Juno News - September 28, 2022Why it’s time to defund the CBC
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Summary
The CBC is a beacon for truth against fake news, according to its CEO Catherine Tate, while the federal liberals claim that Canada just wouldn t be the same without the CBC. In this week's Reality Check, host Jasmine Moulton uncovers the conflict of interest inherent in Canada's national broadcaster.
Transcript
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The CBC is a beacon for truth against fake news, according to its CEO Catherine Tate,
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while the federal liberals claim that Canada just wouldn't be the same without the CBC.
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I'm Jasmine Moulton and it's time for a reality check.
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This show is called Reality Check, but it really could be called
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leftists say the darndest things. And there's no shortage of silly statements when it comes to
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talking about Canada's national broadcaster, the CBC. But before we get to that, if you're
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watching on YouTube, please leave a comment because I'd love to hear what topics you want us to debunk
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next week. As you know, every week we debunk one common leftist myth in Canada. And so far,
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some of those examples include the rich get richer, poor get poorer, that Canada has the best healthcare
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system in the world and that our schools need more funding. So please drop a comment below and let me
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know what topic you think we should cover next week. Now back to this week's topic, the CBC.
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. How many journalism degrees does it take to understand
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that accepting money from government is a conflict of interest in journalism? I mean, I'm not a
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journalistic expert by any means, but it seems pretty obvious that if your funding comes from
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taxpayers from the government and it's your duty to report on the government, that's obviously a
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blatant conflict of interest. How can you honestly report on a government budget, for example, if
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they're reducing your own funding? Do you think that's a great thing? No, of course you wouldn't.
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And this is probably why you see a lot of people in this space, especially in the CBC, who are pro-big
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government, who think that government spending is inherently good. So even though there's this
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really obvious tension underlying the entire concept of a national broadcaster, leftists continue
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year after year to defend the CBC. Specifically, they argue that the CBC's funding should be
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increased for three main reasons. One, because the CBC protects Canadian culture and identity.
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Two, because the CBC is comparatively underfunded compared to international counterparts. And three,
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because our national broadcaster is tasked with providing local coverage. Let's debunk the left's
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first argument in support of CBC, which is that the CBC is necessary in order to build and maintain
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Canadian culture and identity. So the very idea that the CBC is supposed to build or maintain
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Canada's identity and culture might be laughable to you, because perhaps you identify as everything
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opposite of what the CBC represents. But we still need to dissect this argument, because it really
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is the number one go-to argument that leftists use in support of the CBC. But first, it's worth
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asking, what is Canadian culture? What defines our identity as Canadians? You might say Canadians are
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polite, that maybe they're a little bit too apologetic. And often what comes to mind when you think
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of Canada and Canada's identity is that we're very multicultural, but not according to the CBC. Here's
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a CBC doc that was unearthed by my colleague, Harrison Faulkner. Take a look.
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Let me ask you a question. How many of you would trade places with a Black person in this society?
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Well, it's yes or no. How many of you would do it?
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I mean, I hated a Hispanic very dark-skinned.
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So I spent many years thinking of myself, of having very dark-skinned children.
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The question is, how many of you would be willing to trade places in this society with a Black
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I'm not saying there's not racism. Absolutely not. It's just saying I don't see it.
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You know, in this country, we created the criminalization of Black people.
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And when your skin is seen as a weapon, you're never unarmed.
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And that's why Black boys and men and women are dying in the street with their hands up.
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What you just saw was a CBC documentary called Race to Dinner, Deconstructing Karen.
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Census data from Stats Canada confirms that Canada is actually one of the most multicultural
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In fact, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all across the world choose to make Canada
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But instead, the CBC chooses to air this extremely divisive documentary that paints Canadian culture
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And this is precisely the problem with putting a few cultural elites at the CBC in charge of defining
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what Canadian culture and identity ought to be.
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This is Peter Mansbridge, who is a longtime news anchor and chief correspondent for the CBC,
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talk about how the cultural bias of the CBC is real.
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So, what I would say is that there can at times be an inherent bias that gives a Toronto-centric
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And it's something that we struggle here against.
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I mean, I remember when I started my career, the first 10 years in Western Canada, I used to
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thought, oh, those people in Toronto, man, they have no understanding of what it's like
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here on the prairies, and all they ever talk about is their kind of Toronto issues.
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Now, I don't think that's entirely fair, but I do think there can be an inherent bias
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simply by the fact that some of the main players, not just of the CBC, but in the national media,
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live in, you know, the proximity of downtown Toronto.
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And so, therefore, they're affected, they and their families are affected by everything
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from, you know, like the Toronto transit system, the Toronto healthcare, Toronto schools, Toronto
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sewers, the, you know, the condition of Toronto roads, and they're always thinking that stuff.
