Pascale St-Onge has lived several lives. A decade ago, the Liberal MP and now former sports minister, dyed her hair black and became a self-taught bass player for Mad June, an all-lesbian alternative rock band from Montreal described as a mix between Imagine Dragons, The Ramones and Arcade Fire. She also acted as the band’s manager.
She went on to serve as president of Quebec’s largest union for the media and cultural sectors, pushing Justin Trudeau’s Liberals to halt the media industry’s rapid decline and deliver what would eventually become the contentious Online News Act, formerly known as C-18.
And when Hockey Canada executives seemed prepared to grind their way through a national sex scandal that illuminated long-running problems with the country’s national sport, St-Onge cut their federal funding and successfully encouraged others to do the same, effectively forcing change.
Promoted to heritage minister in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet overhaul on Wednesday, St-Onge will be taking over from predecessor Pablo Rodriguez (who was shuffled to the Transport Ministry) in leading the government’s pitched battle with Big Tech, which has most recently seen Facebook-owner Meta and Google both saying they will block Canadian news from their platforms rather than submit to Liberals’ legislation forcing them to negotiate deals with news organizations.
The fight over revenue sharing with news publishers and government regulation of streaming, as well as policing social media content, is familiar turf for St-Onge who has spent much of her public career warning about the threat she believes digital technologies pose to Canadian culture and journalism.
At a press conference on Wednesday, St-Onge said she will make sure the media and cultural industry thrives, and commended her predecessor Rodriguez for passing both the Online News Act and the Online Streaming Act, which aim to regulate digital tech companies.
St-Onge said she intends to approach the battle with tech giants the same way Rodriguez did.
“My goal is going to be the same, which is to make sure that our media industry and our cultural industries thrive, and to make sure that we have news and journalism so that the population can be well-informed and our democracy is strong.”
“The minister has, by most accounts around the Hill, handled some tough files. And I think it’s obvious that she’s a clear, concise, competent communicator at a time when people are rejecting talking points or political rhetoric more and more,” said Greg MacEachern, a former Liberal staffer and principal at KAN Strategies.
Rodriguez also had words of praise for the minister replacing him: “I’m looking forward to seeing what Pascale can achieve because she’s absolutely amazing and she’s going to do a great job.”
St-Onge, 46, is not one to seek out the spotlight. An intensely private person, she prefers to champion social justice issues or showcase others rather than talk about herself. But when she does speak out, it’s usually because of some perceived injustice she wants to fix.
“I come from a relatively modest background and I’ve always been sensitive to and concerned by the fact that certain people have opportunities that others don’t,” she said in an interview. “When I see inequalities or people who are discriminated against, it really gets to me.”
St-Onge grew up in St-Eustache, a suburb north of Montreal. She was an athlete in her younger years, a competitive swimmer from age six to 17, before switching to volleyball in college and university. She graduated from the University of Quebec in Montreal in literary studies and obtained a certificate in journalism from the University of Montreal, but never worked as a reporter, instead landing in the sales department at Montreal-based newspaper La Presse.
When she wasn’t working her day job, St-Onge was either playing the bass or booking venues across Quebec and Ontario for her band. In an interview with Xtra Magazine, the former band members said the idea of forming Mad June sprung from a “half-joking conversation” during a vacation at the beach. St-Onge was the only non-musician of the group but one day picked up a bass and learned to play by ear.
Even though Mad June was an all-female, all-lesbian band, St-Onge was quick to reject the labels in an interview with La Presse. “Often, people will think that the fact that we are all girls is a concept, but nobody would have this thought for a boy band,” she said.
Music producer and songwriter Jeff Dalziel spotted Mad June at one of their shows in 2012 and worked closely with the band for about three years. “Pascale was like Mom,” he said of the dynamic between band members. She was “very good at keeping a tight ship, from everything from financials, to bookings, to travels, to herding the cats”, he said, and “was just easy to work with, which is not very common in our industry.”
Mad June would go on to release three singles but no album before they stopped touring. The reasons for disbanding are unclear, but Dalziel said “it was a very tough time” in the music industry and it was “financially hard” for artists to do their work while balancing a day job.
“I feel sorry for them that it didn’t work out,” he said. “I think they could have gone to bigger and better things had the industry been more healthy at the time.”
St-Onge was already on her way to becoming president of the National Federation of Communications and Culture (FNCC-CSN), representing 6,000 members in the communications and cultural industries across Quebec. It was a crucial, and not very healthy time for the media industry, either.
She was elected to the top job at the end of 2015, shortly after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals first came to power. On the receiving end of the union’s attacks against the Liberal government was Melanie Joly, then-minister of Canadian Heritage. St-Onge regularly lambasted Joly about the exemption made for online streaming giant Netflix in collecting the federal sales tax — the “Netflix tax” — and was pushing for more aid for the media sector, going as far as accusing the Liberals of letting the industry die because of its inaction.
I thought that the government had a long way to go in terms of understanding the impact of digital platforms on the cultural and journalism sectors
PACALE ST-ONGE
St-Onge said her attacks against Joly were never personal, and that she simply disagreed with the government’s position at the time. “I always admired her as a person, even though I thought that the government had a long way to go in terms of understanding the impact of digital platforms on the cultural and journalism sectors and convincing the government to play a role in that,” said St-Onge.
