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Catching up on MediaPolicy – Dhanraj tells his CBC story – Kimmel is back, really back – Unifor launches CheckFactHere – Western Standard cashs a federal cheque

September 27, 2025

Last week Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault showed up at the House of Commons’ heritage committee for his root canal.

The Conservatives were on him immediately about former CBC host Travis Dhanraj’s charges that the public broadcaster violated the Human Rights Act by treating him as a token “brown guy.” MP Rachel Thomas cited CBC’s “toxic environment” as a fact.

Guilbeault appeared to take Dhanraj’s allegations at face value, expressing “regret” at “what happened to him” but distanced himself from the CBC’s handling of the dispute.

MediaPolicy has covered the story here, here and here but I was waiting for more details on Dhanraj’s claims against unnamed colleagues in CBC’s Ottawa bureau and how CBC management handled the whole situation.

Now Dhanraj has given a more fulsome version of his story on episode one of his new podcast, Can’t Be Censored, produced with former CP24 reporter Karman Wong.

The episode is over an hour long and it’s pretty clear that without naming David Cochrane, the host of CBC’s parliamentary show Power and Politics, that is who Dhanraj is identifying as his nemesis (Cochrane has declined comment). Dhanraj says that “three or four” journalists are running the Ottawa bureau’s news coverage as their own club.

Dhanraj’s narrative is that CBC headhunted him, first as a national reporter and then as the host of Canada Tonight, a current affairs show. Dhanraj tried to make the show edgy and popular by inviting controversial guests. They included former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, whose appearance CBC management vetoed on the grounds that Carlson is a white nationalist, although Dhanraj says in the podcast he doesn’t agree with that description.

What got him into hotter water was inviting Conservative Party deputy leader Melissa Lantsman onto his show while the Conservatives were boycotting Cochrane’s hot seat on Power & Politics. As it turns out, CBC management already had an internal protocol that forbade the Conservatives end-running Cochrane in favour of a preferred host. Dhanraj tried to convince his boss that it was good journalism and better for the CBC’s reputation as a big tent public broadcaster to get the Conservatives onto any CBC show at all. He even quoted the Broadcasting Act. His boss didn’t buy it.

There’s more in the podcast episode on other friction points between Dhanraj and the Corp. Assuming he has offered his best arguments, it’s hard to see his allegation of racist tokenism as anything other than his editorial gloss. Rather his story comes across as a tale of an ambitious television anchor making a play to upgrade a lesser show into a bigger one, some colleagues resenting that, and CBC not accommodating it.

If David Cayley’s new book critiquing the CBC had gone to press a little later, I am sure he would have devoted a chapter to Dhanraj. Earlier this week, MediaPolicy posted a review of Cayley’s book.

***

Bob Iger is writing his own history, day by day.

Iger is the Disney CEO responsible for suspending Live! host Jimmy Kimmel for his mockery of the US President’s odd reply to a journalist’s question about grieving Charlie Kirk’s death. Then the viewer and political backlash hit Disney. Iger turned Kimmel’s “indefinite” suspension into a one week cancellation.

US media commentator Evan Shapiro has a LinkedIn post breaking down the events leading up to Iger’s actions against Kimmel.

Bottom line: the threat by Trump’s FCC chair Brendan Carr to strip Disney’s ABC affiliate stations of their broadcasting licenses was an idle one. Up until now media moguls have blinked because they won’t play the long game against the Trump administration’s campaign to tame mainstream media.

Kimmel’s show is back on the ABC network, but initially two major station affiliates refused to air it. One of them is a big Trump supporter. The other needs the FCC to approve a merger.

That lasted three days. Yesterday the two affiliates that include 56 stations across the US reversed course and agreed to resume airing the show.

It ain’t over. Trump replied on Truth Social, “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do.”

***

It’s World News Day tomorrow which is a reminder from major newsrooms around the liberal democratic globe that you’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Pairing up with that, my alma mater Unifor —-which represents journalists and media workers across the country—- has launched a middle brow version of the same, a public service campaign branded CheckFactHere.

Video and print ads created by Unifor will appear in Canadian media who are donating the inventory.

***

A few sunny weeks ago MediaPolicy posted a dissent from a Canadian Press story concluding that PM Mark Carney was considering repeal of the government’s Online News Act C-18 and its $100 million tithe on Google that compensates Canadian newsrooms for their stories appearing on Search. I didn’t think that Carney’s mangled response to a Kelowna journalist’s question about C-18 actually said that.

It took some time to pin down the government for a clarification, but Politico.com asked Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault for comment and his press secretary replied “the federal government has no intention of repealing either of the acts,” referencing both C-18 and the Online Streaming Act C-11.

Then the National Post story added that Guilbeault’s office hedged a bit, saying “for us, currently, the intention is not to repeal those acts… But I can’t pretend to know the end result of the negotiations with the United States” which are “very much” the main factor that will determine the future of both acts.

Somebody needs to put this question to Carney.

While we are talking about C-18, when the Canadian Journalism Collective announced the distribution of the $100 million in August, Media Policy posted that the conservative news outlet Western Standard was getting a $68,000 cheque. What I didn’t mention is that I e-mailed publisher Derek Fildebrandt asking him to confirm that he wasn’t also receiving the federal government’s “QCJO” journalist subsidy. His publication was part of a coterie of anti-subsidy news outlets who published a public oath they would never take that kind of money. Fildebrandt didn’t reply to my e-mail.

Now we know why. He’s taking the money. In an email to his subscribers, Fildebrandt said he couldn’t compete without the federal cash and ——I am reading between his lines here— without Pierre Poilievre in power those subsidies will continue to flow to his competitors.

Fildebrandt’s books aren’t public, so it’s also possible he couldn’t remain solvent without federal and Google money. In any event, my condolences, climbing down from high moral ground is never fun. Just ask Mark Carney.

***

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How the CBC should get its mind right: David Cayley’s new book

Author and CBC Ideas producer David Cayley

September 24, 2025

David Cayley, The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back Again), published by Sutherland House (2025).

The former producer of CBC’s radio show Ideas has a new book that asks and answers a question too often ignored: what is a public broadcaster and why isn’t the CBC behaving like one?

David Cayley’s “The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And how to get it back)” is prosaically titled but elegantly written. Cayley loves ideas of course and his argument is grounded in a series of cerebral set pieces that situate his message that CBC News is too much the storyteller and too little the convenor of open-minded dialogue.

