Nowhere in Canada does Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly get worse reviews than in her home province. Since unveiling her framework for Canadian cultural policy in September, Ms. Joly has been summarily shunned by Quebec's artistic elite and accused of selling out to Silicon Valley.
Even Quebec's current Liberal government, one of the least antagonistic towards Ottawa in decades, has repeatedly hammered Ms. Joly for refusing to force Netflix to collect sales taxes on Canadian subscriptions or help the province's newspapers compete with Facebook and Google.
After vowing to tax Netflix subscriptions on its own, Quebec is now putting its money where its mouth is by helping struggling newspapers to survive.
On Thursday, Premier Philippe Couillard's government announced a $10-million loan to Groupe Capitales Médias, or GCM, which owns six French-language dailies including Quebec City's Le Soleil. The direct aid comes after the government last week rolled out details of a $36-million plan to help print newspapers in general develop digital strategies.
But reaction to Quebec's move may help explain why Ottawa seems so reluctant to provide financial assistance to troubled newspaper groups across the country.
Questions of political favouritism and journalistic independence are inevitably bound to haunt any public aid to private media. Ms. Joly would rather not go there.
The Quebec government said its loan to GCM, part of which would fund working capital at the chain owned by former federal Liberal cabinet minister Martin Cauchon, would help the group complete a $26-million modernization plan.
But others smelled a politically motivated bailout.
"Rescuing of the press group of @MartinCauchon Capitales Médias by the government of @phcouillard in pre-election year?" Quebecor chief Pierre Karl Péladeau tweeted. "How can the government justify a preference for certain media? The Liberal connection?"
Mr. Péladeau's suggestion that the government is helping GCM for political reasons is ironic considering how the ex-leader of the separatist Parti Québécois has chaffed at accusations that politics was behind Quebecor's 2000 takeover of cable giant Videotron.
With the support of the then-PQ Quebec government, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec invested $3.2-billion in Quebecor Media to finance its Videotron takeover and block a bid by Toronto-based Rogers Communications.
Videotron is now the profit-spinning core of Mr. Péladeau's business empire.
Quebecor's newspaper division, which includes paid dailies Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec and the freely distributed 24 Heures in Montreal, reported earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of just $4-million on revenues of $138-million in the nine months to Sept. 30. Advertising revenues declined 13 per cent, while circulation revenues dropped 7 per cent.
By contrast, Videotron reported nine-month EBITDA of $1.15-billion on revenues of $2.44-billion, up 6 per cent and 4 per cent, respectively.
Critics charge that Quebecor's dailies, which dish up a steady diet of anti-Liberal commentary, could not survive without Videotron to cushion Quebecor's overall bottom line. At the very least, Mr. Péladeau's attacks on government aid to GCM expose him to charges of the pot calling the kettle black, since Quebecor has been a far bigger beneficiary of state largesse than GCM.
Quebecor's most recent results included a $243-million gain on the sale of wireless spectrum that it acquired when the former Conservative government blocked wireless incumbents Bell, Rogers and Telus from bidding on the spectrum to favour new entrants into the market. Quebecor, which took a pass on rolling out a national wireless network, never ended up using the spectrum and was able to make a nifty profit on it by selling it to Shaw Communications.
An article in Thursday's Journal de Québec, whose main competitor is GCM's Le Soleil, noted that five of the dailies now owned by GCM endorsed Mr. Couillard's Liberals in the 2014 provincial election, the first in which Mr. Péladeau was a PQ candidate. At the time, the papers were still owned by the staunchly federalist Desmarais family's Power Corp. through its Gesca unit, which also owns Montreal's La Presse. Gesca sold its papers in Quebec City, Ottawa-Gatineau, Trois-Rivières, Saguenay, Sherbrooke and Granby to Mr. Cauchon in 2015. The terms of the deal were not disclosed and Mr. Péladeau, then a PQ MNA, accused the Desmarais's of "finding a cover" to shut down the papers.
Rather than shutting the papers down, however, Mr. Cauchon and GCM CEO Claude Gagnon have moved them into the digital age by launching mobile apps, tablet editions and new websites.
And unlike La Presse, which abandoned its weekday print edition in 2015 and will end its Saturday print edition this month, Mr. Cauchon has said GCM is committed to maintaining print editions at its six dailies. GCM's own data suggest that two-thirds of its 700,000 weekly readers in print never read digital versions of its papers. But clearly, the papers are struggling.
Ms. Joly would come in for criticism if inaction on her part contributed to their demise. But as Mr. Péladeau's reaction to the GCM loan shows, the politics of media bailouts are especially touchy in Quebec.
Konrad Yakabuski