A motion by Snowdon councillor Marvin Rotrand urging an increase in municipal advertising, through the posting of notices in community media, passed at Montreal council Tuesday.
“I am very proud of this motion,” Rotrand said.
The councillor told The Suburban this past June that “my constituents, in my opinion, are much better served by municipal notices and information in The Suburban, or an ethnic paper such as Community Contact or on local ethnic TV, where the city can reach large numbers of persons at an affordable cost than by email blasts where citizens have to sign up in advance or by warehousing information on obscure places on municipal web sites.”
The motion was supported by the Federation of Professional Journalists of Quebec, and asks that city council “declare that the existence of healthy and diverse news media is essential for the proper functioning of democracy in our city; and that the municipal council recognize the important role of the ethnic media in the city, which often reaches an audience different from that of the French or English language media.”
Montreal council is also asked to “join with the City of Toronto in advocating to provincial and federal governments the importance of local journalism and the need to ensure a healthy news media ecosystem exists to serve all Canadians; and mandate city departments to review New York City’s advertising policy and imitate it, so that city bids, notices and other information are published and disseminated on a greater number of platforms than currently; and that city departments be mandated to develop a strategy to better take advantage of the market penetration of ethnic media to enable the city to reach a wider audience.”
Ahuntsic-Cartierville Mayor Émilie Thuillier told the media that the pandemic demonstrated that Montrealers “have to be reached where they are.”
A supporting letter from FPJQ president Michael Nguyen says that the organization “wishes to reaffirm that a strong and independent press is essential to a healthy democracy and to a plurality of voices.
“Beyond the funding of local and regional weeklies through the publication of these written opinions, all citizens benefit from transparent and accessible public information,”the letter adds. “In a context where disinformation is a scourge, allowing citizens to have easy access to public notices ensures the health of our society. On the eve of the next municipal elections, it would bode well for the City of Montreal to set an example and support the written press.”
