The plan entails "moving to a single newsroom approach across brands, allowing for greater collaboration and efficiency," said
The company's media branch "can't afford" to continue operating with its various brands — such as
"It's a consolidation of news gathering, news delivery," he said.
The layoffs include a six per cent cut at Bell Media, but Malcolmson said cuts, amounting to around three per cent of its total workforce, are happening across the organization.
“This thing affects all layers of the company and isn’t targeted at any one band of employees.”
Management positions at BCE are also being slashed by six per cent, while there will also be 20 per cent fewer executive roles in the company compared with 2020.
About 30 per cent of the positions being eliminated are current vacancies that won't be filled.
CTV's foreign bureaus in
Bell Media said it would also shut down
In a separate internal memo sent on Wednesday, Bell Media president
"We are also faced with strong economic and inflationary pressures, a pullback in advertisers’ budgets, and a challenging regulatory environment that has been too slow to adjust," said Oosterman in his memo to staff.
In an open letter published online Wednesday,
"The job reductions are consistent with, but smaller than, similar reductions announced by other leading technology and media companies across
"One of the key things that I think has helped radio is its claim to local representativeness and so this really takes a knife to that," he said.
"We've been told now for more than a decade that Canadian companies have to get larger to compete on a global scale. This was always questionable," he said.
"And now we're seeing the danger element of it is that when there are problems with some of these companies, at various levels, it has impacts across the country."
Taylor said those affects would be felt locally, where the range of voices offered to Canadians would be limited.
"There's so much that's going to be potentially lost here," he said.
Malcolmson said regulatory challenges affecting both the telecommunications side and media arm left the company in an "unenviable place," with no choice but to make widespread cuts.
"We're obviously trying to do this in the most humane, least impactful way possible," he said.
Malcolmson did not rule out further layoffs in the foreseeable future, saying the company will take a wait-and-see approach to the regulatory environment.
He took aim at "relentless regulatory intervention" by the CRTC, under
Noting that the cost of wireless service has declined around 25 per cent and the cost of broadband high-speed internet has gone up by less than one per cent over the last three years, despite Canada's overall high inflation, Malcolmson said "maybe it's time to declare victory" for
"I think the government's sort of populist focus on pricing isn't necessarily in line with current reality and the government has created an intensely competitive industry structure that they should allow to play out," he said.
Telecommunications consultant
"With this regulatory uncertainty, it's a difficult market to invest in."
But Winseck called it a situation that Bell could have avoided with better decision-making over the past decade.
"It seems to me that Bell is asking for the stars and the moon," he said. "It has a pretty favourable regulatory framework already."
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Still, Winseck said Bell has not invested enough "to allow itself to stand out as a major news provider."
The company has also failed to invest in its own domestic catalogue to compete on the streaming side, said Winseck.
"Without your own domestic catalogue, the days were numbered. It has basically withheld or starved its radio stations and its TV services of the investments that it would need to develop a robust catalogue of its own television and film programming."
Malcolmson lamented the process around two pieces of legislation designed to help Canada's struggling media sector. While Bill C-18 would require companies like
The other, Bill C-11, aims to force platforms such as
In a tweet, Heritage Minister
"A broke press is not a free press, and big tech needs to pay their fair share," the minister said.
The union representing some of the media workers being laid off said Bell should have let the two bills to finish working their way through the legislative process before deciding whether to make cuts.
"We think we think they should have waited and it's a shame that they didn't," said
Kitt said it was a "devastating" day for members.
"We're surprised and we're not surprised," he said. "The media landscape in this country is extremely tough right now, which is why the government enacted two pieces of legislation to address it. We thought that Bell Media could have had other options to hold off until they saw relief from either C-18 or C-11."
Malcolmson said Bell has been waiting for regulatory reform for years and the company decided not to hold back cuts pending the outcome of regulatory consultations on those bills any further.
"We have to ensure that our business is able to operate in a viable way, and we can't wait two years and another, for example,
"At some point, we have to say to ourselves, 'Is it worth funding this?'"
This report by The Canadian Press was first published
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