In June 2022, council and mayor voted to stop advertising public notices in local papers. A year later, in June 2023, the Canadian Association of Journalists honoured our city with the 2022 Code of Silence Award for Outstanding Achievement in Government Secrecy. These two things are not unrelated.
Absent from the vote that cut advertising in local papers were councillors Ramsay, Frizzell, Krause and Skakun. The only councillors remaining from that vote are Sampson and Scott. On Wednesday, Aug. 16, councillors and mayor will have the chance to vote on a proposal put forward by Mayor Simon Yu to include local newspapers as a required means of publishing City of Prince George public notices.
When you review the list of reasons for the government secrecy award, you realize that everything on the list came to the public through articles published in the Prince George Citizen and information that they obtained through countless FOI requests. We can’t afford to handicap a public service like the Citizen and then talk about transparency in the same breath. Bill C-18 is shuttering local media as tech companies look out for their best interests. Locally, we need to let our elected officials know that local media is an essential service that can’t be replaced by a snarky social media team at City Hall.
The City of Prince George put forward the recommendations to stop advertising in local papers, framing it in the guise of cost savings, all while joking about newspapers being firestarter. The cost of running public notice ads in local newspapers and inadvertently supporting local media costs the same or less than one of the dozens of reports the city outsources every year.
When arguments are made against this amendment on Aug. 16, they will probably be concerned with efficiency and cost. Someone might say “It isn’t the city’s responsibility to support local media.” It might not be, but it is to the benefit of the public to support it.
What is the cost of not having a local paper that is going to file and report on these FOIs? What is the cost of the city’s social media staffers? What is the cost of having a city control the public narrative?
Take note of who isn’t in favour of the amendment and ask yourself how much those councillors care about transparency.
Send a note to council and mayor in support of transparency and local media.
Derek Carlson
Prince George
