Postmedia’s Decade of Pushing Canada’s Politics to the Right

"It’s becoming more and more a National Post country."

Postmedia owns more than half of Canadian daily newspapers. For the past decade, it’s been shifting the contours of political debate in Canada rightward. (Unifor)

This piece was originally published in Ricochet.

More than half of Canadian daily newspapers are owned by Postmedia, giving the MAGA-aligned newspaper chain enormous influence over the flow of information and how current events are perceived across the country.

In addition to its explicitly Conservative flagship national newspaper, the National Post, Postmedia has a monopoly on major daily newspapers in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Saskatoon and Regina, in addition to owning the Toronto Sun and Montreal Gazette.

“In the last 10 years, they’ve been imposing an ever further right-wing agenda on their newspapers,” Marc Edge, author of the Postmedia Effect: How Vulture Capitalism Is Wrecking Our News, told Ricochet.

“It’s been quite a transformation of our largest newspaper chain into a conservative monolith, and it keeps growing because Postmedia keeps buying more and more newspapers and newspaper chains.”

Months after Postmedia purchased the Sun chain of tabloid newspapers, it merged newsrooms in Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, resulting in 90 layoffs. In 2024, Postmedia purchased SaltWire, Atlantic Canada’s largest newspaper chain, and the Halifax Herald, resulting in 60 layoffs.

The Halifax Herald was the company that owned the Chronicle Herald, an independent Halifax daily newspaper that is almost as old as Canada itself, which was owned by the local Dennis family for much of its existence.

When the sale to Postmedia was announced, former Chronicle Herald managing editor Dan Leger said that it “realizes a longstanding fear, soulless right-wing dark money buying the fine old paper,” which he predicted would be a “vicious blow to local coverage.”

In 2019, journalist Sean Craig reported that “Postmedia has given a directive for all of its papers to shift to the political right, in an unprecedented, centralized fashion.”

Since then, the range of acceptable opinion at Postmedia, and the National Post in particular, has shifted even further rightwards, with the company’s coverage serving to normalize Alberta separatist sentiments, anti-trans bigotry, and state repression against Palestine solidarity activism.

Ricochet spoke to several current and former Postmedia journalists, who have been granted pseudonyms so they could speak freely without professional repercussions.

“There’s definitely an agenda,” said Drew, a Postmedia journalist at a daily newspaper. “Sometimes it expresses itself in an overt way and sometimes it’s much more subtle.”

Drew emphasized that Postmedia’s agenda largely manifests itself in the narrow range of opinion reflected in its newspapers’ editorial pages across Canada.

Commentary, they said, is heavily skewed towards conservative commentators, and in some cases “fairly extreme conservative commentators,” but at the local level, there exists a firm wall between commentary and reportage.

That’s less the case at the National Post, where news reporting is frequently, although not always, torqued along the lines of its opinion pages, which a Postmedia reporter at another daily, Bailey, characterized as a “dumpster fire.”

While Bailey described the local newspapers as generally operating as their own “little fiefdoms,” they acknowledged that Postmedia does impose National Post content on local papers.

Local editors have no control over which National Post columns reporting or sponsored content appear on their websites. Additionally, the “B” section of every Postmedia daily consists of a truncated version of the National Post, which is also imposed on local editors.

“Some of their garbage makes it into our pages or onto our website,” Bailey told Ricochet.

American ownership

Since 2016, Postmedia has been majority owned by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey-based hedge fund owned by Republican megadonor Anthony Melchiorre, who dined with President Donald Trump shortly after his initial election that year.

Chatham also owns the National Enquirer, the celebrity gossip tabloid that conspired with Trump to kill a story on an adulterous relationship, and in 2020, it purchased the McClatchy newspaper chain, which owns the Miami Herald, Sacramento Bee, and the Kansas City Star.

It’s difficult to know for certain how much input Postmedia’s American ownership has in its editorial direction. Foreign ownership restrictions prevent Chatham from appointing more than a third of Postmedia’s board.

