December 10, 2023
Last Monday December 4th I hit the ‘publish’ button on the weekly MediaPolicy.ca update just as the CBC was announcing a ten per cent cut to its workforce. That’s 800 jobs at the public broadcaster: 200 vacancies that won’t be filled and 600 layoffs out of 8,000 staff.
The culprit appears to be a combination of falling advertising revenues and a projected three per cent federal budget cut scheduled by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland, described by the CBC as a $125 million budget gap. The CBC is funded $1.3 billion by the federal government and has a total revenue of about $1.8 billion.
Precisely where the hit will be is unclear. CBC President Catherine Tait is speculating on $40 million annually in less programming of original drama, unscripted TV, and game shows, sparing the emblematic programs of national interest that the public identifies as at the core of the CBC mandate. That’s hard to square with where most employees work, i.e. national, regional and local news. There will be head office jobs slashed, but also 250 in broadcasting operations in each of the English language CBC and French language Radio-Canada divisions. That one-to-one proportionality of cuts didn’t go down well in Québec, but it might be recalled that when the Liberals increased the CBC funding by $150 million in 2016 it was divided evenly without complaint.
Assuming Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge had a heads up about all of this, it wasn’t a coincidence that she told the Commons Heritage Committee on November 30th that it was time to move a CBC re-think up the policy queue after the Liberals had studiously avoided it for eight years.
It is certainly time. The CBC is now a brand issue for both the ruling Liberals and Pierre Poilievre’s “defund the CBC” politics with an election in 2025. Justin Trudeau needs to tell voters what the CBC means to him and his party.
What’s next? The layoffs already reduce the broadcaster’s flexibility, and it seems doubtful that we’ll see any funding restored in the next budget, let alone a fulfillment of the Liberals 2021 election promise to replace the CBC’s $400 million in television advertising revenue. The CRTC, meanwhile, is set (whenever) to respond to the federal cabinet’s instructions from September 2022 to reconsider its licensing ruling that, among various ill-considered decisions, released the CBC from any obligation to broadcast local television news in Canada’s six largest cities.
Opinion columnists are already weighing in on how to reshape the CBC. The Globe’s Konrad Yababuski catalogues the usual right-wing grievances. The National Observer’s Max Fawcett has his wish list, reminding us that for every CBC employee there is a member of the audience with their own passionate vision of what the “public” in public broadcasting ought to be.
What we might get is some version of the time-honoured Canadian tradition to “appoint a Royal Commission.” The last time we did that was in the Liberal-appointed Caplan-Sauvageau Report in 1986 which upon release was mostly ignored by the Conservative Mulroney government. If you are curious about the cyclical history of CBC job cuts and government studies of its public mission, I direct you to this easily digested Wikipedia link.
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There was another bell-weather announcement for Canadian media last week. The Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest will go out of business in 2024. If ever there was a mass media that knew its audience, it was the Digest. The Globe’s Jana Pruden had that story.
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The recommended read of the week is from the New York Times, an excellent feature story on the Silicon Valley Game of Thrones competition for AI dominance, “Ego, Fear and Money: How the AI Fuse was lit.” Engrossing.
Or if it’s podcasts you prefer, I recommend Paul Wells’ interview of CBC President Catherine Tait which was recorded days before the layoffs (Tait knew but didn’t tell). Eerie and informative all at once.
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