People walk past CBC’s headquarters in downtown Toronto.The Canadian Press
Barry Kiefl is president of Canadian Media Research Inc. and was director of research for CBC/Radio Canada from 1983 to 2001.
The CBC was created by a Conservative government in the mid-1930s. Eighty-some years later, Conservatives want to kill the CBC, making it a campaign slogan: “Defund the CBC.”
Dozens of columnists, pundits, pollsters and professors have weighed in on what to do with the CBC. Some commentators cavalierly say it should be a pay-TV service, like HBO. Pay-TV efforts have been tried since the beginning of TV. These experiments failed, especially in the 1950s and 60s, until HBO offered an early window to Hollywood movies and original programming that traditional TV networks wouldn’t air because of public taste considerations.
The CBC’s strength is news and information. CNN learned that a streaming pay-TV service featuring news wasn’t viable. People only pay for news if it’s bundled with entertainment. A newspaper without sports, reviews, crosswords, cartoons, games, lifestyle and travel information would be thin gruel. Cable news channels were only feasible if bundled with traditional entertainment and sports channels in a cable TV package. News on traditional radio and TV stations was supported by the station’s entertainment programming.
Audience share, the most revealing audience metric, is the percentage a service captures of all the time spent using TV, radio or the internet. Canadians spend roughly 20 hours a week on the internet and more than 30 hours watching TV (including streaming). Radio listening hours are fewer, and remain in the teens per week. TV, despite all the media attention given to Facebook, Google, X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, Instagram, etc. remains the dominant medium in our lives. People watch a lot of TV (mostly on TV screens, not their phone). This includes young people, who even listen to the radio, in addition to spending time on the internet.
Most of the criticism is on one CBC service, English TV. French-language critics don’t much bother discussing Radio-Canada’s future because it is so entrenched in francophone life. CBC French TV today has an audience share somewhat higher than a decade ago (15 per cent). CBC French radio has a higher than 20-per-cent share, also higher than a decade ago. Audience share of CBC French specialty channels (6 per cent) and CBC’s English news channel (2 per cent) are also higher than a decade ago and are No. 1 one in their respective categories. These numbers, published by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and CBC, come from independent third-party research companies, Comscore and Numeris. They are the gold standard, measuring behaviour, not opinion.
CBC Radio’s English service also has a higher audience share (16 per cent) than 10 years ago. In most markets CBC Radio One is actually No. 1. About 11 million Canadians, according to Numeris, listen to CBC Radio services monthly. Given CBC Radio’s large share, there are millions of Canadians committed to the service. But critics of CBC Radio are right to point out the diminished program schedule, the multiple repeats of programs and the frequent use of U.S. stories to fill newscasts. Thin program segments are all related to CBC management’s decision to redirect radio budgets to “digital” services; more on this later.
CBC English TV is the lone CBC/Radio-Canada service that has seen its audience decline in the past decade – it now has a market share of just 4 per cent. CBC Gem is a feeble attempt to make up for losses, but has a negligible number of paying subscribers/viewers compared with Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, etc. CBC TV, like CBC Radio, has seen dramatic cuts in its budget. For example, the main channel has cut news budgets by more than 50 per cent in the past 10 years. National and local CBC news programs are starved of resources.
Where did the money go? CBC had a budget of $1.9-billion in 2022, 65 per cent from parliamentary grants. This makes the CBC a taxpayer-funded public service. But CBC is currently spending just over $500-million annually on its many digital services, CBC.ca being the most prominent. One quarter of the CBC’s budget is for digital services. This digital expenditure is three to four times the amount BBC spends on digital services. After a decade or more of gutting radio/TV budgets, what are the digital audience returns?
The CBC regularly promotes its English and French digital services, using monthly “reach.” The CBC’s 2021 annual report says: “In the early months of the pandemic, 24 million Canadians turned to our digital platforms each month – making us the top Canadian online destination and the fourth overall after Google, Facebook and Microsoft.” But those millions of visitors only spent 50 minutes a month (12.5 minutes a week) using CBC’s digital services. Given that Canadians spend about 20 hours a week on the internet, CBC’s share of internet use amounts to less than 1 per cent. Thus, management has defunded CBC Radio and TV to achieve a far smaller audience share than even CBC English TV.
The CBC’s future has been lost in the continuing debate about how to regulate Big Tech. But Canadians have and likely will continue to rely on TV screens and radios for years to come.
Despite self-inflicted cuts to French and English radio and the main TV channels, three of the four core services have maintained their audience support. But as with X, how long will users put up with the degradation? The question facing policy makers intent on reviewing CBC’s mandate is not what to do about CBC, but what to do about CBC English TV’s main channel, and especially the spending on digital services.
Pierre Juneau, when he was the head of CRTC, banned commercials from CBC Radio in the 1970s. Commercial English TV revenue accounts for much less than 10 per cent of CBC’s total funding. A commercial-free CBC TV might have a chance to replicate what CBC Radio did in the 1970s and stand out in today’s ultracompetitive TV environment, as an oasis in a media desert.