Advocacy

TORONTO, ON., Apr. 27, 2023 /CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) is going to court to oppose an unreasonable police attempt to force a Toronto filmmaker to turn over his interviews and source material. In March, the CAJ publicly condemned the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP)’s demand that Jamie Kastner hand over the raw footage of 17 interviews he conducted while preparing his TVO documentary “There Are No Fakes.”  “In democracies like Canada, journalists don’t work for the police,” said CAJ president Brent Jolly. “If the OPP succeeds in getting this raw footage, it will make it harder for [...]

TORONTO, ON, Mar. 28, 2023 - The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) strongly condemns the actions of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) in forcing a Toronto filmmaker to turn over his interviews and source material related to a 2019 documentary. Last November, the OPP served Jamie Kastner with a production order, forcing him to provide police with all the raw footage of 17 interviews he conducted in preparing his TVO documentary “There Are No Fakes.” The film exposed fraud in the world of art, showing how criminals were forging the works of Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau and profiting from their [...]

OTTAWA ON, March 15, 2023 / The Canadian Association of Journalists is pleased to announce the launch of the 2023 Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey — Canada’s annual national media diversity survey.  This is the third year that the survey is being sent out to newsroom leaders nationwide. Last year’s survey saw 242 media outlets participate in the survey.  “The Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey is a critical exercise to help understand and evaluate our industry’s commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives,” said CAJ president Brent Jolly. “The number of outlets participating increased from year one to year two. We look [...]

TORONTO, ON, Feb. 23, 2023 - Google’s efforts to prevent some Canadians from accessing news on its platform under the auspices of “rebalancing the power dynamics in the digital news marketplace” is a harmful act that amounts to taking the public hostage in its efforts to undermine legislation currently being studied by the Canadian Senate. On Wednesday, Google told The Canadian Press that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for less than four per cent of its Canadian users as it evaluates potential responses to Bill C-18, The Online News Act. If passed, the legislation would compel tech [...]

VANCOUVER, B.C., Feb. 13, 2023 /CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) strongly supports the legal action brought forward in the Supreme Court of British Columbia earlier today by Amber Bracken and The Narwhal against the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and related parties for alleged violation of their rights under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The lawsuit stems from the arrest of Bracken, an award-winning photojournalist, while she was on assignment for The Narwhal in late 2021. Bracken was covering enforcement of an injunction related to the construction of TransCanada’s Coastal GasLink pipeline on unceded Wet’suwet’en territory.  Following [...]

OTTAWA, Dec. 21, 2022/ CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) is pleased to release the findings of its second annual national Canadian Newsroom Diversity Survey.  The CAJ collected data on 5,012 journalists from 242 newsrooms across radio, television, digital and print media in Canada. This is up from 3,873 journalists at 209 newsrooms in the inaugural 2021 survey results. The CAJ worked with data and analytics experts at Qlik to develop an interactive website to visualize the results.  This year's survey represents the most comprehensive data set on the gender and racial breakdown of Canadian newsrooms. It marks [...]

Update to this story: https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/judge-denies-saskatchewan-request-for-publication-ban-during-saulteaux-sisters-bail-hearing/ REGINA, November 23, 2022/ CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) calls on the Government of Saskatchewan, and the province’s minister of justice and attorney general, to withdraw its unnecessary application for a sweeping publication ban that would prevent journalists from reporting on the upcoming bail hearing for a pair of Saulteaux sisters in a possible wrongful conviction case. Sisters Nerissa and Odelia Quewezance are scheduled to appear for a bail hearing in Yorkton, Sask. court on Nov. 24-25. Their case has drawn considerable attention in recent months after the Department of Justice’s Criminal [...]

The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) is renewing its support of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in his fight to avoid extradition to the U.S. on Espionage Act charges. The CAJ joins numerous other journalism and human rights organizations in calling on Britain to drop its efforts to extradite him, and on the U.S. to abandon the charges. Assange faces up to 175 years in jail for publishing classified documents from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The documents were picked up by many news organizations around the world to reveal abuses by the U.S. and other governments. Canadian journalists and news [...]

UPDATE: Please see PDF for response from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Sept. 1, 2022 The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau, P.C., M.P. Prime Minister of Canada 80 Wellington Street Ottawa, ON, K1A 0A2 Delivered by email Dear Prime Minister Trudeau, We are writing in relation to the increasing and alarming online hate and harassment targeting journalists and journalism as a profession. This is a global problem, which threatens not only the safety and well-being of journalists, but the proper functioning of democracy itself. Many countries are now working on plans to fight back. We are calling on Canadian police and policymakers to do [...]

WINNIPEG, MB, August 12, 2022 /CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Journalists is disturbed by new information about a neo-Nazi plot to kill a Winnipeg Free Press journalist, and calls on the RCMP to clarify what information it had obtained from U.S. police and what steps it took to investigate the murder plot. In 2019, Ryan Thorpe went undercover to expose Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Mathews as a member of neo-Nazi group The Base. Mathews subsequently fled to the U.S., where he was arrested and sentenced to nine years in prison for weapons charges and plotting violence. This week, [...]