Ms. Budd’s termination is another sign of the corporation’s efforts to update its programming, observers have noted. “It isn’t enough to have the audience that you have,” she says, explaining her take on the CBC’s rationale. “[But] it’s not as if As it Happens doesn’t already have [younger people] listening and writing in.
“My performance was never called into question during these discussions,” she adds. “Over the last while, the corporate spokespeople and the senior management have always been very clear that they’ve been fans of mine.”
But the CBC wants more journalists on air as opposed to “presenters,” which is how Ms. Budd, who is an actor, has been described. It’s a delineation that slightly rankles. “I haven’t studied journalism, but I think that, on the job for 17 years, after being so closely entrenched in the show, people might assume that there’s a certain amount of journalism that’s rubbed off on me.” Still, she’s not bitter. “I knew I wasn’t the journalistic part of the duo. I didn’t quibble with it because I loved what I was doing, and in listeners’ minds, there’s never any distinction between those roles.”
After graduating from York University’s theatre program, Ms. Budd worked for five seasons with the Stratford Theatre Company in Stratford, Ont. Returning to Toronto, she did a variety of acting jobs and frequently performed in radio dramas for the CBC, a gig which led to employment as an on-air presenter for the public broadcaster.
A single, never-married mother of an adopted 17-year-old boy, Thomas, who has special needs, she is fearful about what’s next, she admits. “This is no longer about me or ego or anything else. This is about providing for my son and my future,” Ms. Budd says. She may return to some acting and has been working on a non-fiction book for the past year and a half. The day after her on-air announcement of her departure, her e-mail inbox filled with more than 400 well wishes from listeners.
“My life has been amazing, “ she declares suddenly. Born in St. Catharines, Ont., the middle of three daughters of a father who owned a gas station and a mother who taught school, “I have never applied for a job in my life – aside from auditioning as an actress – and I’ve never stopped working from the time I was 14.”
Her guiding principal has always been to be herself, which involves integrity, honesty and humour, she says. She tells me that on the day she had to sit down with senior CBC management to discuss how she would break the news of her departure to listeners, she was reminded of something a guidance counsellor had said to her when she was 15.
Her teacher presented her with an “intention” sheet, which included the question, “Who do you want to be?” She was supposed to write down a dream vocation.
Cheeky even then, she challenged him. “Well, shouldn’t you have written, ‘What do you want to do?’ ” she recalls retorting.
And then she gave him her response. “I said I don’t know what I want to do but I know I want to be me.” She pauses again. Another booming laugh. “That’s 43 years ago, and I knew it then and I know it now.”
Editor’s note: A different version of this article ran in the print version of Monday’s Globe and Mail.
