Does CBC really deserve to be defunded?
By Lethbridge Herald on February 26, 2025.
DOUG FIRBY – TROY MEDIA
The CBC/Radio-Canada has become a political football this election cycle, with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre promising to “defund” it if he gains power in the upcoming federal election.
Once again, the leader of the Opposition finds that playing to his MAGA-lite freedom fighters puts him offside with the moderate Canadians whose support he needs. For all his claims of listening to ordinary Canadians, he seems tone-deaf about Canada’s national broadcaster.
Many of us get exasperated with the CBC’s Toronto-centric perspective, perceived liberal bias, and at times preachy tone. But we don’t see its destruction as a solution—we just want it to be better.
Polling shows strong support for the CBC in some form. A survey of 2,055 adults conducted for McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy found that 78 per cent of Canadians want CBC/Radio-Canada to continue—if it addresses major criticisms. The top four, ranked in order, are:
• unreliable funding
• advertising
• biased reporting, and
• telling people what to think.
Supporters see it as a vital tool in shaping Canadian cultural identity, made more urgent by U.S. President Donald Trump’s threats to annex our country. When asked whether a public broadcaster like CBC/Radio-Canada is still essential in the digital age, eight in 10 respondents to the McGill survey said it was either equally or more important than before.
Critics, however, argue that it serves as a propaganda tool for elite Liberal interests. Poilievre—whose party is leading in the polls—receives wild cheers from partisan audiences when he vows to defund the CBC.
But as deep as the divide is, there’s one uncomfortable truth most people agree on—the CBC needs to address deep-rooted dysfunction that undermines its ability to fulfill its mandate.
The CBC is a troubled puppy. And nothing short of sustained soul-searching will restore its health.
Why do conservative Canadians feel such acrimony toward the CBC? Mostly because they don’t feel they get a fair shake. Reporters are sworn to objectivity, but sometimes it seems like they’re just going through the motions, paying lip service to perspectives from the right. After all, the Poilievre set is not their tribe. (And here I thought the only tribe reporters belonged to was the Truth Tribe.)
The CBC is also captive to political correctness. This is why it demoted senior reporter Wendy Mesley for repeating in a private meeting at The Corp the provocative title of a book by Pierre Vallières, a leader of the Front de libération du Québec. (Offensive because the title included the N-word.)
It also failed to replace some of its charming curmudgeons, including the late Rex Murphy, whose right-of-centre views clashed with the network’s leadership.
The news department, which helps fill the void left by collapsing newspapers and local commercial TV and radio, does things that leave me baffled. The National, its flagship nightly newscast, is branded as a “show”—as if it’s there to entertain rather than inform. The night of the crash at Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., it devoted almost the entire hour to having Paul Hunter speculate from across the Potomac River on the fate of the passengers (who were obviously dead). One can only assume the outpouring of grief was amplified by the fact that CBC reporters use the airport regularly.
Meanwhile, CBC’s local television newscasts remain puzzling, typically drawing the lowest ratings in competitive Canadian markets. In Calgary, for example, the CBC’s daily television broadcast reaches just 20,000 people on average.
But there are positives, too, notably in the growth of its digital audience. And its entertainment division has produced some winning programs. Nothing compares to Jonny Harris’s Still Standing. North of North, the comedy set in Iqaluit, is groundbreaking, and Allan Hawco’s Saint-Pierre is a police procedural with an authentic Canadian twist.
So, the CBC’s record as a bastion of Canadian culture is mixed. There’s little evidence it deserves a massive funding boost. But there’s also no strong argument for doing away with it.
Before increasing CBC funding, any government must explore how the broadcaster can improve. Can it appeal to all Canadians, regardless of political stripe? Who are the faceless bureaucrats in Toronto making the calls? Based on what I see, some of them need to go.
Let’s put the cards on the table. The U.S. media juggernaut is so powerful that no Canadian media company stands a chance without some government support. The collapse of private news media proves the point. Don’t believe those who claim they’d do better if only the CBC were gone—advertisers just aren’t interested in supper-hour news anymore.
Success shouldn’t mean getting a job in Hollywood. It should mean creating a space where great stars can thrive at home. Quebec has done it—thanks to the French language as a cultural barrier. The rest of Canada could do it, too.
But not with the CBC as it is. If it wants to regain relevance, it must understand what ordinary people are all about. Only then might it deserve the cash it so desperately seeks.
