What's black and white and red all over? The Canadian newspaper industry's balance sheets.

But as has been said here many times before, no industry had more warning of the extent and nature of the coming digital revolution than the Canadian newspaper industry, and it has turned the wrong direction at every step along the way to its current disastrous destination.

But that doesn't mean these newspapers' well-heeled owners won't demand tax-supported subsidies to support their badly run businesses if they're given any encouragement -- which is exactly what the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have been doing.

There are appropriate ways for governments to deal with epochal disruptive technological change, such as that wrought by the digital revolution, but they probably don't involve big tax-supported subsidies to obsolete and badly run industries.

A good example of such a poor use of tax revenues would be the brainstorm thought up by a coalition of newspaper publishers in Quebec who want the government of that province to establish a subsidy program "to help them shift to digital."

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N. Murray Edwards, where are you now that we actually need you?

I am not, of course, talking about the billionaire tarsands tycoon's alleged managerial brilliance or vast contribution to the commonweal of Western Canada, but to his missing voice in the increasingly bitter debate about tax policy and his role in it in this part of the world.

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The Conservative Opposition's threat to use its majority in the unelected Senate to thwart the Trudeau government's plan to repeal two anti-labour laws passed when Stephen Harper was still prime minister is a very telling indication of that party's true commitment to the principles of democracy.