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Very well. Does anyone seriously believe that one dollar of the money these “independent NGOs” will be handing out will go to cover the news from anything but a liberal status-quo perspective, let alone a smaller-government, is-this-spending-necessary perspective? For starters, you’d have to be willing to take the subsidy. And if you were not? Then you’d be competing against people who were. Only now it wouldn’t just be the CBC. (I’m also against its $1-billion annual subsidy lest there be any doubt.)

It’s only $50 million? For starters, yes. This is a big, indeed unprecedented step. Had the government weighed in with a boatload of cash all at once, it might have put people off. But the beachhead having successfully been established, does anyone really think it will stop there? With that sum? With those rules? That client list? Why?

And let the newspaper publishers not be too downhearted. “Over the next year,” the budget says — the year before an election, in case that slipped anyone’s mind — “the Government will be exploring new models that enable private giving and philanthropic support for trusted, professional, non-profit journalism.” These could include granting newspapers “charitable status for not-for-profit provision of journalism, reflecting the public interest that they serve.”

Again: what sort of journalism do you think will be provided by these not-for-profit, charitable-status, public-interest outfits? I’ve no objection if anyone wants to run a newspaper on that basis (at the National Post, we like to say we’ve been working in the non-profit sector for years), though I confess a bias for the sort of writing that is driven by an urgent desire to separate the reader from his money, rather than issued by high-minded public servants.

But charitable status means free of tax, together with generous tax credits for donors. No bailout? Hardly. They’re just going to launder it through Revenue Canada.