Doug Firby is an award-winning editorial writer with over four decades of experience working for newspapers, magazines and online publications in Ontario and western Canada. Previously, he served as Editorial Page Editor at the Calgary Herald.
26-25
Yes.
Agree totally. We need news or we like news. CBC is propaganda.
This, and cause for emulation?
“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) is often considered the best public funded broadcaster in the world due to its long history of high-quality journalism, diverse programming across various genres, commitment to impartiality and accuracy in reporting, wide global reach through the BBC World Service, and its funding model through a mandatory license fee which allows for editorial independence from political and commercial pressures.”
Other progressive countries in the world would not get rid of their public-funded broadcaster for these reasons and the positives listed in the above article, and neither should we. We should not be falling for the Poilievre ‘cut the CBC’ ultra right wing, toxic koolaid.
Are Global TV or CTV funded by government? Should Canadians across Canada have to pay for a biased news service that is pro-Liberal, por-NDP, anti-Conservative, anti-UCP? More importantly a news service that supports the views of terrorist funded organizations on our streets that burn our flag, scream out ‘Death to Canada’, ‘Death to Jews’ and report disinformation spread by similar terrorist groups as fact, even though the UN stated when the Gazan deaths were not accurate when they were at 24,000 and inflated by at least 10,000 and many deaths reported as women and children were men, some died of natural causes, some died at the hands of Hamas for not obeying Hamas and some even died before October 7th. But with all the evidence, CBC continued its clearly biased reporting.
Does this help the security of Canada? Does this help the non-radicalized Muslims living in Canada peacefully? Is this the Canada we want to live in?
There are so many examples I could bring forward but it would take a book to explain why the CBC should be defunded and have to work as Global and CTV to compete for the viewing market!
CBC, in my mind, has displayed some of the worst breach of ethical journalism and appears to as bad as the Associated Press’s reporting ffrom Gaza, which by the way have often been confirmed to be Hamas terrorists, as witnessed with one entering Israel the the terrorists on October 7th, and reporting the events as if it were a soccer game!
I enjoyed this article:
“We spent $1.4B on the CBC and all we got was lousy anti-Israel bias“
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/we-spent-1-4b-on-the-cbc-and-all-we-got-was-this-lousy-anti-israel-bias
I removed all CBC programming from my TV guide list, and will not watch any programming from this anti-Canadian, biased organization and I am not even Jewish, but because their lack of reporting ethically has become evident!
Media Code of Ethics
1. Seek truth and report it
2. Minimize harm
3. Act independently
4. Be accountable and transparent
The British BBC and Al Jazeera (when it was expanding after being started in 1996) provided reliable news when traveling abroad in places where we were in an information bubble. The CBC was fairly impartial back then, although it was not at the top of the list. I now believe that the BBC, CBC, and Al Jazeera are unreliable sources of factual information and seem to be biased in their reporting. Al Jazeera lost its reputation for accurate reporting after receiving significant funding from the Qatari government. What justification do the CBC and BBC have? It appears that the reporting code of ethics has been abandoned.
It is very sad when you cannot depend on any honest reporting today and reflects how society in Canada has sunk to new levels.
Defund CBC! The taxpayer should not be paying for this organization who have lost the fundamentals of ethical reporting!
Are you going to ignore the fact that the CBC handles a lot more Canadian Content like the BBC does in Europe and helps remote areas of Canada have a outlet to the rest of the world and is still needed. While working in Northern Alberta years ago the CBC was the only TV channel we had.
When Lougheed’s energy minister Bill Dickie was a brother in-law of one of my uncles it was conservative MLAs who taught me to never trust a Reformer, they destroy jobs, never create them, they help the rich steal the people’s oil and corporate tax wealth and deliberately destroy everything conservative governments have created for the good of the people and that’s exactly what they have been doing since the Klein days. Putting Alberta in financial ruin in the process.
In true Reform Party Fashion Poilievre is wanting to destroy what Conservatives have created namely the Carbon Tax and the CBC and he doesn’t care who gets hurt in the process.
The CBC was created by Conservatives to create jobs and give remote areas of Canada a connection to the outside world and put a lot more Canadian Content on T.V. and was not intended to make money. It created like the BBC in England.
We know the Carbon Tax Rebates created by Conservatives are putting money in our pockets as we aren’t paying out as much as we are getting and that’s why 27 countries have adopted them. This stupid idea that they will financially destroy us is a complete lie when it isn’t destroying anyone in the world.