Forty Years of Failure to Curb Media Monopolies A 1981 commission set out a plan to protect the public interest. It was ignored, and the Postmedia-Torstar machinations show we’re paying a high price. Taylor C. Noakes is an independent journalist, public historian and part-time iconoclast originally from Montreal. SHARES Torstar and Postmedia swapped 41 newspapers and immediately closed all but six in November 2017, without any consequences from the Competition Bureau. Photo by Edward Lima, the Canadian Press. “The shape of the newspaper industry in English Canada was then dramatically changed by an agreement between the two largest of the remaining newspaper corporations. Two papers, in Ottawa and in Winnipeg, were closed on the same day, and where there had been mingled interests, in Vancouver and in Montreal, one chain bought out its new partner.”