Western Standard - March 10, 2026


Brian Lilley on CBC’s $1M libel case


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

159.75526

Word count

235

Sentence count

17


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 At one point, the largest libel settlement in Canadian history was with CBC and a doctor out of Ottawa, who they smeared his reputation, claimed he was taking his findings were because he was taking trips from a pharmaceutical company.
00:00:16.720 It was proven that wasn't true.
00:00:18.360 He asked for a simple apology.
00:00:20.020 They refused to admit they did anything wrong.
00:00:23.520 And so they ended up having to pay a million dollars because they wouldn't say sorry.
00:00:29.140 When I first started with the Sun in 2010, CBC had just become subject to the Access to Information Act.
00:00:37.900 And, you know, there were limits.
00:00:39.200 You can't find out about their journalism or sources or things like that.
00:00:42.160 But how the business is run, they were supposed to be like any government department.
00:00:46.000 And there was a stack of ATIPs that our company had filed, paid for, filed.
00:00:52.480 But it was all nothing.
00:00:54.040 They wouldn't admit to anything.
00:00:55.540 And so I made that the story.
00:00:56.740 At one point, Carmen, Hubert Lacroix, the then head of CBC, was hauled before committee and asked why they were claiming that they ran the entire network with one Ford sedan and one truck.
00:01:12.960 Because we just asked a simple question.
00:01:15.320 How many vehicles does CBC own or lease for their network?
00:01:20.660 Everything was redacted, except they admitted to one sedan.
00:01:24.100 It was like a Ford Taurus or something and one truck.