Canadian Media Is a $22.6 Billion Industry. It's Also in Crisis.

There's a tension at the heart of Canadian media that a new report makes hard to ignore: the industry is enormous, economically vital, and deeply embedded in how this country tells its stories. It is also quietly hollowing out.

The 2024 Canadian Media Means Business report, released this week by a consortium of Canada's leading media owners and industry associations, puts the sector's total economic impact at $22.6 billion in GDP. It supports 193,120 jobs nationally, 73,120 of which are directly tied to advertising sales. To put that in context, Canadian media is a larger direct employer than auto manufacturing, mining, and telecommunications. It is not a niche industry asking for sympathy. It is a structural part of the national economy.

And it is losing ground fast.

The money is leaving

The central finding of the report is one that anyone who has watched a media plan shift over the past decade will recognize immediately. In 2017, non-Canadian digital platforms captured 76% of Canadian digital ad spending. By 2024, that figure had climbed to 94%. For every $100 a Canadian brand spends on advertising in this country, $74 exits the Canadian economy immediately.

“Foreign tech platforms are siphoning our ad dollars and starving Canadian media," said Sarah Thompson, Project Leader at Canadian Media Means Business. “This industry is a massive economic engine, yet we are bleeding capital while the broader ad market grows."

The flip side of that math also appears in the report. Every incremental $1 million invested in Canadian-owned advertising platforms generates an estimated 8.23 jobs and $1 million in GDP contribution. The economic case for keeping more media spend domestic is not sentimental. It is straightforward arithmetic.

Who is actually losing their jobs

The workforce data is where the report gets uncomfortable. The total number of direct jobs in the sector dipped only slightly, to 137,600 in 2024. But that headline number masks a significant shift happening underneath it. Digital infrastructure and agency roles are growing. Traditional media and news roles are contracting sharply.

Between 2019 and 2024, traditional media subsectors lost more than 11,000 jobs. Newspapers shed over 30% of their workforce in five years. In a single year, between 2023 and 2024, the news industry lost an estimated 600 journalist positions and 400 editor roles.

These are not abstract statistics for Canadian marketers. The journalists and editors being cut are the people producing the content that makes editorial environments credible, trusted, and worth advertising in. When that workforce contracts, so does the quality of the media ecosystem that Canadian brands rely on to reach their audiences.

A country dividing along media lines

The regional picture adds another layer. Ontario held steady, generating $5.3 billion in direct GDP and supporting 41,220 direct jobs. Quebec bucked the national trend entirely, gaining nearly 2,000 jobs, a result the report attributes directly to cultural protection policies. The implication is not subtle: deliberate policy intervention works.

Elsewhere the story is harder. British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba collectively shed 5,310 jobs and $710 million in GDP in a single year. Manitoba was the most severe case, losing 46.5% of its media workforce in twelve months. Nova Scotia was the outlier in the other direction, with jobs rising by 95.5%, largely driven by the expansion of provincial incentive funds.

What this means for Canadian marketers

The report frames this primarily as an economic and policy argument, and the numbers support that framing. But for Canadian marketers, media buyers, and agency leaders, there is a more immediate professional dimension worth sitting with.

The advertising environments Canadian brands depend on, including the editorial trust, the audience relationships, and the contextual relevance that premium Canadian media provides, are downstream of the business health of those media companies. Newsrooms that lose 30% of their people over five years do not produce the same quality of editorial environment they once did. That affects not just culture and journalism, but the inventory and context that make advertising work.

Canada's ad market is growing. The money is not disappearing. It is redirecting, almost entirely to platforms headquartered and taxed outside this country. Whether the industry waits for federal policy to close that gap, or whether brands and agencies start making different deliberate choices about where their dollars land, is increasingly a real question worth asking.

The full report, produced in partnership with consulting firm Nordicity, is available at canadianmediameansbusiness.ca.