Weekend reads: 'Defend or defund?'

Thoughts on the future of our national public broadcaster

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute recently invited me to sit on a panel about the future of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The webinar, which took place on Wednesday, was moderated by Aaron Wudrick, Director of the Domestic Policy Program, and also featured Andrew Coyne, columnist at The Globe and Mail, and Peter Menzies, a senior fellow at MLI, a former newspaper executive, and a former Vice Chair of Telecommunications at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. (You can read his latest policy paper on the Canadian media here, and his latest op-ed about the CRTC, for The Line, here.)

Given the increasingly heated nature of the debate over the future of the CBC — which The Globe and Mail’s editorial board recently weighed in on — this discussion was timely. I hope it was also constructive and fair. (You can read coverage on it at The Hub.)

Lean Out has had a productive year so far — publishing 71 times in the first half of 2023 — and I am now heading off on my annual summer break. Lean Out will be on hiatus for the next few weeks, but I wanted to leave you with this conversation, and some thoughts on why I continue to believe that the CBC should be reformed and not defunded.

I know some of you prefer reading content, as opposed to watching or listening. So for paid subscribers, I have included the full text of my opening statement for the MLI ‘Defend or Defund?’ webinar below.

See you all at the end of June!