Juno News - March 06, 2022


More than 50,000 signatures on petition to defund CBC


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

180.69727

Word count

1,529

Sentence count

93

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has launched a petition calling for the government to scrap the $600 million a year the government gives the CBC every year. They argue that the government should fund other media outlets in order to level the playing field.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, which has been doing some tremendous work on this,
00:00:12.780 launched a petition, I think it was just one week ago, to call on the government to scrap
00:00:18.720 the CBC subsidy, to defund CBC. And this has now reached 52,000 signatures in just a week.
00:00:27.180 Tremendous work. Franco Terrazano is the federal director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
00:00:32.420 and joins me now. Franco, I know sometimes getting people to pay attention to
00:00:38.060 taxpayer spending has been challenging. It's why you work around the clock so tirelessly trying to
00:00:43.180 get people to pay attention. But have you ever had something with quite this uptake?
00:00:47.800 Well, we have had some very big petition numbers, but they accumulate over time, right? Like we did
00:00:53.100 have one petition delivery. It was about 200,000 signatures to scrap the governor general's perks,
00:01:00.400 like the lifetime annual expense account former governor generals get. But what's so different
00:01:07.040 about this petition, 52,000 signatures in a week. So Andrew, to me, that really shows a strong signal
00:01:15.040 that there's many Canadian taxpayers that are deeply, deeply concerned, but with the amount of money
00:01:20.520 that the government is sending to the CBC every year, and also that $600 million media bailout.
00:01:28.480 Yeah, the media bailout is a big one as well. And we've talked about it at great length at True
00:01:33.200 North, because in a lot of ways, it raises questions that a lot of people have as to whether
00:01:37.900 reporters are even fairly covering that because their livelihoods, their businesses, longevity depends
00:01:44.180 on it. But let me ask you, is this to you an issue of content? Is it an issue of the fact that we're
00:01:49.940 funding reporting and the fact that we're funding CBC? Or is it just about the funding itself rather than
00:01:56.140 the specific content that's being published? Well, Andrew, I think there's a lot of people who have a lot
00:02:00.660 of different thoughts when it comes to this matter. But from the Taxpayers Federation, it really boils down
00:02:06.160 to this. We believe that all Canadians should be able to keep their own money and decide which media
00:02:12.200 organizations they want to fund with their own money, right? Taxpayers should not be forced to
00:02:18.360 subsidize certain media organizations. So it really comes down to that. Let taxpayers decide which
00:02:24.500 organizations we want to support. But then also, too, on the other hand, Andrew, as you know, it's really
00:02:30.480 not fair for certain news organizations to have to compete with massive government funded organizations
00:02:37.640 like the CBC, more than a billion dollars every single year, or these other news outlets that are
00:02:43.420 getting some of that $600 million media bailout. So for us, it's all about let Canadians decide which
00:02:49.780 organizations we want to fund with our own money. Yeah, there is a leveling the playing field issue here
00:02:56.580 because all of a sudden, first off, you have to have government deciding what constitutes a media
00:03:01.620 outlet, what constitutes a journalism outfit that's eligible for funding, which raises significant
00:03:07.020 questions, even if I'm not aware of specific issues where an outlet's applied and has been denied.
00:03:12.740 But moreover, you're right. It means that the ones who may not take that, there are a number of
00:03:16.720 outlets like Black Locks Reporter is a great example. They are in the parliamentary press gallery. They're an
00:03:21.600 official media outlet, even if they don't go along with sometimes the mainstream media narrative on
00:03:26.500 things. They've said they don't want government funding. Well, all of a sudden, they're at a
00:03:30.700 competitive disadvantage because they have to deal with things without being able to rely on that
00:03:36.200 subsidy. So it almost incentivizes companies taking it because they don't want to be at a disadvantage to
00:03:41.980 their counterparts and their opponents. Yeah, and you know, you touched on this at the beginning of
00:03:46.840 the show, but just that I think we all agree that one of the most fundamental pillars of a strong and
00:03:52.780 healthy democracy is an independent press and independence both in practice, but also perception.
00:03:59.320 Right. I think there's many journalists out there who are doing a great job, but you can understand if
00:04:05.220 people perceive that they might have some bias when it's the government who is funding their
