In my house growing up, the CBC was as familiar as the wallpaper or the dining room table. Stuart McLean’s voice still fills me with warmth, nostalgia and comfort. At dinner, we’d often laugh at some bizarre story on As It Happens that snuck in during a lull in the conversation. Over the decades, my mother’s devotion to our national public broadcaster has never faded.
But times have changed: Stuart McLean is dead. Jian Ghomeshi is gone (I know, I know). I believe Paul Martin was prime minister the last time I laughed at an episode of The Debaters. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia to say the CBC isn’t what it used to be.
I’m not alone in this sentiment either: Defunding the CBC has become a Conservative political football, and now Pierre Poilievre stands a decent chance of scoring a touchdown with it: According to this Mainstreet Poll, more than 70 per cent of those who intend to vote Conservative either strongly or somewhat support defunding the CBC. That number is 46 per cent for all voters.
So do I support defunding the CBC? It’s complicated.
Let’s start with the relevance of a public broadcaster in Canada in 2022. Here it’s important to remember Canada’s geographic context: We are the second-largest country in the world with a population of less than 40 million. That means a lot of small, isolated, aging communities, particularly in the North. And as someone who works in radio broadcasting (did I just doxx myself?) I can attest that many in this country still rely on radio, not the internet, for their news. Yes, they are an aging demographic, but does that mean they don’t count?
There’s also a strong nationalist argument for a public broadcaster: As George Grant wrote in Lament for a Nation nearly 60 years ago: “The encouragement of private broadcasting must be anti-nationalist: the purpose of private broadcasting is to make money, and the easiest way to do this is to import canned American programs appealing to the lowest common denominator of the audience.” If we want our country and our culture to survive into the future (which I do), we need to preserve our public institutions.
That being said, the CBC is pretty fucking annoying. All the right-wing rhetoric about our country’s national broadcaster being the propaganda arm of the Liberal Party ignores the much simpler truth that its cultural commentary is tedious and boring, its comedy is cringeworthy, and most of its cultural icons have already left the building. It’s stunning to think I first encountered Camille Paglia on an episode of Q more than a decade ago; The odds of Tom Power hosting Paglia again are about on par with my sister’s rabbit getting a PhD in physics.
The most illustrative document I’ve come across on this topic is a 2020 research paper by the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications (FRPC). The paper, prepared in anticipation of a licence renewal hearing for the CBC, attempts to trace the company’s financial history from 1937 to 2019, although as the cover page states, “Frodo had it easier.” What it does show is that #defundthecbc is not just a theory but a reality: In real 2002 terms, Parliamentary funding for the CBC decreased by 36 per cent between 1985 and 2019.
(It’s worth mentioning at this point the strangeness of #defundtheCBC being a Conservative project: It was a Conservative government that created our public broadcaster more than 80 years ago. It was also Chrétien’s Liberal government that made the deepest-ever cuts to the CBC’s budget in the 1990’s. The changing nature of each party’s relationship to the CBC is a subject for another post.)
The paper also raises an interesting point: It’s not public funding that biases a news outlet, but scarce public funding. A broadcaster that’s sitting pretty with either advertising revenue or public funds is less malleable than one that depends on every Parliamentary dollar. So maybe the solution to a biased and annoying CBC is actually more funding?
Finally, there’s the question of where this pressure is coming from: Out of the mouth of a Conservative politician like Poilievre, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to interpret this as (were he to become Prime Minister) an elected official silencing his opponents in the press. Which might be red meat for many right-leaning Canadians, but as a journalist myself I just can’t condone it.
So the short answer is: I don’t know. I don’t think public broadcasting has outlived its usefulness in a country as sparse as ours, but I also recognize it’s slowly becoming obsolete with the advent of the Internet and the turning of a new generation, and much of the country no longer feels represented by it…but I also recognize the at-minimum bad optics of an establishment politician silencing his critics in the media…maybe there’s a good Podcast Playlist recommendation on the subject? Just kidding, I would rather die.