The Canadian media industry: “A heartbreaking feeling”

Like many immigrants, Damilola Onime came to Canada in search of a “better life”.

“My career opportunities were very limited back home,” says Onime, who grew up in Nigeria, where she worked as a journalist before moving to Canada in December 2018. She imagined her half-decade experience would give her an advantage competitive and help him get a job.

“I came here with the idea that ‘this will be fantastic, you will be great,'” she says. “I was applying for jobs at Rogers before I got on the plane.”

Unfortunately, it took a year and a half before it burst into the Canadian media industry.

Onime landed a job as a producer for the podcast network and news organization CANADALAND in July 2020. She recently moved to Ottawa to co-host the morning radio show CityNews.

Still, with her level of skills and experience, Onime believes someone like her should have been more in demand in the journalism industry.

“If Canada wants to brag and present itself as a diverse and immigrant-friendly country, then people who come here as economic immigrants should have the opportunities that have been advertised to them,” Onime said.

“Why should someone who has (several) years of experience in his professional field come here and have no job opportunities?”

But as New Canadian Media’s groundbreaking survey of the socio-economic status of immigrant and refugee journalists in Canada revealed, it takes a year and a half to land a job in your field is still much shorter than the average time that immigrants generally spend to find a path in their career.

Anukul Thakur is a journalist for the Peel Region-based publication, The Pointer. He immigrated to Canada from India in 2019 to pursue his dream of covering the 2026 World Cup. Thakur says it’s easy for immigrants to get caught up in their high expectations of life in a new country.

“Everyone assumes that when you go to a different country, that place will be a land of opportunity,” he says. “It’s not like that. It’s not that rosy.

On February 14, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Sean Fraser announced the government’s plan to bring in more than 1.3 million immigrants over the next three years. Last year, more than 401,000 new immigrants made Canada their home.

According to Statista, landed immigrants who have been in Canada for less than five years have an unemployment rate of 13.5%. This is 4.5% higher than the unemployment rate for people born in Canada.

Data suggests that it may take immigrants more than 10 years to find employment in their field. This is despite the fact that many immigrants come to Canada as economic immigrants, that is, people who have been selected specifically for their ability to contribute to the economy.

A common hurdle for many journalists is finding full-time employment, especially amid waves of job cuts.

Data from Statistics Canada’s Labor Force Survey shows that although the number of journalists in Canada has increased between 1987 and 2017, freelance work has become a predominant aspect of the industry over the same period. . Today, freelancers make up about 17% of Canadian journalists, up from 5% before 1996.

“I felt like when you graduate, you do an internship, you’ll get a job, like a full-time position. Then I was introduced to the world of freelancing. I didn’t choose to be featured there, but it kind of happened,” says Anushka Yadav, who works as a communications officer and social worker at Hope Life Migrant Settlement.

Yadav came to Canada in 2019 as an Indian education journalist. Last year, she simultaneously freelanced as an editorial assistant and associate producer for both the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Global News, while working as an editor for the Toronto Star.

Yet none of that counted in her application for permanent residency, which she filed in 2021, because it wasn’t considered a full-time job. So she ended up having to leave the posts in order to find the right kind of job.

Yadav is currently waiting for his Labor Market Impact Assessment to be approved. In the meantime, she fears losing her status and being forced to return to India.

She argues that Canada needs to change the way it classifies relevant work experience given the growth of the gig economy and precarious work in Canada.

The Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) conducted its first annual diversity survey between November 2020 and July 2021. The survey found that non-white journalists were less likely than their white colleagues to be employed full-time.

Yadav admits that the lack of job stability has affected her mental health, causing her to question, even regret, her career path.

Studies have shown that journalists have more mental health issues than the general population due to the nature of their work. This has been especially true for journalists covering the pandemic.

“For a profession like this, if the leaders of the profession can’t provide stable jobs, then what do you do?” She wonders.

Results from the CAJ and Statistics Canada polls suggest that there are more journalists vying for fewer permanent positions, and racialized journalists are often excluded.

And according to the Canadian Media Guild (CMG), the large number of media professionals stuck in temporary positions is “causing economic insecurity” and harming the industry at large.

Akanksha Lamba is an administration specialist at the CBC. Like Yadav, she immigrated to Canada from India and worked at the CBC as a casual editorial assistant and associate producer in 2021.

The nature of the role meant that the days, number of shifts and pay varied from week to week, which made Lamba feel like she had to take any shift offered to her. To keep track of it all, she says she uses a diary and does her own calculations “because it’s different every month.”

Lamba now works under contract as an administrative specialist at the CBC, which gives him more stability.

Unfortunately, while Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal are among the most attractive destinations for journalists due to their diversity and high media concentration, they are also the least affordable.

It is therefore not uncommon to see journalists turning to other industries to make ends meet, as was the case of Onime, who was looking for work in the restaurant industry. But even there, she says, she was told she was overqualified.

“What little funding I had, I just lost it and had used up all my savings. It was me who was on the verge of homelessness,” she explains.

Like many journalists, for The Pointer reporter Thakur, journalism is a passionate profession. He believes it takes a lot of determination, patience and skill to break into it. “You need that tenacity,” he says. “Someone has to push for this.”

But while he doesn’t resent his decision to pursue a career in the field despite the challenges he faces, he admits “after a while it gets disappointing. You are discouraged,” he said.

Some journalists have defected to careers in marketing and communications. In 2017, the number of people working in advertising, marketing and public relations was 131,900 compared to 11,700 journalists. According to salaries listed on Indeed.com, an average journalism salary in Canada is $47,476.89; for marketing and communications, it’s $64,582.25.

Like Thakur, Lamba also has a “great passion for being a journalist”. But given how precarious the industry is for immigrant journalists, she no longer knows which career path to follow.

Indeed, how long can pure passion sustain a person?

Nayirah Waheed’s poem titled “immigrant” is perhaps best suited to answer this question. The poem illustrates the frustration felt by many who uproot their lives to settle in a new country:

“You broke the ocean in two to be here, only to meet nothing you wanted.

But others like the ever-optimistic Thakur continue to believe there is still hope.

“The money will eventually come,” he says. “They will recognize your talents.”

This article is part of NCM’s ongoing study of the socio-economic conditions of first-generation immigrant and refugee journalists. Please complete our immigrant/refugee survey here: English survey (https://newcanadianmedia.ca/survey-2021-immigrant/) French survey (https://newcanadianmedia.ca/survey-2021-immigrant-fr/ ).

Disclosure: The author was a colleague of Anukul Thakur and Anushka Yadav at the CBC. He is also a colleague of Akanksha Lamba in a separate department.