If theories of media communications and linguistics are your thing, Cayley explores and applies the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Noam Chomsky, The Frankfurt School and a host of other thinkers you may never heard of. If you have a taste for this (I do) or consider yourself a left libertarian, there’s lots to eat. Otherwise, you may need to be patient with Cayley.

Each of his excursions into theory provide the context for his core message, which goes something like this:

For decades now, the CBC has strayed from its Parliamentary mandate, for which it is provided with big subsidies, to be the non-judgmental convenor of public debate instead of just another corps of journalists holding inflated ideas of their clairvoyant understanding of Canadians. The CBC suffers from cultural orthodoxy —let’s call it an overweening confidence in the destiny of liberal progressivism— and the newsroom’s belief that it has a special talent for divining truth and misinformation.

It’s a heck of an indictment and the prosecutor makes his case, beginning with Exhibit A: CBC’s coverage of the Covid pandemic and the three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by the so-called Freedom Convoy, whose participants “manifested a large and vibrant new public,” according to Cayley.

In his view, the federal government, echoed in its messaging by mainstream media and the CBC, treated the participants in this “generally moderate Freedom Convoy” as enemies of the state and this demonstrates the dangerous polarization of the Canadian polity and the pressing need for more civic dialogue in this country. Cayley just published the relevant book excerpts in the National Post. On the other hand, the CBC Ombud’s judgment is here.

If you choke a bit on that lionization of the Freedom Convoy, you may be recalling that it was riddled with avowed insurrectionists and defiers of public health directives enacted by a democratically elected government in the name of reducing critical infections that threatened to kill untold thousands and overwhelm hospital emergency rooms. The incipient threat of violence associated with clearing the occupation was never far away.

Cayley is a skeptic of anything described as a consensus by the medical and science establishments and he reminds us of this when he lampoons the worldwide public health response to Covid as “comprised of speculative computer models whose probative value lies just north of tea leaves and bird entrails.”

He argues that Convoy participants were vindicated in their opposition to Covid vaccine mandates by later findings that vaccines became less effective over time in preventing the spread of the disease. Meanwhile the CBC and other media organizations disparaged the occupiers’ dissent as “misinformation,” unworthy of serious news reporting.

In this review I am not going to litigate this public health issue, or the openness of media coverage, to a conclusion. But suffice it to say it’s a contentious point on which to rest his argument that the CBC newsroom is swaddled in its own filter bubble.

How the CBC became its own biggest fan, says Cayley, can be traced back to its early departure from a more neutral role in public dialogue and its quest for mojo as an edgy news organization in television shows like the investigative journalism of This Hour Has Seven Days. Despite the fact that Seven Days, which ran only two seasons from 1964 to 1966, was cancelled by CBC management —guaranteeing its legendary status as Canada’s media iteration of the Avro Arrow fighter jet— its strong editorial voice and visually manipulative narrative style exemplifies for Cayley what’s always been wrong about CBC’s news journalism.

Cayley connects the immense popularity of Seven Days with a “populism” that seats media gatekeepers into the role of the audience’s surrogate, as its watchdog over the powerful, its advocate for justice, or (using just one more metaphor) the high priests of a media church sermonizing the congregation, vindicated in their righteousness so long as attendance remains high.

What suffers when the CBC insists on being the audience’s surrogate, he says, is the neglect of its core Parliamentary mandate, articulated by the first two words in its mission “to inform, enlighten and entertain.”

Once upon a time, the old guard in the early CBC were more inclined towards “adult education” and news you can use, rather than theatrical news reporting and laying claim to Canada’s voice. Cayley wants the CBC to get back to that “inform and enlighten.”

Cayley never makes it clear if he wants to blow up CBC’s editorial identity as a news reporting organization entirely or just re-set the newsroom mindset to something better aligned with “inform and enlighten.” He cautions that he is not advocating for a University of CBC.

Mostly, he critiques the CBC’s workplace culture as suffering from a baked-in orthodoxy of thought. He can be quite funny writing about this: his insider account of CBC management’s top-down reset of its corporate culture is relatable to anyone who has ever endured the same. His cheeky disparagement of Jian Ghomeshi’s popular radio show Q may leave a smile on your face or okay boomer on your lips.

But the prosecutor Cayley gets himself into trouble when he puts forward Exhibit B which purports to quantify the pervasive reach of the orthodoxy inside the newsroom.

He begins by citing a Léger poll commissioned by the Macdonald Laurier Institute that self-identified leftists outnumber conservatives in Canadian universities by a ratio of nine to one and that this is killing dissent and fostering self-censorship among the minority. From this poll he links to the CBC’s culture, claiming “the case is the same at the CBC, as I have already shown.”

Well no, he doesn’t show that at all.

To rebut, let me first note that the Léger poll was non-randomized and relied on voluntary participation. It collected lopsided data culled mostly from faculty in the humanities and social sciences —prolix socialists, all— and under participation from STEM departments.

More to the point, where’s the proof that CBC staff are nine-to-one lefties versus righties? Cayley points to three journalists (Exhibit C), one of whom is neither a journalist nor works for CBC but once wrote an analysis of CBC’s news coverage of Saskatchewan’s transgender laws.

He notes the troubling story of a veteran CBC Winnipeg reporter Marianne Klowak who quit in disgust at a management kibosh on her reporting that gave voice to vaccine dissenters.

He cites the departure of CBC Toronto news producer Tara Henley who also quit in disgust, issuing a public indictment of the “cognitive dissonance” created by the CBC newsroom’s groupthink.

Two journalists (make it three including Cayley) out of 3,000 is not enough evidence to support his claim, but to be fair it would be difficult to rely on anything but anecdotal evidence without the kind of newsroom polling that is impossible to provide.

Still, Cayley once lived in the belly of the beast and is likely on to something. Common sense tells you that a newsroom where most reporters live in three big cities may well list to the leftish values of urban progressivism.

On the other hand, my own experience of a lifetime representing reporters and journalists —although never at the CBC — convinces me that the left-right thing is for the opinion pages and eclipsed by the dominant spirit in all newsrooms: a Watchdog ideology that posits white-knight journalists at the service of the public by “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Nevertheless, Cayley views the CBC’s self-coronation as public champion as the problem that needs replacement by a more passive role as the convenor of civic dialogue, the aforementioned “inform and enlighten.”

