It is too early to tell exactly what Ottawa’s final cultural policy revamp will look like, but one thing is clear: the Trudeau government doesn’t like the news business any more than Donald Trump does.

At least not the Canadian news business.

There will be no $350 million per year aid package to help fund journalism in this country that News Media Canada, a coalition of newspapers, had been asking for.

For those who are interested, that represents about 35 per cent of newsroom costs. And that figure doesn’t include fat and unearned bonuses for executives like Paul Godfrey, who has prospered while he presides over the incredible shrinking newspaper chain over at Postmedia. Just money for the grunts who write the news and make much less than $85,000 a year — the ones who will soon be facing mass unemployment.

Instead, Melanie Joly, Trudeau’s rookie MP and Canadian Heritage minister, has offered the bare bones of a different approach. More money for “cultural” Canadian productions, millions for marketing those productions abroad, money for a new Creative Industries Council, and protecting the rights of creators.

Lots for the arts, a nothing-burger for a civic journalism fund, which, by the way, a report from the Public Policy Forum commissioned by Canadian Heritage had also recommended.

A lot of people might agree with Joly’s decision not to invest in so-called “legacy” news operations. I am one of them. After all, who would invest in sailing ships in the age of steam?

The proprietors of these newspapers spent years giving away the news on the back of ads. That created a culture of entitlement that persists to this day, making it next to impossible for online start-ups to get people to pay for the true costs of producing quality, independent news and commentary.

It is not an altogether bad thing that the legacy newspaper industry is headed into the sunset under full sail.

But Joly’s medicine is worse than the disease that is killing Canadian news.

The minister touts big global players as Ottawa’s partners in giving Canadian culture policy a facelift. She wants Facebook, YouTube and Netflix as partners in her brave new, and yes, inevitable digital world. Little Red Riding Hood is inviting the wolf to the picnic.

These are the American internet behemoths who are helping to kill the Canadian news industry. Or should I say the commercial news business. If you want to know where all that lost Canadian ad revenue has gone, it has gone to Google and Facebook. In the end, these internet giants, and others like them, will be providing all the information. There is a reason that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

How can commercial, private news possibly survive in Canada, let alone prosper, when U.S. internet giants are not taxed or regulated the way Canadian companies are? Souring that picture even more is the fact that until recently, these massive digital providers produced little or no Canadian content.

Joly has pronounced that she will not impose a tax on Netflix, even though that would be an obvious, fair and welcome policy to at least in part recover some of the revenue that has been sucked out of Canadian newspapers and into digital space. The Public Policy Forum report thought so.

Instead, she has announced a “partnership” with Netflix.

That is passing strange.

Just when Netflix announced an increase in its Canadian subscriptions, the company “pledged” $500 million to fund Canadian productions over five years and to build a permanent production company in Canada. No one knows whether that means Canadian stories and actors, or just American shows and talent shooting in Great White North.

In other words, technically Canadian productions, but not necessarily Canadian content or artistic control — the point made by Brian Baker of the Directors Guild of Canada.

There is of course the question of whether or not this was a quid pro quo: Netflix makes an apparent investment in Canada and avoids a real tax.

But the far greater issue raised here is how this arrangement makes mincemeat out of the Trudeau government’s promise of even more money for the CBC — $675 million of new money announced in the last budget.

That is absurdity in hot pursuit of farce. If the goal is to save the Canadian news business by embracing the digital age, what Joly has really done is make it impossible for that to happen.

The CBC gets a $1.3 billion head start on the rest of the field in Canada, counting cable subscriber fees of $135 million, at taxpayers expense.

That’s the case even though the rationale for paying that outrageous sum of money has long since vanished in the 1,000-channel universe of satellite and cable TV.

And if Netflix really is going to invest in Canadian content to the tune of $500 million, it follows that the CBC needs less, not more money — a lot less.

Some people say there is a silver lining in the death of the dead-tree newspaper industry in Canada. They say that Canadian online start-ups will pick up the slack and prosper. That is virtually impossible under Joly’s plan.

With the CBC now using gobs of public money to compete for eyeballs in the digital universe, who would invest in private Canadian online operations with virtually no business plan that holds out the prospect of profit?

That is especially true when the CBC gobbles up ad revenue, as well as an enormous public subsidy, and then gives away their product for “free.” Why pay anyone else?

True, some private interests will contribute to commercial online start-ups for philanthropic or philosophical reasons, but no one will invest. Not with the CBC going into every hockey game with a 10-0 lead. The best news may end up as a charity case, which I guess is better than the alternative — nothing at all.

In that case, Joly’s brave new digital world will simply deliver Canadians into the hands of porridge makers at the CBC, and people like Mark Zuckerberg, who filled the internet with fake news and Russian troll ads in the recent U.S. presidential election.

Sound like a cultural policy to you?