CBC’s president inadvertently makes the case for scrapping the public broadcaster

Open this photo in gallery:

Quebec Minister of the French Language Jean-François Roberge offered a provocative historical comparison to emphasize the inherent unfairness of CBC/Radio-Canada’s decision to split just-announced job cuts equally between the public broadcaster’s French and English networks.

“It’s as if they are making Radio-Canada pay for CBC’s difficulties,” Mr. Roberge said of the broadcaster’s plan to cut expenses by $125-million to offset higher programming costs and slumping advertising revenues. “It seems to me the last time that happened was in 1840, with the Act of Union, when Upper Canada’s debts were sent to Lower Canada.”

Without getting into the nitty-gritty details of what happened 183 years ago, it is safe to say that CBC/Radio-Canada president Catherine Tait has become about as popular in Quebec these days as Lord Durham was back then. Her serially tone-deaf management blunders have alienated staff at the French network by failing to honour Radio-Canada’s distinct identity and superior ratings.

The plan Ms. Tait unveiled on Tuesday – dividing 500 programming job cuts equally between CBC and Radio-Canada – was like adding insult to injury for Quebec’s information and creative classes, who have bemoaned Toronto-based managers’ obsession with political correctness, diversity and Indigeneity at the expense of basic journalism and compelling programming.

Unlike the CBC, which seems hopelessly lost as it employs one desperate programming gimmick after another in search of recognition, Radio-Canada knows what it is and whom it serves. Public-broadcasting purists rightly point out that too much of the French network’s content is overtly populist and commercial in nature. But its public-affairs programming is of high quality, and mercifully freer of the moralizing tone that CBC viewers and listeners must endure.

Radio-Canada also provides better value for taxpayer money. The French network brought in $88.3-million in advertising revenue and subscriber fees in first half of its current fiscal year, slightly more than the $86.7-million that the English network generated – even though the CBC serves a potential domestic audience that is four times larger than Radio-Canada’s. The English network’s expenses were $423.7-million, compared to $353.7-million for the French network.

The CBC’s market share for English television fell to 4.4 per cent in 2022-23, a half-percentage point below its own modest 4.9-per-cent target and 1.4 points below its 5.8-per-cent share in 2021-22, an exceptional year with both summer and winter editions of the Olympics being held in the same fiscal period. The Olympics do bring in a lot of ad revenue for the CBC, but it also bears huge (but undisclosed) expenses for the Canadian broadcasting rights to the games and to televise Olympic events.

Radio-Canada’s share of the French TV market, meanwhile, stood at 23.2 per cent in 2022-23. CBC Radio One and CBC Music claimed a combined 14.2-per-cent share of the English radio market; Radio-Canada’s radio networks, ICI Première and ICI Musique, boasted a 23.4-per-cent share in French market.

Only one CBC program that got financing from the Canada Media Fund – a New Year’s Eve special – drew more than a million viewers in 2021-22. The highest-rated domestic-made show on English TV that year was CTV’s Transplant, with 1.26 million viewers. Radio-Canada’s New Year’s Eve sketch-comedy review, Bye Bye, drew an audience of 5.2 million. The French network’s nightly police drama District 31, which has since ended, had an average of almost 1.9 million viewers. The series that replaced District 31, the hospital-set drama STAT, is just as popular.

The conventional public-broadcasting model is broken everywhere. But Radio-Canada is a lot less broken than the CBC. The French network’s relevance to the lives of Quebeckers and francophones across Canada has remained largely undiminished amid the upheaval caused by foreign streaming services. Most English-Canadians just seem to have given up on the CBC.

In her own clumsy way, Ms. Tait inadvertently made the case for splitting the two networks up once and for all by insisting on applying cuts symmetrically at Radio-Canada and CBC. There is nothing symmetrical about their operations, so why should the axe fall so squarely in the middle?

Since 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government has repeatedly vowed to modernize the CBC’s mandate. Fearing outrage from the Toronto-based literati and production executives that live off the CBC, it has ultimately lacked the political courage to reform the public broadcaster. The result is that it now has a political crisis on its hands as Quebeckers blame the CBC’s failures for threatening Radio-Canada’s future.

The Liberals could have given English Canada a slimmed-down public broadcaster that emphasizes high-quality cultural and public-affairs programming on multiple platforms. But they succumbed to their habitual inertia and political clientelism.

The worst of all possible outcomes – a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre scrapping the CBC altogether – now seems frighteningly likely.