His intriguing idea is there for your consideration. But in Exhibit D, the prosecuting Cayley again goes too far when he says that “what is more serious is the way the CBC has lost the country’s attention”.

I beg your pardon, it has not. CBC radio is a market leader across the country. Its online news website earns top ratings, vying each year with CTV for the most consumed or most trusted online source. Even CBC’s much maligned television ratings —which lag behind CTV and Global— are weighted down by flagging audiences for CBC’s entertainment programming which must compete head-on during prime time against American hit shows on private Canadian networks and also a little streamer named Netflix.

Cayley’s overstatements don’t detract from his deepest conviction: that Canada is becoming increasingly polarized, even a “fatally divided polity,” and a public broadcaster needs to engage the participation of all. A more open-minded programming culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity may be the tonic. More reflection, fewer snap judgments.

Most book-length critiques of CBC tend to focus on news programming rather than television drama, which is too bad (Richard Stursberg being a notable exception). In fact, Chris Waddell and the late David Taras go so far as to recommend jettisoning entertainment programming altogether and saying uncle to Netflix.

Cayley discusses entertainment programming briefly, mostly in the context of the unstoppable tide of American shows that sets the cultural tone for Canadian content.

He calls upon the CBC to rely less on knock-off genres of television drama, set in classic Canadian landscapes, and more on historical and contemporary stories of Canadian self-discovery. Amen to that, but it’s not clear to me that the CBC isn’t already doing this with the limited production budgets that it has. When it wants to step up its game for bigger audiences, it makes co-venture deals with Netflix.

Finally, Cayley says almost nothing about Radio-Canada, an understandable limitation on the scope of his essay. The application of his critique and his solution, the question and answer about the CBC’s public broadcasting mission, might provoke more insights if anyone in Québec were to take up and explore his views.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Saying the quiet part out loud: Radio-Canada’s anti-Semitic report from Washington

September 18, 2025

On Monday, Radio-Canada’s Washington correspondent Élisa Serret, appearing on the network’s afternoon news show “Sur Le Terrain,” was asked by the host how it was that the US government seemed unable to distance itself from Israel following the IDF attack on Hamas leaders who were meeting in Qatar, a US ally.

The veteran host Christian Latreille asked why the US administration “has such difficulty distancing themselves from Israel, even in the most difficult moments?”

Serret’s answer was that it was because of the “big machine” of Jewish influence in American politics.

Specifically, what she said (as translated in the National Post story) was that “my understanding, and that of multiple analysts here in the United States, is that it is the Israelis, the Jews, that finance American politics a lot.

“There is a big machine behind them, making it very difficult for Americans to detach themselves from Israel’s positions. It’s really money here in the United States. The big cities are run by Jews, Hollywood is run by Jews.”

You can watch the video here. Her broadcast comments were covered by the French language press here and here.

It was a gobsmacking statement. There are pro-Israel lobby groups in the US, as there are many groups that lobby US politicians on everything under the sun. There are Jewish Americans who make campaign donations, as there are plenty of non-Jewish Americans who do the same.

Then’s there’s the canard about “Hollywood” being “run by” Jews and putting the whammy on all thinking Americans. As for Jews dominating the ranks of big city mayors, I think that’s a new conspiracy theory, although demographically fictitious (three out of fifty US big city mayors are Jewish).

Serret is a ten-year veteran of Radio Canada and holds a graduate degree in global and international studies.

The host, an award-winning veteran of broadcast journalism, including the last eleven years as anchor and Washington correspondent, did not interrupt, contradict, or ask Serret to clarify.

After Serret was called out on X, Radio Canada apologized for Serret’s “stereotypical, anti-Semitic, erroneous, and prejudicial allegations against Jewish communities.”

Serret has been suspended by her employer pending investigation, although she is still listed on the Radio Canada website as the show’s Washington correspondent. Audience complaints will no doubt be filed to the network’s Ombud and we’ll get a published report after he interviews Radio-Canada management.

This is one of the moments where the casual, ingrained anti-semitism in Canada smacks you in the face. As a friend reminded me, Serret “just said the quiet part out loud.”

What he means by that, or what I mean by that, is the matter-of-fact manner in which anti-Semitic conspiracy narratives about Jewish control and manipulation of non-Jews and government are culturally reproduced, century after century, day after day, everywhere.

What happened here is that a well educated veteran journalist carried around these conspiracy theories in her head for years and finally had a chance to offer them on-air as conventional wisdom. The awkward question is whether her views were already known and condoned. As for the host Latreille, he either regarded her comments as legitimate journalism or he froze, which doesn’t say much about his level of professional abilities.

Serret’s assumption that she could state these conspiracies as analysis, in a broadcast to a national audience, suggests she believes her views are widely shared with the audience.

I’d like to think they aren’t, and the Culture & Identity Minister’s denunciation was appreciated, but as any member of any Canadian community targeted by hate will tell you, that hate is dangerous to our health.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching Up on MediaPolicy – Kings, jesters and cable lords – the AI Death Star – PBS and NPR defunded – the next Dhanraj leak – how to fix the CBC

July 24, 2025

It’s a sheepish admission I make this week, but sometimes American culture wars can be so darn entertaining.

Take the recent exchange of verbal gun fire between President Trump, the US cable lords, and late night TV hosts that began with Stephen Colbert slagging his show’s owner, Paramount, for paying off on a meritless Trump lawsuit against CBS.

In case you’ve been ignoring it all, here’s a short news report from Global News explaining it.

More to my low brow taste, I enjoyed Jon Stewart’s satiric bird-flip to all those bending the knee to Trump, “Go Fuck Yourself.”

***

And then there’s the end of the world as we know it, otherwise known as AI.

I say this only half facetiously. What AI tools like Google Overview appear poised to do to news journalism may well be catastrophic, it depends on consumer adoption.

But it’s entirely plausible that Big Tech’s scraping of copyrighted Internet content —-there are now third party web crawlers that steal and sell paywalled stories to AI companies —— could mean that a handful of global AI engines become our dominant “news” outlets so long as there remain employed journalists somewhere to be scraped.

The US Senate is holding some hand wringing hearings on AI scraping but, so far, it has a performative feel to it. Congress doesn’t do anything anymore without the White House saying so.

Our own federal government is taking a wait and see approach. Or to put it in their own words, AI Minister Evan Solomon is “closely monitoring the ongoing court cases and market developments.”

