CBC Institutional Failures Mustn’t Be Defended

On Skippy's Promise

I usually make a point of reading everything friend of this site Max Fawcett writes, so his treatise on the news Pierre Poilievre is gearing up to promise to defund entirely the English CBC was worth a read. Unfortunately, I can’t agree.

Max is right that the CBC should be a place of our common humanity, our common citizenship, a place to understand the country we love so much. The trouble is, it’s not. Fawcett’s piece points out that less than 5% of TV viewers are watching CBC, and less than 2% the News Network. This is, of course, as the number of people watching broadcast and cable are declining.

Now, 32% of Canadians listen to CBC Radio at least once a week, which is significantly fewer than listen to commercial radio and fewer than the amount that just toss on Spotify. But it is a considerable influence. How many of those are listening to Radio 1 versus Radio 2 I’d be curious, if we’re trying to define the news value of CBC Radio, but it’s not particularly relevant. What is is that the CBC needs an extraordinary reason to exist, and right now it doesn’t have one.

If you go to CBC News right now, 2 of the first five stories and 3 of the first 9 are wire stories republished by the CBC. 2 of those 9 were analysis pieces, which are valuable but also not particularly journalism. The argument for the CBC’s necessity is that places like The Hub, TheLine, and other (often Substack-published) independent media can do analysis, but don’t actually do local reporting. Well, that’s true, but then the CBC should be sharing important journalism and not wire stories and an analysis piece I could read from 5000 places at the top of their news site.

The real problem for defenders of the CBC, of which I am one, is that the CBC isn’t essential anymore, because of mismanagement from useless executives and a lack of a clear mandate from the Federal government. And if the Federal Liberals would like to try and save the institution, they need to use these last months in office wisely.

..

I wrote a manifesto for CBC mandate renewal earlier this year, and a lot of those ideas are good. If we are committed to the CBC being a broadcast network - and I’m not sure we should be! - then we should be much more focused on telling unique, interesting Canadian stories, diving into our history and culture for ideas and letting up and coming Canadian writers tell their stories instead of forcing them to go to Hollywood and operate in the traditional US TV system. All of those ideas are good and if the Liberals want to save the broadcast channel, they should look at that.

But if they want to save any part of the English language CBC, they need to move much quicker on a much smaller set of priorities. First off, they need to fire Catherine Tait. They should have done it years ago, but her tone deaf approach to running the company, her willingness to give out bonuses while firing employees, and her general aloof attitude killed her chances of running the CBC. She needs to be fired for gross incompetence, and the rest of the board should go too.

What the Liberals should do is appoint a successor who is willing to go on The National and publicly condemn the paying of executive bonuses while employees were being fired, pass a law banning bonuses in any year where the public are net contributors to the CBC’s budget, and order the new Board to review whether a broadcast network is actually worth the cost in a modern society. The review would obviously not be complete by the time of the next election, but it might stay Poilievre’s hand a bit.

It seems impossible that the CBC as currently constituted can survive the LPC polling where it is, but something not terribly bad can survive. A slimmed down English CBC, with a direct-to-consumer broadcast network ala HBO that uses content from the News Network to fill airtime and also runs a collection of the best of Canadian TV, film, and simulcasts of the Radio 1 content is possible. It would be different than it is now, but this has an actual chance of surviving first contact with Poilievre. It would also prioritize the parts of the CBC that need protecting - namely, the news division and CBC Radio - while allowing Poilievre to claim a huge victory and saving the taxpayer 9 figures, probably.

But this is the kind of proactive thinking that has failed the Liberals. This is a pipe dream, because there’s no ambition left in the government. We have decided, for reasons of political expedience, that the Minister of Heritage must be a Quebecer, so the government misses the fact that the current CBC isn’t fit for purpose. It is incredibly arrogant to say but I am certain, beyond a shadow of a fucking doubt, that the CBC would be in better shape if I was running it than the current leadership. Then again, I’m pretty sure a blind squirrel could do a better job, so it’s not that arrogant.

What the CBC needs is a theory for its own survival that has an understanding of what is happening to broadcast and cable TV not just in Canada but in America too. It feels like the CBC is run by people whose understanding of the business of media is worse than that of a casual listener of The Ringer’s The Town. As much as I respect Matt Belloni, that’s not a good thing. What the Liberals need to do is be radical, and propose a set of solutions that understand that the status quo is a dead option, whether it dies in 2025 or 2029. There is no universe where the public will accept ever increasing subsidy - which, to be clear, the status quo will demand - because the CBC refuses to adapt to modern realities.

Yes, the status quo will demand ever increasing subsidy, because as Netflix and Amazon shift their user base to the ad tier, more and more advertisers will follow. The ability of the CBC to dominate the ad market by sheer brute force is evaporating, and they will follow the Canadian version of the path of Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery in seeing fewer and fewer dollars in the ad market. There is no way the CBC exists as it currently does in 10 years. It can either exist in a stripped down form or it can cease to exist.

I wish Max was right, and the CBC was an essential part of Canadian society and culture. It’s not. And the CBC and successive federal governments - including this one - are why it’s not. And if we want to save the CBC, we need to acknowledge that it’s not 1995 anymore