Travis Dhanraj Has Given Us A Reason To Rebuild The CBC

On The Necessary Spark For Reform

Former CBC on-air personality Travis Dhanraj broke his (seemingly involuntary) silence Monday, writing, or more accurately “writing”, a statement that includes no details but accuses the CBC of punishing him for stepping out of line with the Corporation’s views. His lawyer has said that his crime was booking Conservative voices, which is an interesting allegation in the face of the fact that Power And Politics tried to get Conservative MPs on every day and were rebuffed until after the election.

Taken at face value, it seems like the narrative they want to sell is that the CBC promoted Dhanraj - a former politics reporter who occasionally asked “tough” questions of Liberal ministers that bordered on idiotic, in my view - as a token, and then became mad he wasn’t fitting the box they wanted him to fit into. If true, it’s a very bad look for the CBC, who have had a very interesting decade in terms of handling top level talent and their big properties. From the general disinterest in the numerous public allegations about Jian Ghomeshi’s personal life to losing your The National successor to art dealings, botching the post-Mansbridge The National comprehensively, and now being unable to figure out a post-P&P, pre-National primetime lineup to save their lives, the CBC is adrift.

I know nothing of Dhanraj’s specific circumstances, and generally think little of him as a reporter, but let’s indulge the premise that it was the Conservative voices he wanted to platform that got him fired. It would be a cause for great consternation for Canadians, sure … but frankly is it any worse than the managed decline of the CBC right now?

The decision to hire David Cochrane for the vacant P&P job and to co-host the big events was a masterstroke, and the decision to give Rosemary Barton Live a real run on Sundays has panned out well, and given Barton something more to do than just At Issue. Having every Olympic event available on CBC Gem was good, and will be great in Italy next year. And that’s about where I run out of nice things I can say about the state of the CBC.

The Corporation is a joke right now, a rudderless, directionless ship drifting away from relevance. There’s no guiding central philosophy to it, no commercial strategy, no ideological one, and no coherence of any kind. Whenever I hear people talk about the CBC as some beacon of leftism, I laugh not because it’s so far fetched, but because I’d much prefer a properly progressive news channel than this weird one that oscillates between a very socially liberal viewpoint in terms of the issues raised and given airtime but that also occasionally indulges bad faith attacks on the Liberals for the sake of balance.

What is the CBC broadcast channel’s point? A mix of re-runs of their few originals, Coronation Street and Call The Midwife from Britain, and a few originals that could easily be made, if there’s a commercial case for them, at CTV or Global or one of the cable networks owned by other of them. If you want to argue that CTV and Global aren’t spending enough on originals, then argue to have a better conversation about the definition of Primetime for the purposes of CanCon rules, given CTV and Global get away with their Primetime CanCon rules by airing at least two hours of news and then their celebrity news programs, and occasionally reruns of CanCon (Corner Gas quite frequently fills that slot for CTV). But the idea that Son Of A Critch or Murdoch Mysteries need to be on the CBC is absurd - especially since Murdoch Mysteries literally was on privately owned TV for years!

The problem for the CBC is in a landscape where the barrier to watching something else is so low, they have no calling card. Primetime is comedies that forget to be funny and dramas that forget there’s supposed to be a plot mixed with David Suzuki preaching to us and some genuinely good journalism occasionally. What is the CBC now? I have no idea, and I don’t think they do either. Is it supposed to be an equivalent of PBS, with primetime informational and news broadcasting? Is it supposed to be yet another broadcast channel indistinguishable from CTV? Or is it supposed to be a place where we make a higher quality of television, more BBC or HBO than NBC or CBS?

My answer to this question is extremely simple, but we refuse to even create the conditions for the CBC to maybe possibly even remotely consider any form of structural reform. I don’t need Carney to turn around and totally reform the CBC tomorrow, but we do need a serious national conversation about what we want the public broadcaster to look like in a modern era. I’ve written before about mining our rich history for stories, and I maintain that’s correct, but it’s not just about that. How nobody at the CBC bought the TV rights to Chantal Hebert’s amazing The Morning After about the 1995 referendum and adapted it yet is insane to me, let alone Meech Lake and repatriation or the FLQ Crisis or any of the other big moments is insane to me. With the rise of True Crime, where is the Ghomeshi trial show?

But more than that the CBC is being allowed to drift. We need a radical proposal for it or it will continue to bleed money, as ad dollars shift from broadcast and cable to streaming and the CBC’s share of hours watched - the most important metric in ad-supported media - declines further and further. The status quo is only sustainable with considerable increases to the taxpayer subsidy over the next 10 years. This is genuinely going to become a political crisis if we don’t deal with this before it becomes an even bigger problem.

Was Travis Dhanraj fired for being bad at his job or because the CBC was pissed he platformed Conservative voices? I have no idea, but I do know this is a great excuse to rebuild the CBC. It needs to be rebuilt brick by brick, otherwise a great institution will soon be irrelevant.