Minister of Canadian Heritage Pascale St-Onge speaks during a press conference at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, on Feb. 20.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Too little, too late.
What else can be said about lame-duck Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s press conference this week proposing changes to CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate.
For almost 10 years now, Justin Trudeau’s various heritage ministers have been promising Canadians a refreshed direction for the adrift national public broadcaster and to belatedly update the Broadcasting Act that governs it for the digital age.
But only now – with Parliament prorogued and multiple contenders jockeying to replace Trudeau as the down-in-the-polls party’s leader – has St-Onge mooted a few watered down ideas for CBC/Radio-Canada. The Conservatives may be running in the next election on a promise to “defund” the CBC – but the Liberals have paved the way for that by making it seem like reforming it was too hard to even try.
With things the way they are in the United States of America, the case for a strong national public broadcaster creating and disseminating Canadian news and entertainment from Canadian perspectives should be clear to anyone of any political persuasion.
From senior citizens glued to Fox News, to young men listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast – not to mention all the journalists and politicians who for some reason still use Elon Musk’s X – a not insignificant portion of the Canadian population is not just tuned into American media (as has long has been the case), but to American media that is actively hostile to our country’s best interests and, increasingly, our existence as a sovereign nation.
That needs to be counterbalanced, at the very least. A strengthened CBC/Radio-Canada – one that reaches more Canadians, especially through its English-language operations – isn’t the only solution, but it is part of maintaining our cultural sovereignty, national unity and, indeed, national security.
What is needed for CBC/Radio-Canada, however, is not what St-Onge proposed Thursday. What she described was, essentially, a beefed-up version of the public-private hybrid broadcaster we have now, with a greater division between French and English operations, and more power given to a board of directors that has shown itself to be unwilling or uninterested in making the CBC stick to doing things in the public interest.
What the public broadcaster actually needs to regain trust and purpose is to be clearly transformed into “a public media institution with a singular focus on serving a public rather than a commercial purpose.”
Those aren’t my words, but ones from “Canada’s communications future: Time to act,” a January, 2020, report prepared by the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review Panel that was chaired by lawyer Janet Yale.
That independent panel was convened in 2018 by Mélanie Joly, when she was Trudeau’s first Minister of Canadian Heritage, and Navdeep Bains, then Minister of Innovation.
I don’t know if the Liberals simply forgot that they commissioned this report when the pandemic hit or didn’t like its conclusions, but the recommendations of Yale and her distinguished co-panellists are much stronger than the wishy-washy ones St-Onge, who is not running for re-election, has put forth while waving goodbye to public service and returning to her private life as a new mother and alt-rock bassist.
The panel’s chief suggestion regarding CBC/Radio-Canada was to gradually eliminate advertising on all of its platforms over five years, starting with news content – not only on news content, as St-Onge proposed.
This is the single most important step that needs to be taken to make the CBC truly public again, and would bring it in line with international peers we should be emulating, such as BBC in Britain and ABC in Australia.
The only way English-language content, in particular, has a chance to stand out in a sea of American noise is if it has no ads (and, of course, no added subscription fees, which, St-Onge is right, must be eliminated).
The other reason to get rid of ads entirely is because even though taxpayers covered the vast majority of CBC/Radio-Canada’s roughly $1.9-billion in expenses in the 2023-2024 fiscal, advertisers, who contributed just $270-million, too often call the tune.
Since the time Liberal appointee Catherine Tait was president and chief executive officer of CBC/Radio-Canada, the Crown corporation has unfortunately demonstrated repeatedly that it will chase a handful of ad dollars (and other revenue) at the expense of its public purpose, the widest possible viewership or even its reputation.
The most obvious example was the creation of a branded content division in 2020 that many CBC journalists spoke out against but that the corporation’s Liberal-appointed board of directors and the CRTC ultimately okayed.
It should be a national scandal, however, that CBC’s streaming service Gem has infomercials on it – “paid content” is how they’re labelled – from Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic.
The chasing of ad money is also apparent in how the English side of CBC has four police procedurals on right now – one of the few areas of scripted drama that the Canadian private sector already has well covered – while its children’s programming has fallen off the map (from the days of my youth, certainly, when I graduated from Mr. Dressup to Road to Avonlea to Degrassi Junior High).
It’s also why there are horoscopes on CBC.ca. Publicly funded horoscopes.
Yes, CBC/Radio-Canada should be seriously boosted in subsidy as St-Onge proposes, to somewhere in the vicinity of the G7 average of $62 a person per year per capita. But it can’t still have ads and be the public servant of two masters.
Liberals had the right answers in their hands five years ago. They have only themselves to blame for not taking action back when, well, it was time to act.