Taxpayers forced to fund communist propaganda publishers
A taxpayer advocacy group is calling on the Liberals and two provincial governments to cease funding a “politically driven” publishing house, which has been given north of half a million since 2020.
A taxpayer advocacy group is calling on the Liberals and two provincial governments to cease funding a “politically driven” publishing house, which has been given north of half a million since 2020.
The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on Ottawa, as well as the Manitoba and Nova Scotia governments, to “cut wasteful hand outs to publishing houses.”
“It’s wrong for taxpayers to be on the hook for publishing houses pushing fringe political propaganda,” said the group’s Atlantic Director Devin Drover on Tuesday.
“If people don’t want to actually buy a book, taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to pay for it.”
Between 2020 and last year, Fernwood Publishing received $306,900 in federal funding and $135,000 from Nova Scotia in 2024 via the province’s Publishers Assistance Fund.
The publisher, based in Halifax and Winnipeg, describes itself as “politically driven, not profit driven.”
According to the publisher, its approach allows it to “take risks in publishing radical analysis” to “engage with radical ideas and contribute to structural change.”
“We make decisions about what we publish based on its political integrity and relevance,” reads their goal statement.
Fernwood has also received $86,250 from the Manitoba government since 2020 through its Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.
The province spends roughly $114,000 annually on subsidies for book publishers to market their books.
Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left is among the publisher’s recent releases.
“At a time of burgeoning anti-communism from both conservatives and liberals, this book is an accessible, vibrant synthesis of the history of communism that draws on the latest research to develop a rigorous analysis of the contradictions and uneasy truths the left needs to confront if it is to build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism,” reads the book’s description.
According to Amazon.ca, the work is currently ranked 692nd on the bestseller list of “Communist & Socialist Ideologies” books and 115th in “Marxism Philosophy.”
However, it has no reviews on Amazon.
Other titles by the publisher include I’ll Get Right On it, a collection of poems about “working life in the climate crisis,” and Openings and Closures: Socialist Strategy at a Crossroads, which focuses on what actions are needed for socialists in 2025.
“If a business is explicitly ‘not profit driven,’ taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for that bad business plan,” said CTF Prairie director Gage Haubrich.
“Publishers should make their money by selling books people want to read, not getting handouts from three different levels of government.”