The National Telegraph - Wyatt Claypool - December 30, 2023


The Failing CBC Is Stealing Taxpayer Money!

Topics
CBC budget shortfall
Hosted by
Wyatt Claypool
Mentioned
John A. Macdonald Daniel Boardman Catherine Tate Queen Victoria Rick Mercer
Trudeau's UBI Dream and Liberal Shill Content The Left doesn't care Canada is broken

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

192.96

Word count

2,274

Sentence count

130

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is facing a budget shortfall of $129 million, and is trying to find a way to make up for it by cutting jobs, while still handing out massive bonuses to executives and on-air personalities. In this episode, I discuss why the CBC should be wiped out as an institution.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.560 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in my mind, has moved away from just being a massive waster of Canadian taxpayer money to being flat-out thieves of Canadian taxpayer money.
00:00:10.760 I'm not sure if you heard, but the CBC recently cancelled its New Year's broadcast in order to try and help make up for a $129 million budget shortfall that they're experiencing.
00:00:20.880 I guess this saves us all from having to watch Rick Mercer. Not that any of us really watched the CBC, but now we don't have to accidentally see a clip of his on social media.
00:00:30.380 But it's quite pathetic that they can't even host something that they've done every single year because they're supposedly running out of money.
00:00:37.960 And now you might be asking yourself, well, did the Liberals and NDP cut their budget? I don't think so. 0.84
00:00:42.920 They obviously support the CBC a lot. I need to be correct. Their budget from taxpayer money has not been cut.
00:00:49.140 They somehow are experiencing a budget shortfall because, unsurprisingly, their content sucks so much they can't even get advertisers to pay them money for commercials,
00:00:59.500 or at least they can't get them to pay nearly as much as they used to.
00:01:02.820 So the $129 million budget shortfall has nothing to do with government support.
00:01:10.160 The government support's been going up every year.
00:01:12.640 They're going to be getting $1.3 billion next year, and somehow they still can't pay for everything.
00:01:19.280 And it really does demonstrate just how subpar and liberal-leaning the content has become.
00:01:25.860 It was just a few months ago that the CBC had to admit that their target of 4.2% of the Canadian media market
00:01:33.820 that they were hoping to capture in viewership was too high,
00:01:36.640 and I believe that they had re-estimated it for next year down to only 3.8% of the market.
00:01:42.780 That is insanely low, and it's because nobody watches their content.
00:01:47.520 I know I already said that, but you can't put too fine a point on it.
00:01:50.980 It's not that, oh, social media is taking over the news space and people don't want to watch traditional media anymore.
00:01:57.500 If you go down south, American news networks are not having a problem,
00:02:01.440 still attracting millions of people watching them every day.
00:02:04.400 The CBC, relative to American news outlets, actually has about the same operating budget in terms of proportion.
00:02:11.900 They're about eight times as big as us, and the CBC is about an eighth of the budget that CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News would have.
00:02:18.560 And they still can't make a go of it, and they're trying to claim it's because we're just so altruistic.
00:02:23.540 We're just trying to do all this great francophone content for people who live outside Quebec,
00:02:28.200 and we're trying to do northern content for those who live in the territories, and it just costs so much.
00:02:32.440 These people are not spending in order to benefit you.
00:02:36.280 They actually spend money to benefit themselves.
00:02:38.660 The CBC's own reporters had to comment on the fact and go after their CEO because they're still trying to hand out bonuses to executives,
00:02:46.860 as well as on-air personalities and other people who work at CBC,
00:02:50.440 despite the fact that they're literally cutting 10% of their workforce.
00:02:54.240 They are cutting 600 employees and non-union workers.
00:02:57.760 Obviously, you can't get rid of the union workers because, for some reason, job security should be of highest priority in media.
00:03:04.780 Not good content, job security.
00:03:07.460 So here's the clip of their own reporter actually having to grill the CEO who just has no good answer
00:03:12.120 for why they're still potentially going to dole out, I think it was like $12 million in bonuses.
00:03:17.280 You could have kept a lot of those people employed.
00:03:19.180 I don't think any of them should stay employed because I think the CBC should be wiped out as an institution,
00:03:23.960 but I'll get back to that after the clip.
00:03:26.460 I'm just curious about something.
00:03:27.940 I'm going to presume no bonuses this year.
