our bottom line, we’re trying to make sure that we have transparent government that is accessible and serves the needs of the public.”
Coun. Kyle Sampson said he disagreed that the projects Klassen brought up were not related to the placement of public notices and said that the motion should be called what he said it really is — a subsidy for a single private business.
He argued that placing public notices on the city’s website is already a transparent process and the city has already seen engagement from its current advertising strategy, citing the participation in Official Community Plan public hearings earlier this year.
Placing print ads is obsolete and that’s why the province changed the legislation, Sampson said, though he clarified that he does not think The Citizen itself is obsolete.
Referencing his motion prioritizing local procurement earlier this year, Sampson said the city spends with Meta (Facebook) because that’s a place where it knows residents can be reached and ultimately doesn’t cost the city as much as traditional advertising.
Coun. Tim Bennett said that the last time this debate came up, there were two simultaneous conversations about the importance of local media and of holding councillors responsible for their decisions.
He said the local quality of reporting in Prince George is high, with electing colleagues in other communities across the country struggling to get the media to cover their meetings.
While he agrees that public notices need as much coverage as possible and that can’t be accomplished just with social media posts, he said he’s not sure that publishing notices in The Citizen is the best method going forward.
This, he said, is an opportunity to rethink how the city sends out public notices to all local media outlets. However, he was concerned about redirecting money from the legislative services department for advertising purposes.
Coun. Ron Polillo said the city had a similar, lengthy conversation on the same topic around two years ago.
He said that in 2024, Prince George spent around $6,600 with Meta. This year, the city has spent just over $1,000.
In promoting the CityFest event earlier this year, he said the city got more than 415,000 impressions on Meta and advertised with The Citizen and Pattison Media as well.
As a former member of the local media, Polillo said the topic is important to him but he believes the motion was flawed because it only focused on one outlet, did not reach all the audiences the city wants to reach and does not represent efficient spending with taxpayers’ dollars.
He encouraged his colleagues to defeat the motion and put this issue to bed forever so they can focus on more pressing issues.
Coun. Brian Skakun criticized his colleagues for not sending any emails or asking him questions regarding the motion before the meeting.
The city already subsidizes developers when it builds infrastructure, projects like the George Street parkade and single-source contracts, he said.
He said that with Meta blocking Canadian news content and harvesting data from its users, he doesn’t think the city should be spending a single cent with them.
Skakun also praised The Citizen for its investigative work, saying that if the paper were to close, it’s unlikely that other outlets in the city would fill the void.
Coun. Garth Frizzell said the city needs good reporting and op-eds, whether they be congratulatory or critical.
He said he doesn’t want to see tax dollars go to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that using the company’s platforms is an evil we accept to grow the city’s presence.
Because of the way Meta handles copyright, he said, there are concerns about ownership of the items the city posts on Facebook and Instagram.
He said he agrees with the overall message, but he wasn’t going to support a direct-award motion. Instead, he suggested that the city might want to think outside the box and support things like journalism scholarships and diverse media options.
Coun. Susan Scott said she was struggling with the part of the motion directing $100,000 in advertising to The Citizen both because it was a direct award and because she was concerned with the impact on the legislative services budget, which funds public notices.
Anderson said that the year before the notices were discontinued from The Citizen, the city spent $160,000 with the paper. He said that because some notices are statutory, even though there’s a $100,000 budget in the motion, he would be required to keep spending if required notices kept coming up.
Coun. Cori Ramsay said that in the last three years, around $600,000 was spent on advertising and public notices. More than half of that was spent with The Citizen and around $13,000 was spent with Meta.
She said she was visiting the Senate in Ottawa when the Online News Act was passed and told people near her that it would have an outsized impact on northern BC because people use social media to connect over large distances.
The act was the piece of legislation that required search engines and social media platforms to compensate news outlets for content they use. In response, Meta blocked Canadian news sources on its platforms in Canada.
Ramsay said she would not support the motion as proposed, having heard from constituents in the lead-up to the meeting that they would not find value, being concerned about the impact on the legislative services budget, the overall low amount of money being spent on Meta and other potential budget impacts.
Speaking more on the item, Sampson said what he heard from the motion’s proponents that night was about the value of The Citizen rather than the issue of transparency he felt the motion had raised.
If the issue is whether the city should subsidize local media, he said that should be a separate conversation. However, he said he was open in future to creating a procurement process where media outlets can make the case for how they’ll help public notices reach their audience.
Since 2013, he said, around $625,000 had been spent with Pattison media, around $1.4 million with The Citizen and around $580,000 with Vista Radio. Since 2022, he said the city had spent around $13,000 with Meta.
In 2023, after the requirement for public notices to be placed in a newspaper was removed, the city’s spend with The Citizen was below the $25,000 threshold required for it to be listed in its annual statements of financial information (SOFI).
That same year, the city’s spend with Pattison Media was also below the threshold while the spend with Vista Radio was listed at $52,320.81.
The 2024 SOFI has yet to be released.
After listening to her colleagues, Klassen moved for the part of the motion directing up to $100,000 from the communications budget to the Citizen to be struck, as funding for public notices instead comes from the legislative services budget.
Mayor Simon Yu said that Prime Minister Mark Carney wrote in his book that institutional power cannot exist without social license, which is helped by the media.
He said Prince George has a small communications department for a city of its size and spending more on the subject could be a good thing.
Klassen’s amendment was carried.
The main motion on restoring public notices to The Citizen failed by a vote of six to three, with Klassen, Skakun and Yu voting in favour.
After that, council discussed the second motion regarding reducing advertising with Meta by 50 per cent and redirecting those funds to local outlets.
Director of administrative services cautioned against removing Meta from the city’s communications toolbox, especially given the limited amount of money spent with the company.
Communications manager Claire Thwaites said the city can reduce its spending with Meta, but there might be consequences with items like surveys and events where the city doesn’t have a lot of funds to promote them.
She said a recent survey on parking, which was the most responded-to in the city’s history, had around half of respondents come from Facebook.
Sampson said he would prefer to see council ask staff to prioritize local outlets rather than direct specific spending, Ramsay said she was worried about losing the ability to advertise job postings through Meta and Yu said he wasn’t sure if this was the right forum to send a message that a Canadian alternative to Meta is needed.
Both an attempt to amend the motion and the main motion were defeated. On the main motion, Skakun, Frizzell and Bennett were the only councillors to vote in favour.
A third motion would have required the city to start publishing an annual transparency report on its advertising spending was carried, with only Ramsay voting against.
A fourth motion that would have required the city to hold a town hall on returning advertising to The Citizen was contingent on the first motion passing and was therefore not considered.
After the consideration of the motion, Sampson put forward a motion calling on staff to prioritize local media and deprioritize American platforms like Meta. That motion passed.
