When the Manitoba government first announced, back in December, that it was changing the regulations regarding the publication of various types of official government notices by removing the legislative requirement to publish them in newspapers and instead offering the option of only publishing them in the Manitoba Gazette, currently a paid subscription service on the web but soon to become a free one, most people probably didn’t pay much attention to it, apart from those in the newspaper business.
The motivation behind the move, the government said, was to keep up with the times and to reflect the reality that most people get their information from the internet now rather than the print editions of newspapers like this one, or printed sources in general.
However, while it probably wasn’t the intention, the move would have also had the effect of providing less exposure to these legally required notices, because it isn’t overly likely that many people, while enjoying their morning coffee, would think to themselves, “Let’s go to the old Manitoba Gazette and see what sort of public notices the government is publishing today.”
True, the legislation, known as the Government Notices Modernization Act, wouldn’t have prevented provincial departments and agencies from printing required notices in newspapers in the areas affected, but with budgets getting tighter and tighter, it likely wouldn’t have been long before fewer and fewer of them were. And that would have been a bad thing, not only because it would cost newspapers some ad revenue, which it would and which is at least part of the reason that organizations like the Manitoba Community Newspapers Association, were vocal in their opposition to the legislation.
A bigger part of their objection, however, was that no longer requiring their print publication would have lessened the reach of these notices and resulted in fewer people being aware of what the government was doing.
Hard as it may be for those of us who spend lots of time on the internet to believe, there are people who either don’t have internet access or are simply not interested in going online but who do pick up copies of local newspapers, not necessarily to intentionally peruse the ads, but to catch up on what’s happening in their community in general. During the process of reading the news, an ad may catch their attention and, as a result, they will end up better informed.
The provincial government announced April 14 that, while it will still pass the legislation containing the provisions about publication of public notices, it will not enact the sections regarding print publication. Until it does, if ever, printing many government notices in area newspapers will remain a required step.
Ensuring this information was public was never just a matter of ticking off a box to say that a legal requirement has been fulfilled. It was, at its heart, related to the principle that the citizens of a city, or province, or country, have the right to know what the government of that entity is doing and that it is not up to the people to search out the information themselves, but for the government to ensure that it is placed somewhere that is likely to pass before their eyes, much in the same way that information was posted in the public square or yelled out by the town crier long before there was internet or even electricity. As events south of the border have shown us over the past couple of years, not ensuring that people have important factual information can have serious consequences, so holding off on these proposed changes is the right thing for the provincial government to do.