00:03:30.520 I mean, the Canadian Taxpayer Federation said a Freedom of Information request showed $16 million were paid in bonuses in 2022.
00:03:37.620 Can we establish that that is not happening this year?
00:03:41.100 It's too early to say where we are for this year.
00:03:44.660 We'll be looking at that like we do all our line items in the coming months.
00:03:49.300 So there's a chance bonuses could still happen at a time when jobs are being cut?
00:03:54.640 Again, I'm not going to comment on something that hasn't been discussed at this point.
00:03:59.760 Okay.
00:04:01.420 Good job for the CBC reporting on themselves, but I don't think this should even be happening in the first place.
00:04:07.500 That is blatant theft.
00:04:09.240 If the CBC is experiencing a budget shortfall and they are getting $1.3 billion in Canadian taxpayer money,
00:04:15.520 I think Canadian taxpayers should expect that they should be cutting things that they do not need.
00:04:20.520 I think that Catherine Tate, the CEO of CBC right there, she could take a pay cut if she was actually really dedicated to having a good, healthy public broadcaster,
00:04:30.920 but they're cutting programming, not good programming, I'll give you that,
00:04:34.360 but they're cutting programming while still trying to give out bonuses.
00:04:38.980 They could be cutting salaries from executives, from on-air personality if they were actually caring about keeping these other people employed,
00:04:46.460 but they don't.
00:04:47.080 They're just taking taxpayer money and they're trying to find the most efficient way to give it to liberal friends who work for them as humanly possible.
00:04:54.860 That's just theft.
00:04:56.300 I'm not one of those guys who says all taxation is theft.
00:04:59.340 I think that's silly, but at the point where you're just simply taking Canadian taxpayer monies to pay out to people who are not even doing their jobs,
00:05:08.920 that's blatant theft.
00:05:11.440 And the liberal argument for the CBC, and they're going to be deploying this a lot in the next federal election,
00:05:16.960 is that the CBC is a heritage institution and we can't get rid of them because they're just, you know, 1.00
00:05:22.940 it's just part of the Canadian culture that the CBC exists.
00:05:26.540 I want to look up how long they've existed.
00:05:28.340 Sorry for not doing my homework before this.
00:05:31.220 I believe that they've been around like since like the, you know, since like when?
00:05:36.680 1936, probably about when I was about to guess.
00:05:39.720 They've been around since 1936 and it's quite rich that the liberals constantly defend the CBC as like a major part of Canadian heritage, 0.96
00:05:47.300 while they say nothing about protesters, Antifa morons running around, 0.95
00:05:52.300 pulling down statues of John A. 0.99
00:05:54.160 MacDonald and Queen Victoria, renaming streets, not saying a word when old churches are being burnt down.
00:05:59.900 These people could care less about Canadian heritage.
00:06:02.580 They just like the CBC because it gives a subtle left-wing biased take on the news that shuffles people into voting for the liberals.
00:06:11.500 Not so left-wing that they might vote NDP, just enough that they'll keep the establishment government in their place.
00:06:17.300 There's a reason why older voters, 65 plus voters, tend to vote liberal disproportionately to the rest of the population.
00:06:24.860 It's because they watch legacy media like the CBC.
00:06:27.660 And for that matter, all legacy media, CTV, Global, Toronto Star, all these organizations, these failing crappy media organizations,
00:06:37.160 I do a better job just filming random opinion videos like this than they do on their own broadcasts.
00:06:43.260 There's just no quality, bad coverage, obvious liberal narratives.
00:06:47.940 They shouldn't be getting a single dime of Canadian taxpayer money, just as I shouldn't get a dime of it.
00:06:52.240 I don't deserve your money, and the CBC definitely doesn't either.
00:06:56.520 And what I wanted also, like, it is not, the CBC is not some sort of key part of Canadian heritage.
00:07:03.240 It's only a good part of Canadian heritage as long as it respects that heritage and at least attempts to actually fulfill its role.
00:07:10.860 Neutral, unbiased media, especially in areas where they can't afford to sort of support journalism.
00:07:16.440 Yeah, like, in communities in the north, I'm fine with that, and there's only a couple thousand people who live in a town,
00:07:21.780 and the CBC can subsidize some local journalists to do coverage that we usually wouldn't be able to get enough money to support.
00:07:28.040 Fair enough.
00:07:28.740 They have not done that. 1.00
00:07:29.900 Watch any stupid CBC gem show. 1.00
00:07:32.040 Not that you should. 1.00
00:07:32.820 Your eyes will bleed if you attempt to.
00:07:35.080 Watch any news broadcast. 0.97
00:07:36.420 It's nonsense.
00:07:37.440 It's pablum.
00:07:39.020 Me and Daniel Boardman, he usually does the worst of the CBC series. 0.98
00:07:42.920 And when I guested with him one time to watch the CBC with him, in a 45-minute broadcast, they did the same stupid story five times because they can't even, 0.86
