How to Save the CBC

A radical plan to rescue the national public broadcaster from the chopping block

CBC broadcasting legend Peter Gzowski in 1974/Frank Lennon/Getty Images

As you read this, I am at Digital Media at the Crossroads, an annual media conference. I have been asked to speak about the future of the CBC, following a talk from Richard Stursberg — former executive vice president of CBC/Radio-Canada — who will speak on the future of Canadian private broadcasting. This post is timed to publish while I am on stage, so that you, my readers, will have access to the below remarks at the same time as the Toronto audience.

How to save the CBC

I want to talk this afternoon about what it would take, practically speaking, to save the CBC. But to begin with, allow me to tell you about my background with the organization, as part of its rank and file. I started at the CBC in 2013, as an interview producer on the TV show George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight. I then moved to current affairs, and did two stints each in both the Vancouver and Toronto newsrooms. I performed a number of different roles on about a dozen current affairs radio shows in these two regions, including: morning producer, night producer, director, show producer, chase producer, audience producer for town halls, and producer for holiday special shows. I also wrote lifestyles pieces for CBC digital, and I was an occasional on-air books columnist for the B.C. region, and later for Metro Morning and the Ontario region. I was a participant in the Doc Project training program, and produced several audio documentaries for national radio shows, and was designated an official mentor for young journalists in the Toronto newsroom. All of this allowed me to interact with numerous different show teams and hosts. I left the CBC in December of 2021, ending my contract a year early, and published my reasons for resigning in a post in January of 2022, which went viral.

I have been critical of the CBC. But I want to emphasize today that I love the institution, and I want to see it survive and thrive. It is from that perspective that I speak to you today.

The CBC is at a crossroads, as it faces the very real possibility that it could be significantly defunded. Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has outlined his plans to dramatically cut government funding, with a view to stripping English services while preserving French services. According to reporting from my colleague Harrison Lowman, if the Conservatives take power, that agenda will be executed in the first 100 days in office.

Incoming CBC president Marie-Philippe Bouchard inherits a public broadcaster in peril, on the verge of extinction. The task of preserving our national public broadcaster for future generations is an important and urgent one. So, let’s be clear: Ensuring the CBC’s survival will require the smashing of the status quo of the organization. This will no doubt be a painful process, but it will be less painful than Canadians losing an historic institution that sits at the centre of our media, our culture, and our national identity.

To save the CBC from the chopping block, Ms. Bouchard must confront the issue of low public trust. This is something that I have been researching, both on my current affairs interview podcast, Lean Out, and in the 2024 Massey Essay on the state of the media, a partnership between Massey College at the University of Toronto, and the Literary Review of Canada. I am also working on a book on lost public trust in the media for Polity Books in the UK, and recently testified on this issue at the House of Commons Heritage Committee.

A recent survey, “Do We Need the CBC?” from the McGill Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy shows that — at least among the 2,055 Canadian adults that were consulted — an overwhelming majority would like to see the CBC continue. This finding has been repeated on the CBC’s airwaves, including recently in Ms. Bouchard’s interview on The Current. Unfortunately, the caveat that comes with this statistic is often not repeated. So, allow me to read full sentence: “The vast majority (78%) of Canadians would like to see the CBC/Radio-Canada continue if it addresses its major criticisms.”

The CBC, and its supporters, desperately need to understand, acknowledge, and address these criticisms.

As someone who left the CBC publicly, I have heard from thousands of Canadians on this issue — in Tweets, in comments on my Substack, in text messages, and emails, and phone calls, on podcasts, and in informal conversations in people’s homes, over coffee, at events, and even at the dog park. I have also interviewed plenty of journalists, industry leaders, authors, and pundits about this issue. These are people from across the political spectrum.

The four major criticisms that I hear all revolve around this issue of low public trust.

