The conservative movement helped settle a $40 million settlement for Bell

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OTTAWA — Conservative Leader Pierre Poillevre is rejecting the idea that his party played a role in giving Bell Media $40 million in regulatory breaks.

Conservative and NDP MPs have backed a 2022 amendment to the Online Broadcasting Act, opposed by the governing Liberals, that would save Canada's private broadcasters nearly $120 million a year in regulatory fees.

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Bell's share of those savings totaled $40 million — the same amount that the broadcaster's parent BCE Inc. a clear summary of the annual operating costs it incurred last week when it cut 4,800 jobs.

But Polievre is now blaming Justin Trudeau for the cuts and has called on the prime minister to return some of the government's federal grants to media companies.

When asked about the divestment, the Conservative leader says that giving tax dollars to the media will ensure the distribution of unbiased, liberal content.

“So the supposed reason for giving Bell all this money is that it saves the media work. They have all been fired,” Poilevre said on Monday.

“So I don't think that was a real reason to give tax dollars to the media. The real reason was to buy support from the media, which is what it really was.”

The June 2022 proposal, tabled by Conservative MP John Nather, was passed without debate in the House of Commons heritage committee with support from New Democratic and Bloc Québécois MPs.

The proposal would amend the Liberals' broadcasting law, the Online Streaming Act, to remove some license fees.

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Liberal MPs on the committee voted against Nather's proposal, but the amendment was written into the bill anyway.

The act finally went into effect last April.

In an evening statement to The Canadian Press, Conservative Party spokesman Sebastian Skamski called the amendment a “common sense proposal” to level the playing field between traditional broadcasters and online streaming platforms.

“On the other hand, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government have given Bell at least half a billion taxpayer dollars over the past eight years,” Skamski said.

“This money was supposed to support Canadian jobs and Canadian media, but the Liberals wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars only to see the opposite results.”

Asked to explain why the New Democrats voted with the Conservatives, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh says his party opposes the government taking big money for big corporations.

“I can tell you that we have long said that any money that comes into any corporation should come with strong strings attached,” Singh said.

“We've said it over and over again.”

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Heritage Minister Pascal Saint-Onge did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in recent days, he has taken to social media to challenge Polievre and Singh's claims that liberals are to blame.

He said the Tories had introduced an amendment to remove those payments for Bell.

“The Liberals voted against it. It's up to you,” St-Onge wrote on X on Friday in response to Poillevre's attack. “As you can see, your policies are bad for workers and journalism.”

He also hit back at Singh, saying, “I hope you now understand that the ideas of conservatives will never benefit workers, much less journalism.”

Last week, St-Onge accused the company of breaking its promise to invest in news after being granted an annual regulatory exemption.

Bell Media is also expected to receive money related to the Internet News Act, with private broadcasters receiving $30 million through an indirect government deal with Google.

It has agreed to pay news outlets $100 million a year to avoid being regulated under the new law, which requires tech giants to compensate news producers for content they share on their platforms and from which they profit financially.

The company blamed the cuts on the federal government, saying Ottawa took too long to grant relief to media companies.

He also blamed the Canadian Radio-television Commission, saying the regulator was too slow to react to the “immediate crisis.”

The CRTC is expected to issue final rules aimed at helping the news industry in the coming months. Until then, St. Onge said, “We need everyone to be strong.”

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