“Is there a case to be made that what this company effectively represents is a debt factory that can be used to sell securities to American investors? Absolutely,” said Parker, a former reporter at a Postmedia city daily.

“Does that necessarily trickle down to somebody that’s doing day-to-day reporting? Probably not at a national level.”

It’s undeniable that the debt-ridden chain’s ownership by a hedge fund has drained it of resources that could be spent on news reporting, which itself serves an ideological function.

“Since Chatham took a majority stake in Postmedia, the company has cut its work force, shuttered papers across Canada, reduced salaries and benefits, and centralized editorial operations in a way that has made parts of its 106 newspapers into clones of one another,” wrote New York Times reporter Edmund Lee at the time of the McClatchy deal.

The Times noted that between 2016 and 2020, Postmedia has laid off 1,200 employees. In 2023, Postmedia announced plans to lay off 11 per cent of its editorial employees.

In 2021, Postmedia accepted more than $35 million in federal government subsidies. Writing to shareholders, CEO Andrew MacLeod said the company would likely not be profitable if not for “government support,” PressProgress reported at the time.

The company told its shareholders that the taxpayer dollars are, in fact, “key pillars” of its business strategy, despite spending the previous year calling pandemic emergency government subsidies “lavish handouts” for “welfare slackers,” while pundits call for the defunding of the CBC.

Postmedia’s combined cost cutting and acquisitions, Edge explained, represents an “insidious process,” in which Postmedia expands its national reach while reducing news outlets’ capacities to produce local content, resulting in Postmedia “feeding us the National Post from coast to coast.”

“It’s becoming more and more a National Post country,” he said.

How balanced is reporting actually?

Antonia Zerbisias, the Toronto Star’s former media critic, told Ricochet that she rejects the notion of reporting that is objective and entirely free from outside influence, noting the confluence of internal and external pressures on newsrooms shape the final product.

“No matter what, you know someone is looking over your shoulder when you are writing a story,” said Zerbisias.

Citing sociologist Warren Breed’s 1955 study, “Social Control in the Newsroom,” Edge noted the “unwritten rules” that govern mainstream media.

“You learn as a young journalist what will and what will not get in your newspaper, and you learn to go along to get along, or else you end up getting out,” he said.

Self-censorship is a phrase that came up repeatedly in interviews with Postmedia reporters who spoke to Ricochet. But the need for self-censorship doesn’t apply to Postmedia columnists and reporters who are aligned with Postmedia’s political agenda.

“Look at the shit they get away with,” said Bailey.

Adam Zivo, a National Post columnist who travelled to Ukraine to cover Russia’s war, has boasted of working for Ukrainian intelligence to entrap an individual he suspected was a Chinese spy.

Tristin Hopper, whose Twitter bio describes himself as a “columnist and reporter” for the National Post, has fantasized online about running over pro-Palestinian protestors, whom he referred to as “watermelon zombies,” with his car. In 2019, he gained infamy for posting a photo with his foot on a dead raccoon, boasting that he stomped it to death.

Toronto Sun parliamentary reporter Bryan Passifiume endorsed ICE officers’ killing of 37-year-old mother Renee Good in Minneapolis in January 2026 on Twitter, echoing discredited Trump administration claims that Good attempted to hit ICE agents with her vehicle.

“In this case, the far left ended up catching a few well-deserved bullets for their miscalculation,” Passifiume said.

He was suspended for a few weeks for this remark, but has since returned to writing heavily editorialized reporting.

Boosting Alberta grievance narratives

The National Post has long served as a forum for Western Canadian grievance politics, which has culminated in an October 19 referendum in Alberta on whether to have a future independence referendum.

With U.S. President Donald Trump threatening to annex Canada as the “51st state,” and Alberta separatist leaders meeting repeatedly with Trump administration officials, National Post founder Conrad Black has repeatedly taken to his newspaper to praise Trump, who pardoned Black of his 2007 fraud conviction during his first term.

