MONTREAL — In a week when Stephen Harper’s Conservatives moved to give political parties the right to recycle journalistic content for their own partisan purposes, a much larger battle over the independence of the media was raging in Quebec.

On the surface, little seems to connect the backdoor amendments to the Copyright Act that Harper is bringing in and the Parti Québécois’contention that Quebecor’s Pierre Karl Péladeau’s position as the dominant media owner in Quebec is not in conflict with his political ambitions.

In fact, both moves stem from an underlying presumption that the media’s independence deserves little protection from political interference because that purported independence is ultimately a bogus concept.

Essentially the Harper government is arguing that political parties should be able to pick and choose from the journalistic content gathered by news organizations and be allowed to be judge and jury as to the use that they make of it.

As articulated by no less than Heritage Minister Shelly Glover, the Conservative rationale for this extraordinary measure is that alleged media “censorship” is otherwise curtailing the access of citizens to significant information.

Harper’s move is totally consistent with the Conservative portrayal of the parliamentary press gallery as the media party rather than as an independent institution vested with a legitimate role in the democratic process.

The battle surrounding Pierre Karl Péladeau’s double role as a media owner and an elected official is playing out along similar themes.

From the perspective of the newly elected MNA, there is no conflict between his continued ownership of Quebecor — the biggest French-language media player in Quebec — and the leadership role he is aspiring to play in the affairs of the PQ and the province.

Most media observers disagree. They argue that the usual firewalls that have been erected to insulate elected officials from their business interests were never designed to curtail the influence of a media tycoon over the coverage that he receives at the hands of journalists who are his employees. If only because of the increased risk of journalistic self-censorship, the situation is untenable.

Unsurprisingly the PQ’s rivals in the national assembly have jumped on the bandwagon of journalistic independence.

A consensus has emerged in the national assembly that PKP has to choose between his political ambitions and his ownership of Quebecor or at least of the parts of his media empire that deal in information content.

Péladeau’s PQ has been fighting his battle tooth and nail.

There is more to that than the party’s desire to hang on to a star recruit that many sovereigntists see as their next saviour.

Like the Harper Conservatives, the PQ believes that the media is ideologically stacked against it. From its perspective, having a sovereigntist fellow traveller in control of the province’s most-read tabloids and its most-watched television station is only fair.

Sovereigntist militants point to the Desmarais family’s ownership of the Gesca papers and the staunchly federalist editorial position of media outlets such as Montreal’s La Presse or Radio-Canada — an institution that lives on the federal dime — to sustain their argument that they operate in a hostile media environment.

In Péladeau, they have a rare media owner who wears his support for sovereignty on his sleeve. If he is forced to sell his shares, they fear that those will end up in unfriendly hands.

PKP’s recent political calling has already impacted on his media interests. This week, Quebecor sold off the Sun Media newspapers, a business decision facilitated by the fact that having a sovereigntist in control of an English-language media chain was not an asset.

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If only because it stands to be a permanent embarrassment to a potential PQ leader, Sun TV will almost certainly end up on the selling block — if it is not already on it.

But when it comes to selling his French-language holdings, Péladeau has drawn a deep line in the sand and there are those who believe that he could still retreat to his boardroom rather than bow to the mounting pressures to become a full-time politician.

Should that happen, only the naïve should expect Quebecor’s media outlets to be more politically independent than they would be with Péladeau in a front-line role in the national assembly.

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