Bell argued that they needed to be bailed out in order to save jobs. They got the bailout and they laid people off anyway.
Throughout the Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 process, Canadian corporations were telling lawmakers that the media sector was on the verge of shutting down for good. The only way to “save” it was to pass Bill C-11 and Bill C-18. Canadian lawmakers were told to ignore all the evidence and expert opinion on the subject because all that was just comments made by “shills for Big Tech”. Enough Canadian lawmakers followed through with their marching orders and passed both bills despite the countless warnings of the disasters that would unfold should they do so.
Like clockwork, both bills experienced the very disasters that were warned about. Bill C-18 (now the Online News Act) resulted in Meta dropping news links, costing the news sector and estimated $230 million. The loss of traffic impacted members of the news sector of all shapes and sizes. Larger operations saw a massive hit in traffic while smaller ones were forced to slow down operations or even shut down entirely.
Bill C-11 (now the Online Streaming Act) is already undergoing the failures that were so easily predicted. Already, there has been not one, not two, but three lawsuits. This along with potential trade sanctions levied against Canada from the United States for the law discriminating against American businesses. This before we have even gotten to the massive censorship issues as the CRTC continues its consultation process along with multiple streaming services threatening to leave the country in response to the new law.
While the predictable disasters from both bills are ongoing, the Canadian government, convinced that countless jobs were on the line, desperately resorted to the last tool it had in its tool box. They issued massive media bailouts in the presumable exchange that the layoffs would get headed off.
To the surprise of no one paying attention, that ended up being untrue.
In response to getting pretty much everything they wanted, Bell then proceeded to slash 9% of its workforce and shovelled all that money to shareholders in the form of raised dividend payments. This while giving the Canadian government the finger by saying that this is all the governments fault.
Realizing that they had been had all this time, the Canadian government was furious with Bell, calling all of this a “garbage decision”. Shortly after, they hauled Bell into committee where they furiously laid into Bell over its decision. Bell, for the most part, shrugged and basically sent a message of, “Yeah, we lied to you and tricked you into giving us money. You got a problem with that?”
It became quite clear that Bell had run out of f__ks to give by that point. That was definitely reflected in the more recent decision to issue yet another round of layoffs in its workforce. The wealthy monopolistic company has issued another round of layoffs despite the optics. From the CBC:
Bell Media has cut an additional 43 technician jobs as part of the restructuring it announced in February, the company confirmed to CBC News on Thursday.
The announcement comes after the company said it would move its local broadcaster CP24 from its Queen Street headquarters to its Scarborough, Ont., campus this fall, with business news organization BNN Bloomberg to follow in 2025.
“No departures will occur until the period between August 30 and September 27. We will be providing training, offering voluntary severance packages and eliminating vacant positions wherever possible to mitigate the impact on our team members,” a spokesperson for Bell Media told CBC News.
“Bell has and will continue to comply with all of its obligations under the respective collective agreements, and to comply with all applicable federal laws.”
Unifor, which stuck with Bell throughout the Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 lawmaking process by supporting them every step of the way, was furious at Bell for its decision. In response, they issued a statement which read, in part:
Unifor is deeply concerned and outraged that Bell Media has once again announced restructuring plans, this time, giving notice to close to 50 Unifor media workers.
“This is a corporation that has made billions of profits at the end of last year and they continue to carry on with their profit-over-people principle,” said Unifor National President Lana Payne.
“This is yet another blow to journalism and democracy and a step towards bigger swaths of news deserts across Canada.”
Hey, maybe people like us were on to something when we expressed skepticism towards the talking points about how Bill C-18 was going to “save” journalism. Who knows? To be fair, Unifor has every right to be angry over all of this. Not only are their ranks dwindling even further as a result of this for no reason other than corporate greed, but they were clearly lied to as well when it comes to how journalism jobs were supposedly going to be saved once Bill C-11 and Bill C-18 were passed.
At any rate, there’s precisely zero surprise from here. Bell fully intended on not preserving any jobs. Their services are only going to get worse over the long term and the people at the top, as well as wealthy shareholders, are going to get rewarded for hollowing out their operations. There’s a reason why “enshittification” is such an often used term these days when it comes to corporate behaviour.