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And sometimes they tend to apply Toronto standards to their thinking behind the coverage of stories
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So, I, you know, I think that is a legitimate area to talk about.
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I don't buy the political bias stuff, never have at all.
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And quite frankly, I can tell you, when the Conservatives have been in power, I hear from
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When, you know, and when the Liberals are in power, we hear, you know, the same thing.
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This clip should cast a lot of doubt on the CBC's role as defining Canadian culture and
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But what makes that role even more dubious is the fact that the CBC's president, Catherine
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The story broke during the pandemic that she's been living in a multi-million dollar brownstone
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And this is literally the person in charge of the organization defining Canadian culture
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So, it's not surprising that the CBC gets Canadian culture and identity wrong so often.
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Now, I was reminded of this recently when the CBC published a news piece, not even an opinion
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piece, an op-ed given by one of its contributors, but a literal news piece published by one of
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He interviews a now 21-year-old, but this kid who talks about when he was 13, how he could
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have been radicalized by watching Ben Shapiro videos on YouTube.
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So, if any of our viewers are unfamiliar, Ben Shapiro is a Conservative commentator from the
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U.S., and he actually has quite a sizable Canadian audience.
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I, for example, enjoy his content and watch it far more often than I would be caught watching
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But of course, that doesn't prevent the CBC from running this hip piece on Ben Shapiro.
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And listen to the following quote from the article.
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That doesn't make me a sexist or a misogynist, which, as a reminder, a misogynist is defined
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as a person who's strongly prejudiced against women.
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Simply because I enjoy the content of a Conservative commentator that the cultural elites at the
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But of course, this is nothing new, because the CBC runs a ton of content that runs counter
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For example, the CBC published commentary by an Elections Canada worker that painted elderly
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white voters and Conservative voters as hateful and racist.
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CBC Kids claimed that Harry Potter author J.K.
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Rowling is transphobic and dangerous for saying that only women can menstruate.
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And last but not least, CBC Docs is airing a show called Drag Kids, which profiles children
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A lot of Canadians would not identify with any of this content, and beyond just simply not
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identifying with it, they'd find it morally repugnant.
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Based on these examples alone, the CBC cannot rightfully claim to be a cultural representative
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But even if the CBC didn't run some of these pieces that run counter to the identity
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of broad swaths of Canadians, the idea that any single institution in Canada should be
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responsible for defining Canadian culture is a terrible idea.
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By its very definition, culture should be a bottom-up phenomenon, not a top-down dictate.
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So ultimately, I think this reveals a sort of arrogance that anyone in society thinks that
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there are cultural better and that they alone can be tasked with defining what Canadian culture
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So the idea that we need government to safeguard our culture is ridiculous on its face.
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Yet this is the argument that leftists often use to argue that the CBC needs more funding.
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And this brings us nicely into argument number two that leftists often make is that the CBC
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If you take a look at this CBC presentation deck, it shows that Canada ranks 15th out of 20 countries
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Now, of course, spending on public broadcasters is a subset of government spending on culture.
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So the argument they're really trying to make here is, look, there's a lot of countries that
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spend a lot more on their public broadcasters than Canada does.
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Therefore, we should increase the CBC's funding.
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But the argument that they're making here is really a weird one.
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Because if you look, Canada does spend more on culture per capita than other countries such
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as Japan, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, and the United States.
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So is the CBC trying to argue here that Canada has more culture than Italy?
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Or does Norway, for example, the country that spends most on culture, does Norway have more
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The idea that government spending can increase culture is absurd.
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So the argument that the CBC needs more money really comes down to priorities.
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Canada's debt is growing massively, spending is out of control, and Canadians are feeling the
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pinch right now in an inflationary environment where many are teetering on the brink of being
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So the question becomes, is the CBC really that important that we need to increase taxes
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on Canadians or add to the debt burden, which is essentially just a future tax liability for
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Is the CBC that important that we need to add billions of dollars in spending for it?
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And as a reminder, while many Canadians in the private sector lost their jobs during the
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pandemic, the CBC, which is apparently crying poor, handed out over $30 million in raises paid for by
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So this information was discovered through an access to information request by Blackbox
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And they found that the CBC during the pandemic gave out raises to over a thousand full-time
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employees, totaling on average about $15,000 each.
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So it's a little hard to feel bad for the CBC when they cry poor after they hand out $30 million
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But of course, the best way for the CBC to make money would be for it to produce content
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But as True North reported, the CBC is bleeding money and bleeding viewers.
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Ad revenues for English language TV programs fell by 37% from 2018 to 2019.
