Which brings us back to the question of whether HuffPo being foreign owned should be a matter of concern to Canadians at all. From a reader's perspective, why should one care if AOL ultimately collects the ad revenue so long as HuffPo's editorial team is staffed by Canadians, provides Canada-focused content and is a platform for lively and diverse commentary?

As we've seen, the issue of editorial staff -- or more properly how HuffPo might affect the ability to staff other Canadian news outlets -- is a matter of concern even as HuffPo itself hires some Canadian talent. Likewise, its model of curating Canadian news content -- the paid licensing of content from wires aside -- can only be of net benefit to readers so long as it doesn't sink the other news outlets from which it aggregates from in the first place.

The blogging section, however, remains a place where HuffPo could distinguish itself by offering a diversity of viewpoints that are difficult to find anywhere else. While in the U.S., HuffPo has typically been a space for "left-liberal" discourse, that's not been the case in Canada. In fact, blog posts from prominent conservatives like David Frum, Conrad Black and Peter Worthington can be found almost daily on the homepage of the site. These are personalities and viewpoints that can be found aplenty elsewhere in Canada's centre right-dominated mainstream news.

The prominent presence of these voices is likely due to their close association with HuffPo Canada's blog editor Danielle Crittenden. A former editor at the defunct conservative broadsheet the Toronto Telegram, Crittenden is more widely known as a right wing columnist, a vocal critic of modern feminism who's been accused of insensitivity and a lack of nuance in her coverage of islamophobia and racial profiling of Arabs. She is married to the conservative columnist David Frum who crafted messages in the White House for President George W. Bush, and she is the stepdaughter of Peter Worthington, the founding editor of the right-wing Toronto Sun tabloid.

All this is not to say that Crittenden has shut out voices on the left. Consider the success of NDP MP Charlie Angus' impassioned post about the plight of Attawapiskat residents that went viral on HuffPo Canada last November. Tweeted and shared tens of thousands of times, the blog led to weeks of media coverage on the abhorrent poverty First Nations communities continue to experience as disinterested citizens and our elected governments look the other way.

But if HuffPo was founded to differentiate itself by creating a space for alternative viewpoints, as it did in the U.S., Crittenden seems a strange choice for the Canadian iteration.

Its difficult to gauge to what degree the blogs section at HuffPo Canada has broadened the confines of Canada's political discourse. The majority of HuffPo's traffic does not come from blogs. Like it or not, it's difficult for any website dedicated exclusively to commentary to pull in sufficient traffic to stay afloat.

At the time of HuffPo's Canadian launch, I was working as an associate editor at The Mark News, an independent Canadian website that had launched back in 2009. The Mark had tried its hand at creating a digital home in Canada for expert opinion and analysis that operated not unlike the Huffington Post's blog section. By the time I had joined the editorial staff there at the beginning of 2011, The Mark's business model had, by necessity, changed. There simply wasn't enough money coming through the door from online ads alone and much of the staff was delegated to work on revenue generating projects.

To save or not to save home grown media

An often cited study of U.S. newspapers published recently found that for every $7 publishers lose in print, they earn only $1 in digital revenue. There's little to suggest that the picture is any brighter in Canada. Sinking earnings have already led to deep cuts to reporting and editorial staffs across the country as companies like Postmedia try and shift to digital first business strategies.

Huffington Post's arrival in Canada has made this transition job that much more daunting. With their laser focus on digital, they compete for the meager scraps of what as-yet is a paltry (if a supposedly growing) online advertising pie. As outlined already, HuffPo Canada also has the added bonus of being flush with content from their affiliate sites, content that they do not themselves have to pay to produce. This is a luxury that neither Big Media newspapers nor independents like The Tyee enjoy.

That's why Postmedia's Paul Godfrey, perhaps accidentally, has re-opened the foreign ownership debate. As he well knows, any changes enacted to protect domestic media will not come easy.

The near total destruction of Canada's ability to enact new cultural policy since the onset of neoliberal global trade governance is described in detail in political economist Stephen Clarkson's tome, Uncle Sam and Us. To summarize, Canada's global trade obligations have restricted our ability to enact any new cultural protection without facing fierce retaliation from the United States.

In the nineties, Canada tried to block powerful American media from destroying domestic magazine producers. Much like with HuffPo now, the issue had to do with economies of scale. For decades, the Canadian government protected Canada's fragile homegrown magazines from American competitors able to produce Canadian editions on the cheap and then undercut the domestics by offering cheaper advertising rates. When Time Warner began using satellite technology in 1993 so its "split-run" Sports Illustrated Canada could bypass government protections for domestics, Canada responded with a prohibitive excise tax and eventually an outright ban on advertising in "split-run" magazines. Using both NAFTA's notwithstanding clause and the newly minted WTO judicial apparatus, the United States forced the Canadian government to back down and scrap the policies outright.

Out the door went Brian Mulroney's "cultural exemption" rhetoric.

The history lesson is meaningful. It suggests that if Canada did try to protect its domestics from the likes of HuffPo, it would almost certainly face retaliation from its biggest trading partner. The Harper government, if they were to do anything, would likely remove Canada's prohibition on foreign ownership rather than extend the Income Tax Act prohibition to online media. Opening up foreign ownership to capital from multinationals may help Big Media outlets like Postmedia compete, but it does nothing to help the viability of smaller online media outlets that are currently eking out an existence on the web.

For those media, the problem from the beginning, and still, has been getting even a fraction of the capital that HuffPo and other big U.S. and Canadian media organizations have at their disposal to acquire talent, license other content, operate on various increasingly expensive media platforms, innovate, market and even merge with other big players.

So from the standpoint of the smaller online media players, the question of whether to allow foreign ownership involves a parallel question -- is Canada serious about creating new and different incentives to finance home grown media experiments?

Government's have been known to do the darndest things under public pressure and Canadians remain very skeptical of foreign ownership of their media. As the Huffington Post has itself reported over two-thirds of Canadians oppose opening up foreign ownership of our media.

The issue of foreign ownership in Canada, it seems is poised for renewed discussion and vigorous debate. The public deserves to be informed by thoughtful arguments in the press... or perhaps in the blogging section of HuffPo Canada.