In a January 2026 column, headlined, “Formidable Trump changes the world,” Black wrote that Trump’s “enemies still have no idea of his formidability.”

A May 2026 Black piece, entitled, “Canada better hope that Alberta doesn’t leave with its wealth,” the disgraced media baron opined that “if Alberta is not allowed to export its oil and natural gas and satisfy foreign demands for it, there is likely a majority in that province who would prefer to secede from Canada.”

Support for Alberta independence has remained consistent at about 27 per cent support, according to respected Calgary-based pollster Janet Brown.

The Post hasn’t explicitly supported Alberta independence, instead taking an approach similar to Premier Danielle Smith, a former columnist at Postmedia’s Calgary Herald, giving credence to separatist narratives without endorsing separatists’ proposed solutions.

Former premier Jason Kenney took a similarly affirming approach to Alberta separatist grievances, launching the Fair Deal Panel to send chair Preston Manning across the province to catalogue how unfairly Alberta is treated by the federal government and scheduling a referendum on whether equalization should be removed from the Canadian Constitution.

Kenney now sits on Postmedia’s board, a development which Postmedia staffer Drew said they and their colleagues found concerning, given Kenney’s tendency to publicly attack “legacy media” reporting that doesn’t suit his political agenda.

“There’s always been kind of a fine line between journalism and politics,” said Edge, “but you can tell a lot about a publication or a newspaper chain by who they select to sit on their board.”

Kenney has recently been on a media rehabilitation tour, in which he’s been cast as a principled opponent of the very Alberta separatist forces that he attempted to cultivate as premier. Postmedia papers have played a key role in this rehabilitation campaign, although other outlets have been happy to lend a hand.

Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid wrote a February 2026 op-ed claiming that if Kenney were still premier, “there would be no coddling of separatists.”

“The Alberta government would stand firm for Canada. He’d be fierce about it, no waffling,” Braid wrote in a column that was republished in the Edmonton Journal, Woodstock Sentinel Review and the Beacon Herald in Stratford, Ontario.

Zerbisias, who was a CBC reporter in Montreal during the original 1980 Quebec Referendum, sees a parallel in the way press coverage amplified the spectre of separatism until it became mainstream.

“It was hyped up and torqued by the media in a way that caused alarm and economic harm to Quebec and especially Montreal,” she said, adding that the same dynamic applies to Alberta separatism.

A National Post news report on a poll showing support for Alberta separatism reaching a five-year high of 27 per cent was reprinted in the Journal, Herald, Ottawa Citizen,Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, Leader Post, StarPhoenix, Windsor Star, London Free Press, Sentinel Review and Beacon Herald.

Climate science denial

A key motivator for Alberta separatism is the desire to liberate the oil and gas industry from the federal Liberals’ climate policies. On this question, there’s no daylight between the National Post and the separatists.

On the opinion side, the Post has always taken what Zerbisias referred to as a “drill, baby, drill” approach to oil and gas, leading inevitably to dismissing and downplaying climate concerns.

Recent headlines in the Post include “Pushback to climate alarmism a global vibe shift,” “The high cost of climate alarmism” and “The ‘existential’ climate crisis is fading away.”

Regarding reporting, Edge said it’s important to look not only at what is being reported but also “what stories are not covered.” The National Post simply doesn’t cover the climate crisis, leaving the only word on the matter to its climate science-denying opinion columnists, including the newspaper’s founder Conrad Black and longtime Financial Post columnist and comment editor Terrence Corcoran.

A 2021 letter in the Journal of Environmental Research that examined the accuracy of climate coverage of 17 newspapers in Canada, the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand. The National Post ranked dead last.

“Many of Postmedia’s readers are living in climate-impacted communities, and those readers are having their lives and livelihoods deleteriously affected by those impacts,” Sean Holman, the University of Victoria’s Wayne Crookes Professor of Environmental and Climate Journalism, told Ricochet.