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And the CBC's total market share fell to a meager 5% in 2019, down from 8% the year prior.
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The total audience tuning into local evening CBC TV newscasts was only about 319,000 Canadians
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That's approximately 0.8% of Canada's population.
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Obviously, without viewers, your advertising revenue is going to fall.
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And the CBC annual report for 2020-2021, indeed, acknowledged that advertising revenues were
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But the CBC doesn't have an incentive to improve its content to attract more viewers, when
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in reality, all they have to do is just rely on taxpayers.
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And Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was fully on board for this approach because in his mandate
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letter to Pablo Rodriguez, who's the Heritage Minister, he said this.
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He actually tasked the Cabinet Minister with providing additional funding to CBC to make
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So with less private advertising, now taxpayers are going to have to pick up more of the bill
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As a reminder, they already fund about 71% of it, meaning the rest would come from private
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The Prime Minister thinks that taxpayers should pick up a greater portion of that.
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And also, at the same time, that funding to the public broadcaster should be increased.
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Now, this is my favourite argument that leftists make in support of CBC that I love to debunk
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They love to say that, hey, why are you so upset that CBC only costs per capita about $33
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So for starters, this is bad math because they include kids in that population.
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And kids, for the most part, don't pay taxes, federal income taxes, which is what goes to
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So immediately, you have to cut kids out of the total population that you're using in this
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Also, what a lot of people might not know is that not all Canadian adults even pay federal
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In fact, one third of Canadian adults don't pay any federal income tax.
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So actually, when you only consider the taxpayers who are footing the bill for the CBC, the number
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And the most obvious rebuttal to all of this is that why should any taxpayer have to pay for
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something that they're not using, a service that they're not consuming?
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And in reality, the CBC actually costs a lot more than the nominal funding that it gets
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every year because it's completely debt funded.
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So in 2021, the CBC costs $1.4 billion is the amount in the budget that the government
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But the government was in deficit by over $100 billion that year.
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So no, it didn't technically have the $1.4 billion that it gave to the CBC.
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If you look at the average cost of interest on the government's debt for that year, it
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came out to about 2.15% is the interest rate that they were paying on their debt.
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So an interest rate of 2.15% on the cost of the CBC, $1.4 billion in 2021, actually means
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that taxpayers had to pay an extra $30 million or more in interest on the amount that we spent
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So sorry, viewers, the CBC actually costs you millions more than you think.
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But again, the real question in all of this is why should any Canadian be forced to pay
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for the CBC when they don't watch or listen to it?
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And this brings us to our third and final argument why leftists think that Canada needs the CBC.
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In today's media landscape, leftists will argue that there's not a market case to be
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made in these smaller markets, smaller local markets.
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They're not economic necessarily to run a newsroom out of anymore, as more advertising dollars
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have gone to tech giants like Google and Facebook.
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They argue that the CBC should operate in these smaller local markets where there's
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But shockingly, as we saw during the pandemic, the CBC actually shut down its local coverage
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at a time that Canadians would have needed it most.
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Susan Margetti, who's the general manager of CBC News, Current Affairs, and Local,
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As Canadians turn to us for the latest developments during these unprecedented times, we're temporarily
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pooling our resources into one core news offering.
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We are needed now more than ever, and we will work together across the organization to serve
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Canadians night and day with the trusted news and critical information they need for the
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duration of the pandemic while keeping our team safe.
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Simply stated, extraordinary times require extraordinary measures.
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They don't even realize how they're shooting themselves in the foot here because a lot
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of their defenders say that local news coverage is their raison d'etre, that this is why they
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exist, but obviously during the pandemic, they couldn't even keep that alive.
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But this obviously does bring up a large criticism of the CBC, which is that they actually compete
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with private industry, private media that could have otherwise popped up in the space.
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If it's difficult to run a news operation in a small local community, it becomes that
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much more difficult when you have a multi-billion dollar funded competitor to compete with.
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It is inappropriate that any government-funded institution in this country should be defining
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and dictating what Canadian culture and identity are.
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If the CBC truly was a relevant cultural force in Canada, then more than 5% of the market
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But of course, the CBC is bleeding ad revenue and viewership, but instead of improving its
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content, it instead just dips further and further into taxpayers' pockets.
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And it's all too quick to axe local coverage when the going gets tough.
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Frankly, the CBC is the last institution in this country that should be defining our culture
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and identity, and it's not justifiable as a taxpayer expense, especially in these times
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when taxpayers are struggling to even afford their groceries.
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If you like the work that we do, please support it.
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Let us know what topics you want us to cover next week.
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I'm Jasmine Moulton, and this is Reality Check.