00:04:11.760 organizations. Right. I think that is a very key problem. And we're not the first ones to bring up
00:04:16.940 that objection. Right. There's we've we've heard it from other journalists in the past. But also,
00:04:23.200 too, you talk about how you now have an incentive for organizations to want to collect these tax
00:04:29.100 dollars. Well, what about us struggling taxpayers, the federal government? Right. Like what about what
00:04:34.040 about us struggling taxpayers? The federal government is already more than a trillion dollars in debt.
00:04:38.400 You break that down per person and that's more than thirty thousand dollars that each Canadian man,
00:04:43.520 woman and child is on the hook for. Right. How high of our tax bill does it have to get before we 0.99
00:04:48.820 actually have a federal government that finds some savings? And Andrew, that one point four billion
00:04:54.120 dollars to the CBC, the six hundred million dollar media bailout. Those are perfect areas to find some
00:04:59.880 savings. One point that I've always raised about CBC and this, again, should extend even if you love
00:05:06.480 CBC. I would love nothing more than for people to say, I love CBC so much I'm paying for a subscription
00:05:12.140 like I do for the Globe and Mail or the National Post or donating to True North or taking out a
00:05:17.260 subscription to the Western Standard, whatever the case is. People who like that. We're not saying
00:05:21.960 abolish the CBC. We're saying don't make it reliant on government money. Let it compete like anything
00:05:27.780 else. And even if even if we're going to have as a society this decision where we believe CBC is
00:05:33.260 important, CBC content's important. Why is it not a public good? Why is its content not free for other
00:05:39.360 people to republish? Why is it competing with private companies for the rights to carry the
00:05:44.880 Olympics, for example, something that companies pay a lot of money for? Why are they trying to elbow out
00:05:50.680 private sector media? That kind of defeats the purpose of CBC, which is to fill a void that they
00:05:55.920 say wouldn't exist in a free market. Andrew, so many good points that I want to dissect there.
00:06:01.960 Let's start with this. Even if we want to call this a public good, even if, right, does it really need
00:06:08.140 $1.4 billion every single year? Really $1.4 billion every single year? And to your earlier
00:06:16.420 point, you said, hey, we're not we're not looking to abolish the CBC, just remove the government
00:06:21.520 funding, right? The taxpayers money that has been forced to go to this organization. Now, we've been
00:06:27.460 doing a lot of digging through the annual reports just to just to make sure the numbers are correct.
00:06:31.760 And the last figure that I saw was that the CBC was able to raise about $500 million in non-government
00:06:39.340 revenue. So we're not saying abolish the CBC, just defund the subsidies that the government is giving
00:06:46.000 to the CBC. Now, who knows what would end up happening to the non-government revenue. But like I
00:06:52.080 said, the last number that we saw was $500 million not from the taxpayer. And I think there's an
00:06:58.860 important point there, because I don't think most Canadians, even many who signed that petition of
00:07:03.380 yours, would object to CBC saying, OK, we're going to get rid of the online news section. We're going
00:07:08.860 to get rid of, you know, Little Mosque on the Prairie or whatever the 2022 version of is. We're going to 0.97
00:07:14.340 get rid of all of that. We're going to broadcast in northern communities. We're going to broadcast in
00:07:18.940 indigenous languages. We're going to go where there is no private sector alternative. They could
00:07:23.460 probably do that for less than that $500 million you talked about. Yeah. Or it's certainly less
00:07:29.600 than the $1.4 billion every single year. Like I have to keep going to this, right? Because even if
00:07:35.140 you do want to make the argument that the government should be funding, I think, OK, like let's we can
00:07:39.120 arm wrestle over that for about a week. You and I going back and forth. But $1.4 billion every single
00:07:46.160 year. That is I think that is is quite unacceptable. And it's not just me. It's not just you. I think
00:07:53.260 that's one of the reasons why we saw 52,000 signatures on the petition in a week. That shows
00:07:58.700 me that there's many Canadians who clearly think that this is an issue and clearly think that this
00:08:04.720 is a big issue. And that petition is at taxpayer.com, correct? Yep, absolutely. Just head over to
00:08:10.140 taxpayer.com. Click on the petitions tab and you'll find it there. Franco Terrazano, Federal Director for the
00:08:15.980 Canadian Taxpayers Federation. Thanks very much. Good, sir. Hey, it was my pleasure. Thanks for
00:08:19.800 having me on. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to
00:08:24.120 True North at www.tnc.news.