Quebec's Secret Media War

​via WikiMedia Commons.

The Quebec media landscape is becoming an increasingly strange mix of old-fashioned press tycoons and small town politics, with two very powerful families peddling two very different political agendas.

This tension is coming to a head as Pierre Karl Péladeau continues to flex his CEO swagger in Quebec politics. The Parti-Québecois MNA and former president and CEO of Quebecor and The Sun Media Corporation is widely considered to be the front-runner for sovereignist party's imminent leadership race, and at the moment it doesn't seem like transparency will be a key point in his platform. He's already told the press that he does not have t​o answer their questions and that his Facebook status updates are sufficient for connecting with constituents.

On Wednesday he went even further when he demanded, via Twitter, that La Presse journalist Denis Lessard stop "haras​​sing" him by calling him on his personal cell phone, a fairly common practice among journalists covering the National Assembly.

These comments are pretty peculiar given that PKP knows more about media and journalism than almost anyone in Quebec. Péladeau is a billionaire media baron and still the majority shareholder of self-described "media p​owerh​ouse" Quebecor, whose publications have, in the past, been notoriously tough on politicians and invasive even towards private citizens.

And nowhere is this invasiveness more obvious than in their treatment of the Péladeau's rival billionaire family, the Desmarais, owners of Power Corp. which also has a huge stake in Quebec's media landscape, including Montreal's

, North America's largest French-language daily.
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​Pierre Karl Péladeau, ​photo via Facebook.

Quebecor's answer to La Presse, Le Journal de Montréal, has a long history of dispatching their journalists to the Desmarais' 21,000 acre "Sagard" compound.

The newspaper even resorted to flying helicopters over the vast property to take pictures and then ran dramatic headlines comparing it to the court of Louis X​IV. Which, when you look at the lavishness of the compound, is actually a pretty fair comparison.

So as Péladeau, a public servant, pleads for his right to privacy, his company's crown jewel has been quite aggressive in infiltrating the private property of the Desmarais clan who are, at the end of the day, private citizens.

But this rivalry goes beyond Quebec billionaires dissing the other's cribs through their respective media empires.

The Desmarais family have famously close ti​es with federal and provincial Liberal parties and La Presse op-eds tend to have a strong federalist streak often blurring the line between Power Corps' financial and political interests.

In 2011, Wikileaks released a cabl​e sent to the State Department from US Ambassador to Canada David Jacobson.

In it he described how then Liberal Premiere Jean Charest suddenly backed down from his aggressive criticism of the Harper government's less than ambitious targets at the 2009 Climate Change Conference after huge media backlash, spearheaded by La Presse

"It's difficult to say whether Charest was reacting to La Presse, pressure from the Desmarais family, or another factor (…) but the corporation's provincial and federal influence is undeniable."

It turns out that Power Corp. is also the single largest shareholder of the French energy juggernaut Total S.A. which plans on investing over $20 billion in oil sands over the next 20 years.

Ambassador Jacobson even mentions how Quebecor's Journal de Montreal "led several commentators in charging that La Presse's stance had been dictated by its ownership—Power Corporation, a holding company with substantial financial interests in the oil sands."

And this complicity is exactly what PKP was suggesting as recently as Tuesday in a Facebook post where he directly calls out

for passing off Power Corp.'s oil interests as Canada's own and accuses the paper of being on a "crusade" to defend Alberta oil sands corporations and the Keystone XL pipeline.
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Pierre-Karl might be on to something.

But the point is not whether or not Péladeau is right about the Desmarais' influence on Canadian politics. PKP is using the media—his media—to advance his own narrative. Like the time he appeared on the news—on the station that he owns—denouncing the apparent cosy relationship between Liberal leader Jean Charest and his nemeses the Desmarais family. You can watch it here on this webportal, which he also owns.

But the unfortunate reality is that the vast majority of news in Quebec is filtered through two huge corporations with close political ties. It is pretty common for the rest of Canada to roll their eyes whenever things start to get crazy in Quebec. But unlike the recent student riots, corruption scandals and austerity measures that have rocked la belle province, this is an issue that reaches far beyond its borders. The ripples of Quebec's veiled media war are quietly affecting everything from Alberta oil sands and Keystone XL all the way to Ameri​can and Fre​nch politics.