MONTREAL

This is slated to be the busiest political weekend on the federal calendar in months in Quebec.

Chances are few will take notice.

In Rimouski, the Bloc Québécois is holding a convention that will set the stage for a leadership vote next month.

In Victoriaville, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau is scheduled to address a gathering of the Quebec wing of his party.

But with newsrooms operating on skeleton crews on weekends, the two parties can expect little more than bare-bones coverage of their events.

It does not help that attending the Bloc’s convention requires overnighting in Rimouski.

Or, in the case of the Liberals, that they have embraced the leader-centric Conservative approach to party gatherings. All proceedings with the main exception of Justin Trudeau’s speech are taking place behind closed doors.

But both parties are also getting a taste of the brave new shrinking world of the Quebec media — one where the lights of the few French-language organizations that bring the rest of Canada and the world into francophone homes are flickering.

A few weeks ago, Gesca, the company that runs La Presse, confirmed that it was winding down its print edition. In as little as two years Montreal’s most-read French-language broadsheet will only exist in electronic format.

After that happens, the fate of sister papers in Quebec City, the Saguenay and the national capital region is uncertain. The move could bring Canada’s only Ontario-based French-language daily, le Droit, to the end of the road.

No one should count on the wire services of la Presse Canadienne to pick up any slack. Last week, the news agency announced impending staff cutbacks in Montreal and Quebec City.

That came just days after Le Devoir — Montreal’s other broadsheet daily — published an annual financial statement that was awash in red ink.

These developments will surprise no one who has kept a finger on the faltering pulse of the print news industry worldwide.

But their potentially devastating impact on the quality of French-language information on offer in Quebec is compounded by the fact that Radio-Canada is struggling to cope with a crippling round of cuts.

Current affairs programs such as Enquête whose investigative journalism was more than instrumental in bringing the corruption issue to light in Quebec are all under the knife.

Earlier this month the star anchors of the public network took the unprecedented step of going together on the prime-time talk show Tout le monde en parle to sound the alarm.

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As someone who started out at Radio-Canada, I can testify as to how out-of-character it was for this group of journalists to plunge into the fray.

One collateral result of the witch hunts for separatists launched in the Pierre Trudeau era has been that Radio-Canada has traditionally afforded a lot less leeway to its anchors and journalists than its CBC counterpart.

Even in better economic times for the media industry, Radio-Canada has always provided an essential information-gathering service.

Alone of all French-language broadcasters it maintains a network of newsrooms across the country. They often double as training facilities for its future star correspondents.

No other French-language media employer routinely exposes its journalists to the rest of Canada.

On a day-to-day basis, Radio-Canada is also pretty much the sole provider of French-language international coverage in Quebec.

In his prepolitics days, Quebecor owner Pierre-Karl Péladeau was never a friend of Radio-Canada. But in his new capacity as a Parti Québécois MNA, he co-signed an open letter last month to stress the central contribution of the public network’s news and current affairs services to Quebec’s public life.

As an aside, those who were troubled by the notion that Quebec’s biggest media mogul could end up calling the shots from the heights of a sovereigntist government might ponder the fact that, at this rate, the Quebecor empire will be even less challenged for domination of the province’s information industry in a few years’ time.

All this in a week when the ruling Conservatives set out to raise funds on the backs of media that they depict to their followers as instruments in the hands of a half-dozen non-Conservative owners.

This may be as close as a federal governing party can come to fiddling while Rome burns.

Chantal Hébert is a national affairs writer. Her column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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