***

There are no obituaries written yet for public broadcasting in the United States.

Congress finally passed the defunding of NPR radio and PBS television. In the US, public broadcasting was not as robustly funded as it is around the rest of the world. The annual Congressional allocation of $500M (USD) was about half of CBC funding for eight times the population and ten times the number of stations.

The federal dollars were only a sliver of overall funding of 1,000 local NPR stations, 350 PBS outlets and the national flagship operations. But funding was always heavily weighted towards local stations and local programming: the “left wing” national content that Republicans so despise is almost entirely privately funded.

The precise consequences of defunding at the national and local level will unfold in the coming months after the scheduled September payment doesn’t arrive.

Perhaps it’s not a surprise that NPR CEO Edith Chapin just quit.

***

The real-life CBC drama of Travis Dhanraj’s lawsuit and public campaign against his former employer released another episode this week.

The National Post posted a story sporting a “leaked” audio clip of Dhanraj and his union representative in a meeting with CBC manager Andree Lau. The occasion was a discussion of his April 2024 X-post criticizing CBC President Catherine Tait for declining to be interviewed about CBC finances on his show, Canada Tonight.

The edited audio file is a bit of a nothing burger. Dhanraj tries to get Lau to spar with him about the journalistic ethics of CBC coming down hard on him for the post. He gets the better of the argument, mostly by default. That’s about it.

It’s not clear from the clip whether the meeting was a formal grievance meeting, normally a privileged and off the record discussion. CBC responded to the Post story by saying Dhanraj broke his promise not to record the meeting.

***

The McGill University Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy released a report on its two-year study of what is to be done about the CBC. The Hill Times covered it here and CBC News reported on it too.

You may recall that the Centre published an opinion poll in October 2024 that revealed very high public support for the CBC, qualified by strong desire for “changes.”

One of the weird things about this result is that the CBC-is-no-longer-needed vote goes up after a hypothetical addressing of major criticisms.

As the report authors observe dryly, it’s difficult to distill “a single perspective” about what needs improvement other than the fact that 78% of Canadians want to keep the CBC running.

One thing the report is very good on is that “Canadians need to be assured of the value of the product they will be paying for. Regular and in-depth demographic reviews of the audience should be established to determine the kind of content Canadians require and the way they need to receive it. Models for this form of consolation include nation-wide town hall meetings, citizens’ assemblies and comprehensive surveys of the public (not merely existing members of the CBC/Radio Canada’s audience).”

In addition, the report says that Parliament should enshrine a cycle of five-year mandate reviews of the CBC so that the relevance of the public broadcaster to what Canadians want keeps up to date.

Times two, I say.

The report goes on to say that the CBC must “create meaningful, not performative, representation [in its content]. This goal addresses equity, diversity and inclusion, but more broadly, political and regional diversity as well.”

Put bluntly, the CBC needs to convincingly reflect an audience that is broader than the heavily urban demographics of its newsroom if it’s going to be funded and enjoyed by all Canadians.

Parliamentary funding of CBC is of course the bottom line, whether up or down. The Carney government has adopted former Heritage Minister Pascale St.-Onge’s report on the CBC and made European levels of funding its aspirational long-term target. According to St.-Onge, that would mean the moving the yardsticks from $32 per Canadian annually to $62.

Give the authors of the report credit, they have broken the taboo on pointing out that French-language Radio Canada already matches European levels of funding of $79 per head while English-language services (from which Indigenous language programming is financed) languish at $25 per capita.

The taboo remains powerful enough that the report doesn’t recommend what to do about this funding gap.

In the end the authors suggest their own idea of what Canadians want out of the CBC: “information sovereignty.” In other words, a public broadcaster that protects the national interest in reliable news and information.

Their argument is made in the context of rising existential threats to our national security; including extreme weather catastrophes, pandemics, threats to our territorial sovereignty, and the surprising aggression from the United States, a country that controls much of the media we already consume. They might have added AI as yet another existential threat to information sovereignty, as noted above in today’s post.

The 80-page report comes with a three page Executive Summary.

***

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Catching Up on MediaPolicy – The CBC’s nightmare – Canadian ban on TikTok down to the wire – ‘Empathie’ on Crave

July 17, 2025

Travis Dhanraj’s lawyer is shovelling more coal into the litigation furnace by calling upon disaffected CBC staff to e-mail her with their complaints.

In a video interview with Candace Malcolm of Juno News, Kathryn Marshall issued a series of claims to illustrate former news host Dhanraj’s allegation that there are systemic violations of employees’ human rights at the CBC. Marshall said her inbox was full of e-mails from former staff and invited more.

It’s doubtful that any e-mails Marshall solicits from CBC staff past and present would be legally admissible in the human rights proceedings she says she is initiating on Dhanraj’s behalf.

But they can be theatre props in the public trial that Conservatives hope to schedule at the Culture and Identity (formerly Heritage) parliamentary committee in the Fall.

The feeding frenzy of conservative attacks on the CBC occasioned by the Dhanraj controversy is hardly surprising, it’s a permanent feature of our political landscape.

The blood in the water would be salacious evidence of feuding between Dhanraj and the CBC Parliamentary bureau, described by Marshall in her Juno interview. Specifically, her claim is that “a very close knit gang of Ottawa correspondents” were resentful of Dhanraj’s success in getting Conservative Party guests on his show and tried to bar those guests.

Marshall said she has “names, receipts and e-mails.” Those revelations, says Marshall, are “the CBC’s nightmare.”

Marshall also told Juno News that the CBC sought to punish Dhanraj for his X-post about then CBC President Catherine Tait by taking away his show, demoting him, and demanding he sign a gag order. She described CBC’s actions as “Stalinist” and later in the interview accused Dhanraj’s union the Canadian Media Guild of collaborating with the CBC (which would be illegal).

You get the picture.

The point of this kind of public campaign as an accessory to a legal claim is to define the public narrative. So far that story is not only how Dhanraj was treated by the CBC, but the credibility of CBC news journalism itself.

The credibility of the CBC might appear to be in jeopardy according to Dhanraj and conservative critics, but that does not seem consistent with public polling.

Last week Pollara released its annual poll on Canadian news media. CBC News continues to top the charts on both consumption and public trust. In fact, it went up over the last year, as the graphic below shows.

