TORONTO – Ming Pao Daily News, the only Chinese-language newspaper produced and published in print in Canada, will permanently close by the end of January. The final editions in Vancouver and Toronto will be released tomorrow, January 16, while the newsrooms and offices will cease operations on January 31, according to a notice sent from the Hong Kong headquarters to all employees. According to the CBC, a letter from Ming Pao Newspapers (Canada) to the B.C. Labour Ministry says the business is being permanently closed “for financial reasons”. 

The news has deeply moved the Chinese-Canadian community. Teresa Wat, a Member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, said she broke into tears upon learning of the closure of the newspaper, which for decades represented much more than just a news outlet. In 1996, Wat worked in the Richmond (B.C.) newsroom as editor-in-chief, coordinating a team of ten reporters. “I’m saddened” she wrote on X (Twitter). “Ming Pao was more than a newspaper. It helped newcomers navigate housing, employment, language barriers, and integration, and it brought an immigrant perspective to Canadian issues while challenging stereotypes…”. According to Wat, the newspaper was thus an essential reference point for Chinese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and other countries. Even more so since the closure of the print edition of Sing Tao Daily in Canada on August 28, 2022 (the newspaper now only publishes online), Ming Pao Daily News remained the only Chinese-language daily printed in Canada.

The Canadian Ming Pao – as the newspaper itself reported in the article announcing its closure, here – was a “child” of the Hong Kong newspaper of the same name founded by Louis Cha in 1959. The Canadian edition was launched in Toronto on May 28, 1993, and in Vancouver on October 15 of the same year. Louis Cha later retired from the group in December 1993, following the acquisition by Pin Hai. In mid-1995, ownership changed again, passing to Zhang Xiaoging, a Chinese businessman of Malaysian origin, who passed away on November 11 of last year.

Like all print ethnic newspapers, Ming Pao has faced difficult times in recent years due to rising printing costs, fierce competition from the internet, and the near-total indifference of the Canadian federal government toward the ethnic press. In mid-2024, Ming Pao Canada launched a petition to the Canada Periodical Fund to support its financial situation, which gathered over 3,000 signatures, but ultimately failed to achieve its goal and received no funding. In previous years, however, it had been able to secure a series of grants (trackable in the “Grants and Contributions” section on the Government of Canada website: https://search.open.canada.ca/grants/). According to data from the Canadian Journalism Collective, in 2025, the Canadian Ming Pao received over CAD 1.1 million under the Online News Act (the list is available here), though it has not been clarified what will happen to these funds after operations cease; in any case, these are non-governmental funds, provided by internet “big tech” (mainly Google) to Canadian media for the use of online news, and not federal government funding. Furthermore, these funds are largely given to the Anglophone and “mainstream” media, and only to a minimal extent to the ethnic press.

Funds aside, the bottom line is that as of tomorrow, January 17, with the cessation of Ming Pao Daily News publications, there will no longer be a Chinese-language print daily in Canada, home to 1.7 million people of Chinese descent (4.7% of the total population – Statistics Canada 2021 Census). And several dozen people will lose their jobs: 60 employees in British Columbia have already received layoff notices, along with an unspecified number of workers in Toronto. In 2014, the GTA newsroom alone employed 130 staff. How many other “ethnic” journalists in multicultural Canada will face the same fate?

In the pic above, the Toronto headquarters of the Ming Pao Daily News (photo by PFHLai – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link)