First, many people feel that the CBC is biased in its coverage, and often shares only one side of a story, ignoring, dismissing, or deriding other viewpoints across the country. Most people that I’ve spoken to do not believe that the Liberals or CBC bosses hand down editorial diktats from on high, or even that individual journalists are partisan actors. Most that I have spoken to believe the organization exists in an ideological bubble and is thus hostile to, and ignorant of, ideas that it finds foreign to its dominant world view — and that the result is coverage that is both overly-narrow and tedious. I want to read a quote from my colleague Jen Gerson, at The Line:

“Take the carbon tax, MAID, government spending, contentious protests, gender identity, sex work, safe supply, diversity and inclusion, homelessness, and crime — these are some of the most pressing and contentious issues facing Canadians today. These are complicated issues, often morally fraught, and offer rich opportunities for real debate, reporting, and investigation. I don’t think that’s what we’re getting from the CBC right now. That is a problem, and an abrogation of the CBC’s duty to inform and serve a geographically and ideologically diverse public. Hence the anger.”

By the way, bias is often presented as an amorphous and subjective concept, something that cannot be easily defined or measured. In fact, it can, as recent work from University of Guelph political science professor Dave Snow has demonstrated at The Hub.

Moving on to the second major criticism, many people feel that the CBC has made mistakes in its coverage of key issues in this country. Pandemic coverage, coverage of the trucker protests and the Emergencies Act, are common complaints. Indeed, CBC’s own documents reflect the public’s frustration. The English services Ombudsman’s annual report for 2021-2022 records it as “the most active and contentious year” he’d ever experienced, and notes that complaints increased 60 percent from the previous year — saying that “the frequency and ferocity of fury in the messages … was jarring.”

The third criticism I hear is from many within the Canadian media, who argue that the CBC is unfairly using its $1.4-billion-dollar annual advantage to compete against struggling private media, as opposed to supporting the media ecosphere as a whole.

And the fourth major criticism I hear is that the CBC has abused the taxpayer’s trust by spending too much on bureaucracy — including paying lavish executive salaries and bonuses. According to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, the number of CBC employees taking home a six-figure annual salary has increased 231% since 2015. And Blacklock’s has reported that VPs now earn close to $500,000 per year. Add to that, CBC paid out $18.4 million in bonuses in 2024. The outrage about these bonuses cuts across political parties, and is shared by some of CBC’s own staff.

To save the CBC, Ms. Bouchard must meet all of these criticisms head-on, and enact real change — enough concrete reforms to justify a Conservative government stepping back from a very public and very popular pledge, and enough to signal to the party’s base that its concerns have been taken seriously.

Any plan to accomplish this will have to be both swift and radical. It will not be easy. But now is not the time for vague platitudes, or for cosmetic tinkering. Not when the fate of such an important institution hangs in the balance.

I have 15 suggestions for immediate action — any one of which would signal real change.

1. Refocus the CBC on the areas of the market that there is no good business case for, and that private industry is unlikely to serve — and get out of areas that are already overserved. The CBC is stretched way too thin, trying to be all things to all people. It should reorient itself around local news, investigative reporting, foreign reporting, current affairs coverage, and services other languages, including Indigenous languages. It should get out of entertainment, lifestyle, opinion (rebranded as “analysis”), and podcasts.

2. Decentralize the CBC. Focus on building small, nimble news hubs in multiple communities, particularly in rural areas and news deserts. Hire and train local talent to encourage more geographic diversity in staff, and thus a greater range of perspectives. Right now, two-thirds of CBC staff work out of Toronto or Montreal. And, as former Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon, author of the famed Shattered Mirror report on our media, noted recently in The Toronto Star, “unsurprisingly, CBC’s Overton Window has shifted toward the sensibilities of the urban centres where management and staff reside, often leaving others feeling left out.”

3. Get out of commercial advertising. The CBC should not be competing with, and thus undermining, media start-ups and legacy platforms that are already struggling to survive in an extremely challenging media environment.

4. Get out of streaming entertainment content. The market is already chock-full of commercial streaming services that CBC is not well-equipped to compete with. Also, Canadians should not be charged for subscriptions to watch content they paid to produce.

5. Abolish executive bonuses. No bonuses on the taxpayer dime.

6. Significantly reduce management roles, including in HR, communications, and DEI. The organization has become very top-heavy, with the corporation struggling under the weight of all of its non-news roles. Remedying this could yield tremendous cost savings for the corporation.

7. Stop relying on precarious labour. According to the TMU Review of Journalism, the CBC employs more than 2,000 temporary workers every day. Through its extensive use of precarious employment, the CBC has created a two-tiered employment environment that inhibits good journalism. The system is terrible for morale, and even worse for editorial independence. You simply cannot fight for stories if you have no idea when you’ll next get your next shift.