Still, the endless right-wing barrage against the CBC destabilizes the public broadcaster (I exempt from this tar-brushing the perceptive podcast episode posted today by The Hub’s Full Press, which is worth your time).

The CBC has done nothing to counter the Dhanraj narrative of a corrupt news culture —-it’s issuing rote denials while awaiting the filing of Dhanraj’s human rights complaint. The result is that a bunkered public broadcaster leaves a vacuum for others to fill and they are obliging.

The appointment of a new CBC President in January is now seven months old. After an early spate of interviews given by Marie-Philippe Bouchard, we’ve heard very little about any new direction or bold plans to meet criticisms or disappointments expressed about the public broadcaster.

That might be because Bouchard doesn’t know yet if the Prime Minister intends to keep his campaign promise to boost CBC funding by 11% this year, and more over time. That was complicated by this week’s disclosure that as part of its spending review the Carney government has asked CBC to submit a draft plan for deep budget cuts in 2026-2027.

Or it could be that Culture and Identity Minister Steven Guilbeault is still working on a new bill to implement election promises of better CBC governance and long-term financial independence that would require amendments to the Broadcasting Act.

MediaPolicy asked the CBC if there are any significant announcements coming and was told to expect something in the Fall. A similar inquiry to the Minister’s office did not get a reply in time for publication.

***

AI-generated image

This past week TikTok ramped up political pressure to convince the Carney government to undo the federal government’s 2024 decision to ban TikTok the company from Canada, but not the app.

The Liberals’ decision on TikTok followed US legislation to ban both the company and the app on the grounds of national security. Subsequently it was given a stay of execution by Donald Trump in his effort to force a sale of the Chinese-owned social media company to American interests.

Like the US law, the Canadian ban is based on undisclosed and/or hypothetical national security concerns about data security and the distribution of malevolent content, sponsored by China.

TikTok says it is winding up its Canadian operations to comply with the federal ban. Meanwhile it has bought media advertising pleading its case to the Canadian public, posted a posturing letter asking for a meeting with Industry Minister Melanie Joly, planned layoffs of its 350 Canadian staff and withdrawn its funding of Canadian creator development and event sponsorships.

Aside from the sponsorship largesse, TikTok is a major distributor of Canadian cultural content. According to Scott Benzie of the creator group Digital First Canada, TikTok has engineered its algorithm to be a heavy distributor of local content for users that activate the location service on the app, perhaps as high as 50% of “Nearby” and “For You” video recommendations. That’s something that foreign streamers won’t commit to.

With a lawsuit against the federal government on the go, TikTok says Ottawa has taken “measures that bear no rational connection to the national security risks it identifies.”

For its part, the government insists its investigation under the Investment Act in 2023 revealed “clear and legitimate concerns.”

When the ban was announced in November 2024, then Innovation minister François-Philippe Champagne said “I’m not at liberty to go into much detail, but I know Canadians would understand when you’re saying the government of Canada is taking measures to protect national security, that’s serious.”

The entire mess feels a lot like the Facebook ban on Canadian news even though the circumstances are quite different.

Michael Geist has published several articles on the TikTok ban, including this one, which apart from the familiar Liberal-bashing on digital policy I found persuasive (and it’s worth marking the occasion).

Another angle on the problem is something every Canadian is painfully aware of these days: when the American elephant rolls over, we can easily get crushed. And the crushers run the White House.

The troubling question is who isn’t cynical about the merits of the American ban of TikTok in the first place? Or that we are just obediently playing a vassal state by following suit?

The answer to the dilemma is for Carney to publicly defend the ban with as much disclosure of the national security threat assessment as possible, or to repeal it.

***

The Big Tech/Big Hollywood court challenge to mandatory cash contributions to Canadian media funds might get an answer from the Federal Court of Appeal before Labour Day.

Until then, the MediaPolicy boycott of streamer subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon and AppleTV) continues. I don’t miss two of them.

In their absence, I’ve made better use of my CraveTV subscription. That allows me to recommend an excellent new Canadian series, Empathie, a sad and funny drama set in a Montréal mental health facility.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

The ticking media bombshell: Conservatives want hearings on Travis Dhanraj quitting the CBC

Television host and journalist Travis Dhanraj – CBC Photo

July 12, 2025

The fireworks ignited by television host Travis Dhanraj’s public resignation from the CBC will not be a flash in the pan. Not if the Conservative Party has anything to say about it.

The Conservatives are demanding summer Parliamentary hearings, a sequel to the political inquisition that followed the CBC’s annual payment of performance pay to some staff in late 2023.

Conservative headquarters also launched a volley of fundraising e-mails [download, below] citing Dhanraj’s “bombshell” resignation and reiterating its campaign promise to defund the CBC under the leadership of Pierre Poilievre, now standing in the August 18th by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot.

Dhanraj is a veteran television reporter and host who returned to the CBC in 2021 as a National Affairs correspondent and two years later, to much fanfare, as the host of Canada Tonight. At the time, CBC’s press release highlighted Dhanraj’s commitment to “unfiltered” and “diverse” journalism.

But last week Dhanraj announced his “involuntary resignation,” denouncing the CBC’s commitment to diversity as performative and promising detailed revelations to come. The CBC denied the allegations and cited confidentiality obligations as the reason for the brevity of its public reply. It also announced his resignation had been refused.

It’s difficult to recap the sequence of events leading up to Dhanraj’s pyrotechnic departure: much of it is connecting dots but will become easier to piece together once his lawyer Kathryn Marshall files a human rights complaint on his behalf.

The jumping off point appears to be Dhanraj posting a tweet in April 2024 that criticized the CBC for not making then-CEO Catherine Tait available as a news subject on his show, presumably to answer questions about the performance pay.

A public statement issued by his lawyer in February 2025 suggested that at one point he went on medical leave because of the psychological harm caused by CBC management’s alleged retaliatory actions towards him.

In his own public statement, Dhanraj characterized his resignation this way:

It comes after trying to navigate a workplace culture defined by retaliation, exclusion, and psychological harm. A place where asking hard questions — about tokenism masquerading as diversity, problematic political coverage protocols, and the erosion of editorial independence — became a career-ending move.

In further statements, Dhanraj’s lawyer linked “the colour of his skin” to CBC’s alleged exclusion of conservative perspectives and news guests. Specifically, she said that CBC assumed when it hired him that as a brown man his news hosting would focus on liberal perspectives, to the exclusion of conservative guests and issues. A proven connection to race might violate the federal human rights code, if discriminatory.

