Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun and Ottawa Citizen Paywalls: How to Read Postmedia's City Papers for Free

Postmedia owns most of Canada's big-city newspapers, and four of them come up in our readers' links more than any others: the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, the Vancouver Sun and the Ottawa Citizen. Between them they cover Alberta politics, the Oilers and Flames, the British Columbia legislature and the federal government, and all four lock their sites the same way. Follow a link from social media to a Don Braid or Rick Bell column and you are likely to meet a subscription prompt. This guide explains how the Postmedia paywall works on the city papers and how to read a full story from any of them.

How the Postmedia paywall works

All Postmedia papers run on one publishing platform and share a metered paywall. Non-subscribers can open a limited number of articles a month, counted in a browser cookie, before the article body is replaced by a prompt to subscribe. On top of the meter, each paper marks some of its reporting and most of its columns as subscriber-only, so a first-time visitor can hit the gate immediately on a column. The National Post and the Financial Post behave identically, because they are the same platform.

Both gates are applied in the browser. Postmedia needs Google to index every story, so the full text is delivered in the page and a script then hides it from readers over the limit or without a subscription. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does receives the complete article.

Our tests on 30 September 2026 through Skip the Paywall:

• A 2,008-word Calgary Herald arts feature on a musician revisiting his band's debut album after a family tragedy loaded in full, all 31 paragraphs.
• A 1,473-word Calgary Herald Rick Bell column on Alberta separatists and Premier Danielle Smith loaded in full, all 57 paragraphs.
• A 1,591-word Edmonton Journal Oilers story on coach Mike Babcock's praise for Ryan Nugent-Hopkins loaded in full, all 41 paragraphs.
• A 1,383-word Edmonton Journal court report on a judge reversing the University of Lethbridge's cancellation of a 2023 lecture loaded in full, all 34 paragraphs.
• A 1,527-word Vancouver Sun story on a B.C. court ruling that could worsen the rural doctor shortage loaded in full, all 38 paragraphs.
• A 1,059-word Vancouver Sun profile of the B.C. Conservatives' new interim leader loaded in full, all 31 paragraphs.
• A 1,545-word Ottawa Citizen guide to marking the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Ottawa loaded in full, all 55 paragraphs.
• A 1,711-word Ottawa Citizen round-up of the city's first Nuit Blanche in a decade loaded in full, all 33 paragraphs.

Columns, court reports, sports and arts coverage all came back complete, including the pieces that are subscriber-only on the original sites.

Read a Postmedia article in full

• Copy the article link. The four papers use the same pattern on their own domains: calgaryherald.com/news/headline-slug, edmontonjournal.com/sports/headline-slug and so on. Sharing parameters from the Postmedia apps can stay.
• Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
• The story appears in a clean reader view with the headline, byline and body text.

The same steps work for the rest of the chain, including the Sun tabloids, the Regina Leader-Post, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the Windsor Star and the London Free Press. The one exception we have found is the Montreal Gazette, which returned only a partial article in an earlier test, so we do not list it as supported.

Other approaches

• Library access. Canadian public libraries almost all offer the Postmedia papers through PressReader, free with a library card, and many carry the e-editions as well. Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Ottawa libraries all do.
• Newsletters. Each paper runs free morning and evening newsletters that summarise the day's stories and link to them.
• Private windows. The meter lives in a cookie, so a private window resets the free allowance, though it does nothing for subscriber-only stories.
• Subscription bundles. Postmedia sells a single digital subscription covering all of its papers, and introductory offers are frequent.

How the city papers compare with other Canadian titles

The four papers here load in full, as do their national siblings, the National Post and the Financial Post. The Globe and Mail, which uses its own platform, also works. The Toronto Star, by contrast, enforces its paywall on the server and sends only a teaser, so it does not. Our explainer on metered versus hard paywalls explains the difference, and the full list of sites that work has every Canadian title we have tested.

Subscribe if you read it regularly

Local reporting on city hall, the courts and the provincial legislature is expensive, and Postmedia's city papers have shrunk considerably in the past decade. If one of these papers is your daily read, a digital subscription is the honest way to keep its newsroom staffed, and the group's bundle means one subscription covers every paper in the chain.