“It is a profound disservice that the news media has done to their audiences to not adequately explain why those impacts are happening, given everything that we know about climate change.”

Israel and antisemitism

Nowhere is the line between reporting and commentary more blurred at Postmedia than coverage of Israel’s conduct and allegations from pro-Israel groups that antisemitism in Canada has reached crisis proportions.

In a March 2026 report on a World Symposium Against Antizionism scheduled for Toronto, Passifiume writes that “Toronto’s anti-Israel and far-left activists began a well-organized campaign targeting Toronto’s Jewish community mere days after the October 7, 2023 attacks.”

“Military operations by Israel and the United States to eliminate Iran’s despotic and dangerous regime only renewed anti-Jewish sentiment in Canada, with gunmen opening fire on three synagogues earlier this month, and several Jewish-owned businesses finding themselves the target of antisemitic vandals,” Passifiume added without explaining how he knew the vandals’ motivation.

In a story framed around Toronto-born Israeli deputy foreign affairs minister Sharren Haskel’s calls for the RCMP to investigate antisemitic “gang” violence in Canada, Passifiume referred to October 7 as a “siren call for anti-Israel radicals in Canada to commence campaigns of disruptive protests, university-based intimidation encampments and marches against Canadian Jews.”

He quoted Larry Zeifman, an accountant who used to sit on the board of a Toronto synagogue, who said that in order to keep Jewish Canadians safe, Prime Minister Mark Carney must say that “he respects and supports Israel’s efforts to defend itself, that he rejects the antisemitic measures of the ICC (International Criminal Court) and the UN, that he is moving Canada’s embassy to Jerusalem, and that (Benjamin) Netanyahu is invited to Canada and that (Carney) will travel to Israel.”

“Anything less than that will continue to suggest to us that we are not heard and valued like other groups in Canada,” added Zeifman.

In neither piece of reporting did Passifiume speak to anyone with a different point of view.

Passifiume was one of several Postmedia contributors who have accepted paid trips to Israel by the Exigent Foundation, an organization co-founded by former Canadian ambassador to Israel Vivian Bercovici, who is herself a National Post contributor.

PressProgress has reported that at least two of these trips were funded by the Israeli government.

National Post editor-in-chief Rob Roberts, Toronto Sun editor-in-chief Adrienne Batra, Sun columnists Warren Kinsella and Brian Lilley, National Post and Ottawa Citizen columnist Terry Glavin, and Zivo are other Postmedia employees who travelled to Israel with Exigent.

Responding to independent journalist Rachel Gilmore’s criticism of media personalities who went on a separate trip to Israel funded by the Israeli consulate, Passifiume claimedthat these paid junkets provide “valuable context to a conflict that Canadian media regularly gets wrong.”

As previously reported by The Maple, the pro-Palestinian advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East took Postmedia to the National NewsMedia Council (NNC) in December 2023 for running entirely one-sided “advocacy polemics” from the right-wing Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) as news stories.

Postmedia masquerading pro-Israel 'advocacy polemics' as news

These articles have been published in the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Sun, The Province, Windsor Star, Regina’s Leader Post, Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix, the Kingston Whig-Standard and London Free Press.

The NNC dismissed the complaint in April 2024.

“IDF kills Hamas terror cell leader posing as ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist,” read an online August 11, 2025 National Post headline for a JNS article on the Israeli military’s killing of Palestinian journalist Anas al-Sharif.

After online backlash, the Post tweaked the headline later in the day to “Israeli strike in Gaza slays Anas al-Sharif, who Israel says posed as an ‘Al Jazeera’ journalist while directing rocket attacks for Hamas.”

Two weeks later, Post comment editor Carson Jerema wrote a column headlined, “How about not hiring terrorists to report the news?” in which he complains that a “National Post headline that identified Sharif as a terrorist attracted vitriolic reaction in Canada from activists, some of whom call themselves journalists.”