Marshall welcomed a Parliamentary hearing and suggested that Dhanraj’s experience was “systemic” and goes to the heart of the CBC’s workplace culture and delivering on its public mandate:

Obviously, the issues that Travis has highlighted in his resignation letter and which will be part of a future legal proceeding are very serious, and they’re not just isolated to Travis. I’ve heard from a lot of other CBC employees who have similar stories. It’s a systemic issue, and it’s a workplace culture issue that goes very deep at CBC, which is very concerning given the amount of public funds going to the corporation and its public-interest mandate.

Sooner or later the Conservatives will take this up at the Culture and Identity committee, with MP Rachael Thomas grabbing the spotlight in the prosecutorial role she relishes. But it may bring more thunder than lightning due to the stifling effects of pending litigation.

If the Conservatives go as far as attempting a filibuster of other Parliamentary business (like government bills), the balance of voting power in committee will be held by Bloc Québécois MP Martin Champoux.

BREAKING CBC BOMBSHELL Download

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – dirge for the DST – Hollywood gets state cash – online harms legislation still cooking – who stole the music grants?

CBC explainer on the repeal of the Digital Services tax

July 5, 2025

Soon the wake for Canada’s digital services tax (DST) will be over and the news cycle will re-fire for the next trade battle with the United States.

Prime Minister Carney’s repeal of the DST was mocked by the victorious White House as a Canadian “cave.” Within hours, Canadian critics were queueing up, condemning Carney’s move as “bootlicking” (Lloyd Axworthy) and “bending the knee” (Le Devoir). On the other hand, Jean Charest described it as “a legitimate choice in a world of very bad choices.”

The MediaPolicy take on it is here.

The CBC has a hip two-minute cut-for-social video explainer narrated by the tattoo-embossed Nick Parker.

And for another take, here’s Paul Wells interviewing Canadian tax expert Allison Christians.

President Trump has promised to re-announce tariffs this week. Carry on Canada.

***

Two months ago when Donald Trump blurted out his desire to tariff US movies filmed abroad he got a tepid response from the supposed beneficiaries, Hollywood studios and the Big Tech streamers.

That’s because the studios and streamers make so many movies in Canada, at a competitive and government-subsidized cost, with world class quality.

What Hollywood really wanted was production subsidies from the US federal government, but so far that has not happened.

Now California is stepping up to the plate. Governor Gavin Newsom is prepared to double existing state subsidies to the tune of $750 million, quite a slice of the pie in what is otherwise a major austerity budget for the state.

***

The Canadian Press has reported that Justice Minister Sean Fraser is having a close look at the federal Liberals’ online harms legislation before re-tabling it.

Bill C-63 died on the order table when Mark Carney called a federal election in March. The core of the Online Harms Bill was to require social media platforms to establish content safety codes, legislation that polling suggests is a winner.

The add-ons to the bill were more controversial. The opportunity for private citizens to file anti-hate complaints against each other under federal human rights legislation, abolished by Parliament in 2012, is to be revived.

And the anti-hate provisions in the Criminal Code are to be strengthened with more severe punishments. MediaPolicy offered some perspective on that, here and here.

Prior to the election, then Justice Minister Arif Virani reluctantly split the controversial from the core elements of the bill into separate legislation. Neither bill was taken up by Parliamentary committees in the months leading up to the election call.

The CP story quotes the new Minister as wanting to make his own “fresh consideration of the path forward.”

At the very least the Minister may steal the best ideas from the Conservative election promise on deep fakes.

***

There are two 15-minute weekend reads on media that I can recommend.

In his personal blog “Fagstein,” the Montreal Gazette’s Steve Faguy has posted a short history of the CRTC’s decades long struggle to keep local television news solvent.

He’s done a great job. I know how hard it was as I tried to do the same in a shorter space in chapter six of my book on the Online Streaming Act. Faguy’s post is the learning resource that has been missing.

The other read is a feature story from the Globe and Mail’s Josh O’Kane. He’s updated his whodunnit reporting on the cyber-theft of $10 million from FACTOR, the music funding organization that distributes dollars contributed by government, radio stations and (subject to a court appeal) music streaming companies to Canadian musicians.

***

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I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Catching up on MediaPolicy – Can Québec shove aside the federal Bill C-11? – CBC bonus pay, the epilogue – Will Page’s “screwed losers.”

Former CBC President Catherine Tait defended “bonus pay” in 2024

June 1, 2025

Last week MediaPolicy offered an analysis of whether the Québec CAQ government’s Bill 109 might trigger a constitutional conflict with the federal government’s Online Streaming Act Bill C-11 over who can regulate video and audio streaming platforms with the goal of making French language content more prominent in Québec.

Having federal and provincial governments running active public policy on exactly the same thing is a bit of a problem, something Julie Miville-Dechêne immediately pointed out on the floor of Senate.

The Senate’s Government Representative, Marc Gold, replied that the federal government was thinking about Bill 109 and “may have more to say on this in the coming days.”

What the Carney government might or might not say in the coming days will probably follow some off the record conversations with CAQ Culture Minister Mathieu Lacombe who has already said publicly he doesn’t have to negotiate with Ottawa.

The legal question of whether it’s Parliament or the Québec National Assembly that has jurisdiction over the “discoverability” of Internet-borne content is a juicy orange for the many devoted fans of Canadian constitutional law.

Legal expert Pierre Trudel of the Université de Montréal published his view in Le Devoir. He argues that Québec can take legislative action “to ensure that French-language works can be easily found in the mass of available content, even by someone who isn’t searching for them,” because nowadays the delivery of online content depends so heavily upon consumer data that it becomes a matter of provincially-regulated commercial affairs and consumer protection.

Trudel offers as a legal precedent a 1978 Supreme Court case. In that 6 to 3 majority ruling, the Court upheld a Québec consumer protection law governing the exposure of children to advertising content even when it was applied to federally regulated television programming.

***

In the quiet lull following its miraculous survival of Election 2025, the still-funded CBC released its commissioned report from Mercer compensation consultants that answers some of the outstanding questions about the $18 million in “bonus payments” to 1,200 executives and non-union staff that fed the news cycle for so many months in 2024.

The headline is that Mercer recommended to CBC management that its at-risk “performance pay” component of total compensation is a common practice, a good thing, and ought to be retained in the name of effective staff recruitment and retention. In spite of the advice, CBC management rejected the recommendation to stay the course on performance pay and instead converted those dollars into wages.

