Prime Minister Paul Martin and his Liberal colleagues aren't the only ones squirming as the Gomery inquiry into the federal government sponsorship scandal unfolds in Ottawa. Toronto's foreign-language newspapers say they've become unexpected victims of the fallout from the scandal, facing an unprecedented financial squeeze as Ottawa cuts back on advertising.
"Since Paul Martin took over, and this case with the sponsorship scandal came out, the federal government has stopped all the advertising contracts," says Thomas Saras, the long-serving president of the National Ethnic Press Council of Canada. The council represents about 500 newspapers, more than half of which are Toronto-based.
"The ethnic-press industry has been hit badly."
Advertising is the lifeblood of any newspaper, but unlike the big mainstream dailies, the smaller ethnic publications have few big, institutional advertisers they can count on. This means that ads from Ottawa -- which has had a policy of spreading some of its ad dollars to the ethnic press in the name of multiculturalism -- have assumed a greater importance for these publishers.
Strangely, a scandal that centres on how the Liberals directed millions of dollars to a few friendly Quebec ad agencies has sent a general advertising chill through the whole of the federal government -- and the shifting political winds are gusting all the way down to Toronto, the centre of ethnic publishers.
If there's anyone who is positioned to understand this, it's Mr. Saras, who works from a small downtown office in the basement of a Victorian house. His work space is littered with stacks of papers, including his own Greek-language newspaper, Patrides, and wallpapered with framed pictures of him meeting every major federal and provincial leader of note in the past 30 years.
"In this industry, you don't make money, you make contacts," says Mr. Saras, the spokesman for a virtual Tower of Babel of small-press publishers. He plans to use these contacts as he travels to Ottawa next week to tell top government officials that ethnic papers have never had it so bad -- and that the federal government needs to pay more than lip service to multiculturalism.
By and large, he says, ethnic-press owners are mom-and-pop proprietors who scrape by to put together publications that tell fellow immigrants stories from the homeland. Ottawa needs to reach people who don't read the big English and French dailies, he argues.
To him, these smaller papers represent the glue that helps hold together the Canadian mosaic of different cultures. In the past, a $1,000 full-page ad on, say, the SARS or West Nile crises or the new immigrant card have gone a long way toward paying the costs of printing such newspapers -- and publishers say they would like to see those days again.
"It's a big difference. I publish only once a month. If I had a government ad . . . half a page could pay for one-third of my run. That's a big difference to me," says Sybille Forster-Rentmeister, publisher of Echo Germanica, a German-language paper.
Just about everyone is feeling the pinch. Shakiba Dilmaghani, who handles advertising for the twice weekly Shahrvand -- "citizen" in Farsi -- says total government advertising revenues have dropped by about 72 per cent this year over last.
Like most such papers, Shahrvand gets its ads from advertising agencies that act as middlemen between government and ethnic newspapers. One agency steered 16 provincial and federal government ads worth $12,734 to Shahrvand last year but has sent only nine relatively tiny government ads worth about $3,500 this year. The paper also deals with another firm that sent it six government ads last year, but none this year.
Ms. Dilmaghani says Shahrvand, which boasts of being the largest Persian publication in North America, has found other advertisers to pick up the slack, but other papers aren't so lucky.
Tania Nuttall, publisher of the twice-weekly Brazil News in Toronto, says that last year she got about five federal government ads, which added about $2,000 to her advertising revenues. This year, she has had only one tiny advertisement worth less than $200.
While most publishers won't talk about their ad rates or divulge their revenues from other advertising sources, Ms. Nuttall says the loss is significant to her newspaper, which typically runs 20 to 28 pages. "It's a struggle. I live from one edition to the next," she says. "It's not fun. You're a journalist -- you do it because you love it."
K. David Lim, of the Chinese Canadian Post, says it has been almost six months since his publication received a government ad. "That's what everyone is complaining about."
Pierre Téotonio, a spokesman for Public Works and Government Services, the department in charge of spending ad money, confirms that the federal government has done "very little advertising" to date this year.
In each of the past three years, he says, ethnic-press publications have received about $1.5-million a year -- in keeping with government policy of trying to support the multicultural press.
But in March, Stephen Owen, then public works minister, put a two-month moratorium on all types of advertising so the government could look at its practices in the wake of the sponsorship scandal. And by the time the moratorium was due to be lifted, the federal election was under way and no new ads could be placed, Mr. Téotonio says. (Government advertising is banned during election campaigns.)
Now that Parliament is back in session, ethnic-press proprietors could see their business pick up, although the government is still pledging to reduce its overall advertising.
Ethnic-press operators say anything but the status quo would be welcome. Even the relatively large publications are clamouring for help. The Sri Lanka Reporter boasts of its 100-page-a-month size and is chock full of ads selling trips back to the homeland, real-estate, automobiles and the services of immigration consultants.
But Srimal (Chris) Abeyewardene, who puts out the paper with his wife and university-aged son, says he typically sells ads at very low rates -- meaning he needs Ottawa's help to get to the point of profitability. And that's why he put Mr. Martin on the hot seat in June, when the Prime Minister addressed the ethnic-press association in Toronto, before the election.
Mr. Abeyewardene complained about middlemen gouging proprietors (some of the ad agencies that act as go-betweens charge commissions as high as 30 per cent). He also asked the Prime Minister what happened to the government ads the ethnic papers used to receive.
And then, because he could, he printed Mr. Martin's response in the Sri Lanka Reporter. "There ought to be a reasonable allocation of government advertising," the Prime Minister said at the time, vowing to soon meet with ethnic publishers to discuss the issue further.
To date, that meeting hasn't happened. But Mr. Saras hopes to use next week's trip to Ottawa to make sure it takes place soon. And maybe then he will frame the picture that shows him shaking hands with Mr. Martin and put it on the wall beside the ones of him with Jean Chrétien, John Turner and Pierre Trudeau.
Colin Freeze