00:07:52.980 their own CBC The National, the 45-minute news segment plus commercials, cannot somehow do any original journalism. 0.95
00:08:01.260 They have, like, three stories that they just keep whacking away on, constantly putting out left-wing narratives and not even covering the story correctly on a factual level.
00:08:09.440 It's horrible.
00:08:10.480 These people don't deserve a budget.
00:08:11.920 They should be flat-out defunded. 0.77
00:08:13.600 Anyone who defends the CBC should be mocked.
00:08:15.980 And the CBC was not always bad.
00:08:18.120 They used to actually be able to deliver at least something that Canadian taxpayers, I don't think taxpayer dollars should be going to media in the first place.
00:08:24.640 But at least taxpayers could at least feel like at least it's not being completely wasted.
00:08:28.540 Maybe it's not legitimate that they're taking our money and putting out, like, any content that should be private.
00:08:34.260 But they used to do good stuff.
00:08:35.560 I have a prop right here.
00:08:36.660 I love their rendition of the Mikado.
00:08:38.840 This was done in the 80s, though.
00:08:40.100 I can't find you anything in the last decade that the CBC has done that I'm, like, proud of as a Canadian.
00:08:45.660 It's not – why should I feel prideful that there are bloated crown corporations existing in Canada?
00:08:51.220 Do you look at – do you look at, like, the – like, do you look at the DMV in your, like, community and are prideful about it?
00:08:58.840 No, it's a badly run institution that I don't care about.
00:09:03.380 I want good institutions.
00:09:05.180 And the CBC is not one of them.
00:09:07.380 Like, the thing is that, too, is that the CBC has completely inversed what it usually is to be a public entity.
00:09:14.800 Because even though it's going to say it's a private entity and they sometimes generate their own private money, not really.
00:09:19.640 It's all off the back of Canadian taxpayer money.
00:09:21.440 It's effectively a public institution.
00:09:23.080 Public employees should be generally not as well paid as private employees, but they get a little bit of a better pension and it's a stable job.
00:09:32.420 The CBC is one of – one of – yeah, a litany of public institutions where everyone gets paid massive salaries that are bigger than private institution salaries.
00:09:43.180 They get fat pensions and they can never be fired unless, like, the CBC, they fire their own non-unionized employees in order to keep giving themselves bonuses for themselves and all the unionized employees.
00:09:54.160 It's just completely incestuous. 0.99
00:09:56.840 This needs to be stopped.
00:09:58.060 And I do not feel bad about any of these people who end up losing their jobs at the CBC.
00:10:03.020 You don't deserve to be subsidized to play bad – like, to, you know, pretend to be a journalist.
00:10:09.060 It's just not something that I care about at all.
00:10:11.900 Anyways, that should be it for me today.
00:10:14.520 I have my usual donation link for my legal fund in the description of this video.
00:10:19.000 I'm being sued by a billionaire because myself, the National Telegraph, and our guest writers do good reporting and we will defend them.
00:10:25.700 I'm $25,000 deep into defending us, so just chipping in any money really helps me out.
00:10:31.720 And then I just also want to mention that I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination.
00:10:37.380 So if any of you live in that riding and know someone who lives in the riding, make sure you or they have a Conservative Party membership and vote for me number one on the ballot.
00:10:45.520 I don't know when the nomination date's going to be, but probably within a year.
00:10:48.560 So all you probably need is a one-year membership.
00:10:50.240 And, you know, other than that, always make sure you know which riding you live in.
00:10:54.520 I know a lot of people in this country who do not know what their electoral district is, and that's a little scary because it means that you're going to be far less effective at engaging in politics.
00:11:03.060 So even if you don't live in the city of Calgary, make sure you can name your riding.
00:11:07.400 Even just comment which riding you live in the description of this video or this comment section.
00:11:12.000 I want to make sure that people are paying attention and they are active enough that they can actually stop bad candidates who are running for nominations in their area or they know which ward or provincial riding that they live in.
00:11:23.940 So they know if it's a riding that really needs help to be taken back from the Liberals and the NDP or it's an area where we could be, you know, you could be getting on an EDA and you could be potentially pushing forward good policy for party AGMs.
00:11:37.460 Make sure that you're engaged because if you're not engaged, you can't complain that the country's going down the toilet.
00:11:42.840 Other than that, I hope everyone has a great day.
00:11:45.360 Sorry for the rant.
00:11:46.220 It's just my style.