And perhaps that puts an end to the melodrama manufactured by MPs of all parties, as well as many members of the media commentariat, using the bonus payments as a stick to beat the CBC and its unpopular President because she refused to cancel payments owed under employment contracts in a year that the public broadcaster laid off 141 staff and then narrowly avoided mass layoffs.

Before closing the book on this, there are a few parting observations worth making:

Every MP ripping former President Catherine Tait for not cancelling performance pay was well aware of what Mercer confirmed: an at-risk component of total employee compensation is a prevalent business practice throughout the economy. The idea is to keep high achieving employees hungry for success through good performance. It’s not a perq. It’s not a cash grab.

If the unspoken script to the drama is that CBC employees get paid too much, the Mercer Report put that one to bed. CBC executives and non union employees are paid smack in the middle of the spectrum of total compensation for similar work. In fact they would be slightly below median earnings were it not for a solid pension plan.

Between MPs asking the wrong questions, Tait clamming up in response to political attacks, and the limited information in the Mercer Report, we still don’t know anything about a number of key questions. Did legal entitlement to performance pay depend in any way on whether the CBC was laying off employees ? (Probably not). Did Tait have any option to reduce or cancel them? (Unlikely). Did employees achieve their targets for full at-risk pay or are the payments gimmes for most employees ? (Unknown).

More importantly, now that $18 million of budgeted at-risk pay is being integrated into fixed salary, will that be at a dollar-for-dollar rate or discounted because there is no longer an at-risk portion?

The fact that none of these questions have been pursued, let alone answered, tells you what performative nonsense this has been.

***

Back to the issue of Canadian content made discoverable on the big streaming platforms: I recommend the latest episode of Dan Runcie’s Trapital podcast hosting Will Page, the high profile expert on global music streaming and ex-Chief Economist for Spotify.

Page says that after a decade and a half of audio streaming that fuels “glocalization” of music — where musical cultures cross pollinate across national and linguistic borders — he was surprised at the growth in the US dominance of the global music earnings when he had expected the opposite.

That has implications for Canada:

“I ask you to go to the YouTube artist charts for Brazil…. Google it up and pull down those top 100 artists in Brazil this week.

And you’ll find one, maybe two international artists on that chart is singing in Portuguese, very little Spanish. And if you’re lucky, I think The Weeknd is ranked 95, and Bruno Mars is ranked 65…

Other than that, it’s an entirely Portuguese chart. So there you go. There’s a top 10 global music market that just said, “thank you and good night” to the English language.

If you are a non-English speaking country with a strong identity, glocalization is a force for good. If however, you are an English speaking country that’s not American, glocalization leaves you screwed. So we have winners and we have losers.”

Page has lots more to say about Canada and Canadian music. You can listen to the podcast here.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

Miles to go: the Media Policy work of the 45th Parliament

May 1, 2025

The federal election is over and the CBC is still standing. That’s a milestone achieved, for now.

This next Liberal term of government will probably run light on media policy compared to the last four years of legislative turmoil that swirled around the Online Streaming Act Bill C-11, the Online News Act Bill C-18, the future of the CBC, and Online Harms Act C-63, the latter bill being split into two parts and then wiped off the Parliamentary agenda by the election.

If media or cultural issues appear front and centre of public attention during the 45th Parliament, it will likely be a result of trade negotiations with the Trump administration.

The exception is the CBC: the reinvigoration, rebranding, reinvention or re-whatever of the public broadcaster is a winning file for the Liberals and long overdue. The Carney campaign promised more money, more secure long term funding, more local news and more anything to counterweight online misinformation and foreign interference.

The money —a promised 11% increase of $150 million to the Parliamentary grant — will be in the budget bill. The rest must find its way into law through amendments to the Broadcasting Act. That means getting in and out of the procedural swamp of a Parliamentary committee (the new “Culture and Identity” committee) where there is no reason to expect the Conservatives or the Bloc to hand the Liberals a “win.”

It’s going to take a strong minister to get this CBC overhaul done. In March, the Prime Minister appointed Steven Guilbeault as Culture and Identity minister, doubling up with his Quebec lieutenant duties.

Guilbeault is the wrong guy for the job at this point in history. This seems harsh and counterintuitive in many ways. He’s done the job before (2019-2021). He’s smart, decent, competent and temperate. And he is fluently bilingual. So what’s not to like?

The minister’s number one job in this Parliament is the CBC make-over and selling it to English Canada.

That requires gut-instincts about culture and popular attitudes that you can’t easily learn on the island of Montreal. To be pragmatic about the political task at hand, the face of the CBC’s redemption in English-Canada, particularly the west, cannot be the much vilified environmentalist Guilbeault, no matter how unfair that tag may be.

There are other candidates that fit better: fourth-term Toronto MP Julie Dabrusin knows the cultural file as Guilbeault’s former Parliamentary Secretary, she’s bilingual, and if it matters to anyone she was born and educated in Montreal.

The other media policy file that may move forward is a retabled online harms act. You may recall that when the Liberals put forward C-63 last year it contained a raft of amendments to the hate crimes provisions of the Criminal Code and a separate regulatory scheme that would require social media platforms to establish their own binding content codes that manage the online harms to kids, revenge porn, fomentation of hate, and incitement of violence or terrorism.

The Conservatives have no interest in the content codes other than to politicize them as censorship. The Tories have their own version of an Internet crime bill that focusses on harms to children and jailing the perpetrators.

If the Liberals have any sense they will ditch the anti-hate criminal amendments which will just chew up the Parliamentary agenda with public debate over jailing free speech. But they should go full steam ahead with the content codes: it’s a winning file and the Liberals can probably get the support of the Bloc to get it through committee.

Outside of Parliament, the battle at the CRTC over implementation of the Online Streaming Act is going to peak in the next few months.

In the next few weeks the Commission begins hearings on three major policy files covering the first-time regulation of video and audio streamers, as well as online distribution chokepoints. Also, the US streamers’ legal challenges to the initial “five per cent” cash contributions to Canadian media funds will be heard in Federal Court in mid June.

Assuming the court upholds the Commission’s levies, it all points to a crescendo of policy pronouncements and trade confrontations in the fall and winter of 2025-26.

Because of this, all other media policy files will probably get ignored.

