MONTREAL — In 1996, the year Elmo got tickled and the Unabomber got pinched, Montreal-based cable distributor Videotron launched its first internet service. It was molasses-slow, delivered over phone lines with a fax-machine squawk. So unloved was the service that Quebecor couldn’t even sell it off when it acquired Videotron in 2000. It was but a drop in an ocean of newspaper ink for the publishing giant the following year, accounting for $14.2 million in revenue—less than two per cent of the take from its newspaper empire.

What a difference a quarter century makes. An adopter of the early aughts convergence model, Quebecor used Videotron internet as a means to deliver the cash cow: the oodles of content generated from its publishing, broadcasting and online news and retail divisions. The company had 792,000 customers by 2006, the year it launched its mobile phone service. Quebecor is one of the few that was successful in convergence, in that it was able to make profits from the acquisition and management of disparate businesses under one roof, as Louis Hébert, a management professor at HEC Montréal, told me. And, wow, did it pay off. 

In 2024, the year of “what the hell just happened,” Quebecor Telecommunications, which includes Videotron and other wireless carriers, delivered over $4.8 billion in revenues—or nearly seven times what the company’s media division rang in. “It’s clear that [Quebecor] is now a telecommunications company,” Hébert said.

This transformation has put Quebecor in a very strange position, in that it is at once underwriting and undermining the future of culture and media in Quebec. 

Quebecor-branded content is king in Quebec. Its TV stations draw a drool-worthy 40 per cent market share in the province. Its most popular television shows average as many as 1.6 million viewers, or over 17 per cent of Quebec’s population. Weird coincidence: 1.6 million people also take in the paper versions of the Quebecor’s Journal de Montréal and Journal de Québec every week, which have a combined web and print readership of 3.3 million. Nearly four million weekly viewers watch its nightly newscast TVA Nouvelles.

In short, Quebecor represents a massive swath of the province’s news, arts and culture industry, a noble and much trumpeted endeavour on the part of the company. It also risks becoming a money-losing proposition. The company’s annual media revenues declined just under 5 per cent from 2019 to 2024, to $703 million. The drop since 2014 had been 13 per cent. Even the scrappy and enduring Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec have felt the pinch, with web and print circulation falling from nearly 4.5 million in 2019 to 3.3 million in 2024.

Once a broadcasting, publishing and retail conglomerate with internet bits attached, Quebecor effectively saved itself through canny investments in telecommunications. The telecom division’s ensuing, ever-growing revenues—up 39 per cent between 2019 and 2024—have allowed the company to offset the diminishing returns of its media division. Yet by dint of being an internet and wireless provider, Quebecor is also quickening the decline of these very assets.

Quebecers have been more reticent to cut cords than their neighbours. In fact, traditional TV viewership actually went up slightly in 2024 as it was nosediving everywhere else—a testament to the durability of the province’s small but mighty ecosystem of vedettes and often gobsmackingly good TV. Yet the trend is clear: Quebecers in the 25-to-54 money demographic are watching far less of it.

On one level, it’s not a loss for Quebecor, as it can sell internet to cord cutters. Corporately, though, it raises an existential question that was unimaginable 25 years ago: how long will Quebecor’s dominant telecommunications division subsidize the decreasing returns of its once mighty media empire? “That is the question,” Hébert said.

Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, for one, doesn’t sound particularly optimistic. In 2025, Péladeau spent a lot of time sounding a death knell, evoking the demise of his TVA Sports channel when he wasn’t predicting the disappearance of Canadian television altogether. Quebecor’s changing business model and declining fortunes have meant nearly 1,000 layoffs since 2023. 

Péladeau won’t likely let his newspapers wither. Le Journal de Montréal and Le Journal de Québec are vestiges of his father, Quebecor founder Pierre Péladeau. And in times of media fragmentation elsewhere, the newspapers remain a remarkably efficient conduit to the province’s political class, which tends to listen when Le Journal speaks. Things aren’t nearly as sure beyond the newspapers. Culture and media are important, no doubt. But, media empire be damned, it’s more lucrative to sell the internet to the masses. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”