LONGUEUIL, QUE. -- Canadian heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez will soon meet with Canada Post executives to discuss the possible distribution of local and regional weeklies by the Crown corporation.

"The regional newspapers, the local radios play a fundamental role that others cannot play," the minister said during a press conference Thursday at the Longueuil offices Exprolink, a company that manufactures electric maintenance vehicles.

Rodriguez said he has been following the situation of regional weekly newspapers closely since the announcement by the City of Montreal on Monday to move towards the voluntary model also known as "opting in" for Publisac as of May 2023.

This approach means that citizens must request to receive Publisac, whereas currently they have the option to refuse.

Since weekly newspapers are distributed with the Publisac and Montreal's decision may be followed by many other municipalities, citizens across Quebec may lose access to their local information.

"This is an issue I'm following, especially since the Montreal announcement," said the minister. "I have to meet with Canada Post on this issue."

Weekly newspaper publishers are criticizing Montreal for throwing the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to minimize the distribution of Publisac.

Canada Post is the only other entity that has the capacity to distribute local and regional weeklies to the doorstep of citizens, but its rates are prohibitive, reaching up to three times the price charged by Transcontinental, which distributes Publisac.

Minister Rodriguez recognizes that although his department's initiatives to financially support the various media will allow many of them to survive, it will be a waste of time for those who can no longer be distributed to their readers.

'IT'S GOT TO BE DONE'

"I'll look into it with Canada Post, but I'm certainly open to discussion. Necessarily, they have to not only publish, but it has to get to the people," he said.

The minister recalled that regional newspapers are a vector of democracy by being witnesses for citizens of the work of their local elected officials. He said that a distribution by Canada Post is quite possible.

"I never say no. I never say it's impossible ... I'm not closed to anything, the proof is all the efforts we've made," he said, referring to his recent Bill C-18, which aims to redistribute to the media a share of the revenues taken from them by the digital giants.

"Platforms like Google and Facebook use content created by media professionals and broadcast for free and do not pay a penny," he said, recalling that 451 media outlets have had to close their doors in Canada in the last 15 years, including 64 since the beginning of the pandemic, following the erosion of their advertising revenues to the benefit of the web giants.

Rodriguez's predecessor at the Department of Canadian Heritage, Steven Guilbeault, had shown great interest in the idea of turning over the distribution of local newspapers to Canada Post when it was brought to his attention at a forum chaired by the current sports minister, Pascale St-Onge, when she was still president of the CSN's National Communications Federation.

The initiative, which was also supported by the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec (FPJQ), never made it beyond the drawing board.

Minister Rodriguez was in Longueuil on Thursday as the Trudeau government's Quebec lieutenant. He met with Mayor Catherine Fournier, with whom he discussed, among other things, housing, drinking water and wastewater treatment infrastructure.

-- This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on April 14, 2022.