One such file is the Meta ban on news distribution over Facebook and Instagram, the very unfortunate outcome of the Bill C-18 battle that hurts journalism start-ups and news websites in smaller communities. Pierre Poilievre’s campaign proposal was to just cave to Meta, which the Liberals are unlikely to do and in any event that would just be an invitation for Google to demand the end of its $100 million in annual licensing payments.

(On that point, the Google-appointed Canadian Journalism Collective released the first instalment of a list of eligible news outlets this week).

There is no principled way to solve this policy puzzle, which means it might be solved in trade negotiations.

Another file that needs attention but won’t get it is an overdue redesign of the federal QCJO subsidies to news journalism. The opportunity here is to do some good policy work that doesn’t require legislative amendments and Parliamentary bandwidth.

Lastly, now that we have a new Prime Minister maybe we can get the Liberals to reconsider their ill-tempered and ill-considered support of password sharing on news subscription websites in the government’s litigation with Blacklock’s Reporter.

The government has convinced itself (and a trial level judge) that it’s siding with the angels by giving an expansive and elitist interpretation of the “fair dealing” or “research” exception to copyright: it simply does not match up against the common sense reality of running a paywalled news business.

The fact that Blacklock’s is editorially a thorn in the side of the government is the bad energy behind all of this. It’s a vindictive abuse of state power, made possible only because Blacklock’s is not the Globe and Mail or the Toronto Star. It’s time for fresh government eyes on this.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

The CBC as “national scold” and “vector of polarization.”

April 24, 2025

Of all the silver linings in Donald’s Trump’s aggression against Canada, I’ve been gratified to discover the renewed popular passion for Canadian culture.

Last weekend I was drawn by the headline of novelist Stephen Marche’s opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, “The new American threat to Canada’s sovereignty requires a new cultural nationalism. Here’s what it should look like.”

The pinning-jelly-against-the-wall quest for a distillation of Canada’s national essence always interests me: I’ve pondered it myself in a previous post and celebrated the thoughts of others on the subject.

Unfortunately, what Marche offered us last week was a fact-free rant against the CBC.

His starting point is a much celebrated allegation: that Justin Trudeau is a proud “post-nationalist” who does not value Canada’s rich history because it is marred by the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and wrongs committed against minorities. Says Marche, our “cultural industries” eagerly signed on to Trudeau’s project of denigrating “so-called Canada” and “the self-critique quickly narrowed into a negligible, impotent stream of identity politics to the exclusion of virtually any other perspective.”

Having named all “cultural industries” in the indictment (including his own, the book publishing industry), Marche’s chief culprit is the CBC. Just to give you a flavour:

The most egregious, and most important, case is the CBC. The CBC has spent a decade turning itself into a big national scold. Literally, their ad campaign from 2023 featured the slogan: “It’s not how Canadian you are. It’s who you are in Canada.” That’s how they chose to promote themselves – a sneer at anyone who might think of themselves as a patriot. I am not sure, at this moment, whether the CBC even likes Canada. You certainly can’t tell by listening to them.

There are no facts or examples provided for this grave condemnation of the public broadcaster as “a big national scold” that “sneers” at “patriots.”

I watch, listen and read the CBC every day: I’ve never witnessed scolding, sneering or anything of the kind. What’s the CBC guilty of? Broadcasting North of North? Or Sort Of?

Once rolling, Marche doesn’t stop:

The Conservatives have, if anything, underestimated the problem. I say this as a small-l liberal: When the head of the CBC cannot name a single Conservative voice on their platform, when they are opposed, as such, to the political views of somewhere around half the country, they are failing in their mandate to represent the country. It is as simple as that.

A small point, Marche’s link is to a podcast that doesn’t verify his statement: former CEO Catherine Tait declined Paul Wells’ invitation to identify “the most interesting conservative commentators on CBC,” she didn’t say she didn’t know any.

A bigger point is whether the CBC invites conservative commentators onto its shows. On that point, I seem to recall Andrew (“defund the CBC”) Coyne making some rather good conservative arguments on CBC’s flagship At Issue panel for the last decade or so. From my own observation, the CBC regularly seeks out conservative voices on its television news panels, although I suspect it’s difficult when there appears to be a Conservative boycott on the public broadcaster.

Marche’s zippy one-liners continue: the CBC engages in a “ritualized fetish for self-purification”; “its politics seems to derive from the sociology department at York University,” and “the CBC is a force of [information] pollution, they are an active vector of polarization.”

Anyway, you get the gist. By the end of the tirade, Marche tables an unobjectionable list of principles underlying a strong Canadian cultural nationalism. Count me in.

But in the end, Mr.Marche is not a satisfied CBC customer and I am. What about everyone else?

Here’s some feedback from the Reuters-Oxford study of the Canadian news market, the first graph covering radio and television and the second chart covering online news:

These aren’t the numbers you hear about when critics are taking a run at the CBC.

When they do, one of those cherry-picked numbers is the “CBC’s two per cent market share.”

If you look it up, that’s a reference to the CBC National News channel’s share of the cable audience. It may surprise you, but two per cent for a single channel in the 500-cable channel universe isn’t bad. CBCNN’s cost is covered by cable subscriptions and advertising, basically Pierre Poilievre’s formula for a defunded CBC.

The other sore thumb is the CBC’s five per cent share of prime-time evening television ratings. It’s competitors CTV and Global no longer disclose their ratings, but they are believed to be higher. That’s not surprising: the evening prime time is when CTV and Global carry popular US programming, while CBC does not.

Here’s a chart from CRTC data (unfortunately a year behind) you might find interesting.

Since 2015 (Table 30), the CBC has slipped in the relevant television ratings (network stations) against the private broadcasters.

Since 2009 (Table 32), the CBC’s production spending on Canadian content slipped a lot, while the CanCon spending of the private networks and specialty channels climbed. The explanation is that the CBC’s Parliamentary funding is stagnant and, in response to new viewing habits, it has shifted its budget from television to online.

This is neither an apology for those television ratings nor a scolding for those that ignore the CBC’s strong ratings on radio and online.

“Not bad” or “good enough” is not the bar, not for the public broadcaster. The CBC should be appreciated and reasonably well loved across the country and if it’s perceived as projecting itself as too urban, too central Canadian, or too progressive that’s a problem it needs to address like it’s life depends upon it.

Which it probably does.

***

I can be reached by e-mail at howard.law@bell.net.

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