National Post Paywall: How to Read Any Article for Free
The National Post and its Postmedia sister papers meter their websites. Here is how the Postmedia paywall works and how to read a National Post story in full without a subscription.
Paywall behaviour last tested
The National Post is Canada's conservative-leaning national daily, and its comment section is where much of the country's right-of-centre debate happens. It is also the flagship of Postmedia, the chain that owns the Toronto Sun, the Ottawa Citizen, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald and most of Canada's other big-city papers. All of them share one paywall system, so this guide applies across the group.
How the Postmedia paywall works
Postmedia sites use a metered paywall. Non-subscribers get a limited number of articles per month, tracked in a cookie, before the story is replaced by a subscription prompt. Some content is marked subscriber-only from the first view, particularly the Post's columnists and its Financial Post business coverage.
In both cases, the article text is present in the page for search engines. The paywall is applied by a script in the browser after the page loads. A reader that fetches the page the way a crawler does gets the full text without ever triggering the meter. In our most recent test, a 1,370-word National Post opinion feature loaded completely through Skip the Paywall.
Read a National Post article in full
- Copy the article link from nationalpost.com or any Postmedia paper.
- Paste it into the box on the home page and press Read Article.
- The story appears in a clean reader view.
One quirk: Postmedia pages carry a lot of navigation and cookie-consent text, and on some stories the reader's extraction includes a line or two of it at the top or bottom. The article itself is complete; just skip past the menu labels if they appear.
Which papers share this paywall?
- National Post and Financial Post
- Toronto Sun, Ottawa Sun, Calgary Sun, Edmonton Sun, Winnipeg Sun
- Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, Vancouver Sun, The Province
- Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Windsor Star, London Free Press
All run on the same platform, and the steps above work on each of them.
How it compares with the Globe and Toronto Star
The Globe and Mail also loads in full through the reader. The Toronto Star does not: its paywall is enforced on the server and the reader receives only a subscription form. For the technical background, see metered versus hard paywalls.
Other approaches
- Library access. Canadian public libraries commonly offer Postmedia papers through PressReader, free with a library card.
- Private windows. The meter is cookie-based, and a private window still resets it on Postmedia sites.
- The ePaper. The print replica is subscriber-only and not available through any reader.
Support the paper if you read it daily
Postmedia has closed or shrunk many local newsrooms over the past decade. If the Post or your local Sun is a daily read, a subscription is the direct way to keep it going, and introductory offers are usually under a dollar a week.
Try it with an article
Paste the URL of an article from National Post and read it in a clean reader view. Free, instant, no signup.
Frequently asked questions
Does this work on the Toronto Sun and other Postmedia papers?
Yes. All Postmedia titles use the same platform and paywall, so a link from the Toronto Sun, Vancouver Sun, Ottawa Citizen or Calgary Herald works in the same way as a National Post link.
Why does some menu text appear in the reader on National Post stories?
Postmedia pages contain a large amount of navigation markup, and the readability parser occasionally keeps a line of it. The article body itself is complete.
Is the Financial Post included?
Yes. The Financial Post is published on the same platform as the National Post and its articles load in the same way.