In 2017, Vincent Marissal, who had recently left journalism to join a public relations firm, was tapped by the FNCC-CSN to help St-Onge convey her messages to Ottawa. “She is someone who isn’t loud, but who is crystal clear in her demands,” he said. “She was not confrontational, just very honest with the ministers, Joly, and all the others, that if they were to do nothing, more newspapers and more newsrooms would close.”
Marissal, now a politician for left-wing provincial party Québec solidaire, said Joly understood the urgency of the situation in the media business but “the fruit was not yet ripe” in the federal cabinet at the time to engage in a battle with U.S. tech giants.
Charles Côté, former president of La Presse’s information workers, said “there is no labour union in Canada that worked harder than the FNCC under Pascale’s leadership” to convince the federal government it had to step in to prevent Canada’s news industry from disappearing.
In an interview, Joly said that she worked alongside St-Onge behind the scenes to “evolve” her government’s position on the matter. By the time the 2019 federal election came around, most parties were in favour of making tech giants collect a sales tax, even imposing an income tax on them.
Joly and St-Onge’s efforts eventually led to the Online News Act, which requires companies such as Google and Meta to pay Canadian online news companies to link to their websites. Meta has threatened to ban Canadian media from its platforms in retaliation.
In 2021, Joly was Liberal national co-chair of the federal campaign and was looking for the female equivalent of a Steven Guilbeault, former climate activist, to become a similar advocate for the cultural sector. She thought of St-Onge, who was at the end of her mandate at the FNCC.
Before entertaining the offer, St-Onge turned to Guilbeault to ask him if he regretted making the switch from activist to politician. His answer? No.
St-Onge ran in the 2021 election and narrowly won in Brome-Missisquoi, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, by less than 200 votes. She was immediately asked to serve in Trudeau’s cabinet, becoming Canada’s first openly lesbian cabinet minister.
To everyone’s surprise, including her own, she became Minister responsible for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, and Minister of Sport, two uncontroversial portfolios that usually consist solely of announcing good news.
The files that landed on her desk, however, were anything but usual.
As soon as she started on the job, St-Onge had to deal with the diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing, and a call to ban Russian and Belarussian athletes from the 2022 Paralympic Winter Games after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Then came Hockey Canada. The organization was under intense scrutiny after it was revealed it had reached an out-of-court settlement with a young woman who was allegedly sexually assaulted by members of Canada’s junior hockey team in London, Ont., in 2018.
St-Onge announced last year the federal government would be freezing its funding for Hockey Canada as long as the organization did not comply with accountability measures — something she announced without input from her public servants, revealed Joly.
“She’s the one who called the shots,” said Joly.
St-Onge’s handling of the Hockey Canada file, in particular, resonated outside of the Ottawa bubble. Hockey parents said they felt like the minister was standing up for them by standing up to the country’s most prominent sports organization.
“I admire the fact that she had the courage to be able to say, ‘this is just not right,’ ” said John Ouellette, a hockey dad from Cape Breton. “And I would say that that acted as a catalyst for other people to sort of check their own principles and stand behind the position that she took.”
I admire the fact that she had the courage to be able to say, ‘this is just not right’
JOHN OUELLETTE, HOCKEY DAD
St-Onge said she had to put Hockey Canada on the “penalty bench” for covering up the allegations with settlement money. She also had to narrow the issue to what it was: sexual abuse.
“For me, there was no other way to act. As a minister, as a public figure, as a leader, when we hear things like that, we have to condemn them and call a spade a spade,” she said.
There have been other challenges thrown her way, including growing calls from former and current athletes, as well as her predecessor Kirsty Duncan, who served as Minister of Science and Sport from 2015 to 2019, to hold a national inquiry into abuse in sports.
St-Onge has said she is committed to launching an investigation, but said “it’s a matter of what and how” that would happen.
Shauna Bookal, who works as manager of equity, diversity, inclusion and student experience at Ontario University Athletics, said she has met lots of politicians over the years and was “very skeptical” when she first met St-Onge as the country’s new Sport Minister in early 2022.
“She’s different,” said Bookal. “She didn’t just come for the photo-op, she didn’t come just to say she was there. She actually listened and then she would follow up.”
As an openly gay woman, St-Onge knows how far the rights of sexual minorities have progressed in recent decades. But she has also noticed that things have started to slide in Canada the past year, and this is one topic that makes her voice break.
“It scares me,” she said in a rare moment of vulnerability, before quickly reverting to an explanation of the effects of social media’s algorithms and why society has become more polarized, a file she is clearly familiar with.
“The weakening of our news media, the fact that our newsrooms have less and less reporters, have an impact on the quality of the information, on the capacity of people to have access to verified content and proper journalistic work,” she said.
“At the same time, you have these echo chambers that are amplified, that are feeding into lots of disinformation and negative leaders, and their statements are legitimized by political leaders afterwards. That’s one of the reasons why I decided to get into politics in 2021,” she continued.
St-Onge remains convinced that those online echo chambers do not represent the majority of Canadians. “The large majority of Canadians, I’m convinced, do not want to see human rights scaled back, don’t like to see division, hate and anxiety, and don’t want to live in that environment,” she said.
As she pivots from scrapping with hockey bosses to staring down the tech sector, St-Onge will be looking again to ensure she’s the one calling the shots.
Source : NATIONALPOST