Calls to ‘defund’ the CBC is an example of Canadian austerity tradition

🔊 Listen to Post

Pierre Poilievre, leader of the official opposition and Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), is crusading against the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). 

Poilievre has made it something of a platform policy to “Defund the CBC” with a petition on the CPC website, calling for the Liberal government to do just that. It is unlikely that the government will, but that only feeds into the CPC narrative that the CBC is a “left-wing” propaganda mill leeching off taxpayer money to churn out stories which serve their Liberal Party bosses. 

This latest row comes after reports of the CBC/Radio-Canada awarding pay bonuses to 1,194 employees “in a year when 141 employees were laid off and 205 vacant positions were eliminated,” the Toronto Sun reported.  

In May, CBC President and CEO Catherine Tait testified before the House of Commons Heritage Committee about these bonuses where CPC committee members accused her of having lied about the nature of these bonuses. Poilievre has expressed his belief that the CBC is an anticompetitive hindrance in the media landscape, and that it would be beneficial to “defund” it to make the news coverage market more competitive.

Personally, I agree that doling out bonuses after mass layoffs and position eliminations is a scummy thing to do. Any corporation — broadcasting, manufacturing, service, and so on — should be criticized for showing so many people the door. But do not think for even one second that the CPC have pure intentions in their hearts. It’s the exact opposite, if anything.

When Brian Mulroney was prime minister from 1984 to 1993 and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, one of the CPC’s predecessors, he followed the neoliberal trend of his cohorts Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in market deregulation and privatization of anything Crown owned and operated. If it was owned by the government or funded by taxes, it either got its budget slashed, eligibility numbers cut, or was just sold off to the private sector. 

When Jean Chrétien was a Liberal prime minister from 1993-2003, he stayed the austerity course, including cuts to the CBC’s budget, in the name of a balanced budget. Stephen Harper did the same and Poilievre, who was a Harper-era cabinet minister, seeks to keep the bipartisan tradition alive.

You may be asking how this little political history lesson is relevant to Poilievre’s defunding campaign, well here is why.

The CBC is a publicly funded broadcaster. Like many other Crown corporations, it is not supposed to be profitable — it provides an essential service to the public. In this case, the service being media, but not just the news, also Canadian-produced television and radio programs.

This may come as a shock to many people in my age range and generation, but the CBC has a history of producing T.V. shows that were once culturally relevant in Canada. Think “by Canadians, for Canadians” if you will. 

However, the aforementioned cuts and the permeation of the juggernaut that is U.S.-based media has led to a decline in relevance, but not outright extinction from the media landscape if their 2023-24 third quarterly report is anything to go by. 

Poilievre’s game is simple — paint the CBC as being biased, but in the wrong way, question why it even gets public funding, and privatize the service once the idea has become accepted as normal by the public. 

The issue never was that the CBC laid-off employees, eliminated posts, or doled out bonuses. The problem was that they did not do it as part of the private sector. If the CBC had, then the CPC would only kick up a mere rhetorical fuss instead of demanding abolition. The CBC did wrong, but the CPC wants worse.