8. Affirm the CBC’s role in training the next generation of journalists. Make its resources available to other journalists: Offer more training sessions and public talks, bring back retired CBC veterans to train younger journalists in the rigors of craft, open up its studios after hours for the use of podcasters and news start-ups, make its reporting free for use to outlets across the country, collaborate with start-ups and air some of their content. I echo the sentiments of my colleague Jen Gerson: “I wish the CBC considered itself not as a competitor to private journalistic enterprise, but more like a public service, akin to a library.”

9. Reform hiring practices. Remove degree requirements to widen the talent pool, increasing economic diversity and combating the perception that we in the media are the elites. Abolish political litmus tests; parroting a narrow and often controversial approach to diversity and inclusion should not be a prerequisite for passing HR screenings and/or subsequent job interviews.

10. Enforce rules against CBC’s news-gathering and current affairs journalists commenting on controversial issues. CBC has a statement on this in its Journalistic Standards and Practices (JSP), which I’ll quote from now: “CBC journalists do not express their own personal opinion because it affects the perception of impartiality and could affect an open and honest exploration of an issue. We maintain the same standards, no matter where we publish — on CBC platforms or in other media outside the CBC.” This is a good rule, but unfortunately it’s unevenly enforced. Every time a journalist tweets their opinion on a contentious topic, it erodes credibility not just for the journalist but the institution as a whole. The CBC itself is aware of this problem. I’ll quote from a recent Ombudsman review: “… the public is free to draw conclusions about reporters who lay out their world views, even implicitly, on social media. And the real-world problem for CBC is that no matter how much rigour it brings to the stories it reports, those perceptions will colour the way the coverage is received by the audience.”

11. Set measurable institutional goals to increase conservative representation, in terms of staff, on-air talent, and guests. In my entire time at the CBC, I never encountered a single open conservative on staff. And conservative voices are few and far between on the airwaves. If we want conservatives to continue contributing their tax dollars to the organization, that has to change.

12. Hold guest speaker lunch-and-learns to introduce CBC staff to new ideas, expanding institutional knowledge on different perspectives, especially on contentious issues. CBC staff need more exposure to different viewpoints. I am convinced that much of what appears to be bias is simply lack of awareness of other perspectives and arguments.

13. Conduct an extensive review of the CBC’s pandemic coverage, including coverage of the trucker protests and the Emergencies Act, and make the results public. Hold a press conference and discuss the findings frankly. Apologize for any stories where coverage did not hold up, and/or issue corrections.

14. Follow the leadership of The New York Times and publicly reaffirm the value of journalistic objectivity. Since 2020, the aim of journalistic objectivity has come under fire in journalistic circles. But the public still highly values impartial reporting, as research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has demonstrated. Times editor Joe Kahn, speaking to Semafor, recently touched on a “big push” within the paper to “re-establish our norms and emphasize independent journalism” — and the CBC should do this as well.

15. The CBC should stop blaming external forces, and present a positive vision for the national public broadcaster. To date, the approach that the public broadcaster has taken has been to blame external forces for its troubles, pointing the finger at Big Tech, social media, a polluted information environment, hostile politicians, news avoidance, atomized attention, and political polarization. The broadcaster should instead focus on the value that the CBC could add to public life, including, as I’ve written in the past: Local news in areas that are remote and/or commercially unviable; service in other languages; resource-heavy investigative reporting and foreign reporting; reporting aimed at government and corporate accountability, which is often adversarial and litigious and requires institutional weight; intellectually stimulating current affairs radio shows with a good mix of content for all interests and perspectives, providing a forum for lively debate on the nation’s most pressing issues; local morning radio shows that help people access the richness of their communities, and help newcomers in particular to acclimatize to Canadian news and culture and politics; cultural programming that builds social cohesion and national identity (think: the Tragically Hip’s last concert, which attracted an audience of 11.7 million); the celebration of Canadian art and music and theatre and comedy and literature — not to mention the veritable treasure trove of Canadian history that the CBC has to draw on, in the form of invaluable archives.

I want to leave you with that positive vision of what the CBC could be, and has been at points in the past. I want to stress, again, that if the CBC wants to survive, Ms. Bouchard is going to have to be bold.

I wish her every success. I, like many Canadians, will be rooting for her.