“For those working in a trade where skepticism is at its core, journalists are remarkably credulous when it comes to anything smearing Israel,” Jerema wrote, expressing no skepticism of Israel’s claims that Palestinian journalists are moonlighting as militant commanders.

Fomenting anti-trans hatred

Another piece of convergence between extreme right-wing opinion and skewed reporting at Postmedia is its coverage of trans people.

Amy Hamm was fired as a Vancouver nurse last year after the B.C. College of Nurses and Midwives ruled that she “made discriminatory and derogatory statements regarding transgender people, while identifying herself as a nurse or nurse educator, across various online platforms including, but not limited to, podcasts, videos, published writings, and social media.”

When Hamm was first brought before the college in January 2023, National Post columnist Michael Higgins wrote a column, headlined, “B.C. nurse Amy Hamm is being persecuted for believing in biology,” in which he likened her to former psychologist and National Post contributor Jordan Peterson.

A year later, Hamm penned her first Post column, in which she advised against “raising our hands to speak before whimpering politely towards a cacophony of rainbow-adorned tyrants,” and soon became a regular fixture in its opinion pages.

When the FBI announced it was investigating doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors in June 2025, Hamm praised the agency’s “extrajudicial moral stance on the worst medical scandal of our time” in a column published in the National Post and Winnipeg Sun.

“There are times when something is so egregiously and evidently wrong that it warrants such action as the FBI’s intimidation. This is one of those times,” wrote the disgraced nurse.

In November 2025, Hamm wrote a column defending Alberta Premier Danielle Smith pre-emptively invoking the notwithstanding clause to shield a suite of anti-trans laws from judicial review.

These laws require parental consent for trans students changing their pronouns and names in school, ban gender affirming care for minors, and prohibit trans women from participating in female sports.

“There is something heinous, wicked and dead wrong going on: children are being sterilized and made lifelong medical patients for a pseudo-religious belief system,” wrote Hamm. “Who cares what stops it?”

Post health reporter Sharon Kirkey has facilitated this anti-trans hysteria through her reporting, which unlike Hamm’s commentary has travelled widely outside of the National Post bubble.

Kirkey published a more than 2,000 word report in April 2026 on Dr. Karine Khatchadourian, a pediatric endocrinologist who used to provide gender affirming care for minors but has since urged her colleagues to “reassess” the practice.

The field of gender affirming care, Kirkey writes, is “so turbulent and charged with emotion that providers are reluctant to express doubts for fear of being alienated by colleagues and condemned by activists as transphobic.”

Kirkey dedicates a total of 18 words to the majority view that gender affirming care shouldn’t be curtailed: “Meanwhile, numerous medical organizations, including the Canadian Paediatric Society, continue to endorse an affirming approach to gender dysphoria.”

The reporter doesn’t appear to have sought comment from these medical organizations.

In addition to the Post, this story was published in the Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, Leader Post, StarPhoenix, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen.

Holman of UVic said that Postmedia routinely publishes “material that is not consistent with democratic values,” chief among them “evidence” and “tolerance.”

He emphasized that Postmedia isn’t the only right-wing news outlet to suffer from this deficit, which “can also afflict a left-wing news outlet.”

“But I think that given the prominence of Postmedia as often the only print outlet in certain jurisdiction, it behooves us to have a little more scrutiny around what is published and what isn’t published,” said Holman.

‘Very few reporters within Postmedia would piss on Postmedia if it was on fire’

Postmedia’s political agenda has produced resentment among employees of its local newspapers and the communities they serve.

Parker, the former Postmedia reporter, noted that any reporter working for a Postmedia daily will have likely encountered members of the public who won’t engage with them because of the company’s reputation.

“People on the outside might hate Postmedia for one reason or another, good, bad or otherwise, but I don’t think anybody hates Postmedia as much as somebody that has to fucking work for Postmedia,” said Parker.

“Very few reporters within Postmedia would piss on Postmedia if it was on fire.”