CBC

During a town hall meeting on Monday, CBC President Catherine Tait told CBC and Radio-Canada employees that the public broadcaster will cut up to 10 per cent of its workforce, including 600 workers, according to the public broadcaster.

The broadcaster is making the cuts to address a $125 million shortfall that the CBC is facing, with cuts to both its English and French services, according to multiple sources. $40 million of those cuts will be to programming, according to the CBC. The CBC confirmed on Monday that on top of the layoffs, which will affect both union and non-union workers, 200 vacant jobs will remain empty. There are also no plans to implement a retirement incentive package, sources at the meeting told the Star.

Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge says it would be within the spirit of the government’s digital news law if CBC/Radio-Canada were to receive money from Google — but suggested its share of the $100-million fund may be capped.

In an interview on Rosemary Barton Live airing Sunday, St-Onge said the deal was “mainly and mostly about written press” but that broadcasters like CBC/Radio-Canada also had digital written news and could be included.

“I think it’s important to respect the principle that for these tech giants, public broadcaster’s news must also have value” because of the advertising benefits Google receives, she told CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton.

When the smart people running the CBC were looking to produce a French version of one of its podcasts this year, it somehow never dawned on them that outsourcing the adaptation to a Paris-based production house might not be viewed as a stroke of genius.

Canada, after all, is an officially bilingual country. The Broadcasting Act stipulates that the CBC is our national public broadcaster in French and English with a mandate to, among other things, “contribute to a shared national consciousness and identity.”

Catherine Tait, president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, defended the public broadcaster’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict in a sometimes testy meeting with MPs Thursday.

Tait, who was called to appear before the House of Commons heritage committee after her term at the CBC was extended this summer, said CBC’s journalists are independent from government, the company’s executives and the board of directors and are free to report on the conflict as they see fit.

She defended the newsroom’s longstanding practice of not referring to attacks or their perpetrators as “terrorism” or “terrorists,” saying CBC journalists do not want to be seen taking sides in the conflict.

At the CBC it’s Hands off Hamas but woe to Trudeau’s critics …

.@CBC Ombudsman warns network to rethink coverage that disparages gov't critics as extreme or disreputable in purporting to fact-check the news: "When they do so they'd better be right." https://t.co/yzTaqzHkiH #cdnpoli @JonMontpetit pic.twitter.com/SUrJbLc4TD

— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) October 10, 2023

OTTAWA – Six months after the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Radio-Canada scaled back its use of the social media site X, the public broadcaster says it will mostly remain off the platform formerly known as Twitter because it doesn’t bring in a lot of traffic.

Leon Mar, a spokesperson for the public broadcaster, said CBC’s focus is to engage Canadians on other platforms and to continue driving traffic to its websites and streaming services.

“The audience and engagement that we get from X is small. Among our social media platforms, X is among the smallest sources of traffic,” he told The Canadian Press when asked why it hasn’t fully returned.

OTTAWA – An attempt by the Conservatives to summon CBC executives over the network’s refusal to describe Hamas as terrorists was blocked Tuesday by the Liberals, the Bloc Québécois and the NDP.

Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman put forward a motion to the parliamentary committee on public accounts asking it to denounce the position of the public broadcaster, and to call various CBC executives to appear in front of the committee for a minimum of two hours each. She had wanted to call CBC president and CEO Catherine Tait, English-services ombudsman Jack Nagler and director of journalistic standards, George Achi.

The CBC should be defunded.

It’s a waste of money to pay $1.2 billion per year to this media organization and now the government is set to hand it even more.

This past weekend, I was a guest on the CBC’s weekly call-in show, Cross Country Checkup, to discuss and debate the question: do we still need the CBC?

I was there in particular to make the case that the news media market has evolved over the past decades such that a public broadcaster of the size and scope of the CBC is no longer justified. Others argued in favour of preserving the CBC. And then there was a combination of callers and experts who found themselves somewhere in the middle.

An idea whose time has come.

CBC is claiming state secrets when asked about the cost of a Supreme Court battle over getting information on government secrets. Canada’s state broadcaster has been pushing Ontario Premier Doug Ford to release the mandate letters given to his cabinet ministers since 2018.