CBC

The CBC is at a watershed moment, observes longtime CBC insider David Cayley. The previous era of Canada’s publicly funded broadcaster has exhausted itself, Cayley concludes, and in the new era that’s unfolding, what the country desperately needs and deserves is a dialogue, not a monologue.

“Everything ends in time,” he observes, “and I believe that (CBC’s) properties, its idea that it would belong to the audience, that it would stake its legitimacy on the audience, has brought it to a place where it has only one preferred audience — and can’t address the rest of the country, and can’t get outside or above or beyond the assumptions it shares with that audience — so it’s become a kind of boutique.”

The CBC far exceeded its “equity representation” target in the last fiscal year, with 84.1 percent of new hires being “Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, and racialized people,” according to the public broadcaster’s new corporate report. In the “reflecting contemporary Canada” subsection, the report shows the CBC had aimed for 65 percent of new hires to fall within the three groups, but surpassed it by 19 percentage points.

Some employment lawyers believe the CBC’s fixation on race and disabilities in its hiring process is limiting the broadcaster from accurately reflecting the Canadian population, and could fall into hiring discrimination.

The CBC needs to come clean with Canadians about how it picks its guests and frames its stories, according to its own ombudsman, after complaints of bias over coverage of gender identity programs in schools.

Blacklock’s Reporter says the rebuke followed a 2023 episode of CBC Radio’s Front Burner that addressed nationwide protests against gender identity curriculum but only featured two guests — both transgender and both connected to sexual minority activism.

The CBC once imagined its audience as a single community, bound by shared interests and a common national purpose. In the 1960s, producers like Patrick Watson were taught to ask of every program: “How will it serve the audience?” That question presupposed a public that was coherent, if not always unanimous — a public that might quarrel over facts and policies, but still inhabited the same civic space.

That assumption no longer holds. The ideal of a singular Canadian audience has shattered. A dramatic fragmentation has occurred, and Canadians now divide on first principles. Where there was once consensus, there is now dissensus.

When the CBC dislikes a person or an opinion, our taxpayer-funded broadcaster calls it “controversial.” In CBC-speak, “controversial” means conservative, libertarian, religious, traditionalist, classical liberal, or otherwise not in line with woke ideology. For the CBC, there is nothing “controversial” about a man who “identifies” as a woman having an absolute right to enter women’s washrooms and other female spaces. Only those who seek to protect safe spaces for women are “controversial.”

Travis Dhanraj, the former CBC News Network host who denounced the Crown Corporation for “dysfunction at the highest level” in an internal email from July that went viral, has filed a human rights complaint against the CBC, claiming discrimination based on colour, disability, and race.

The CBC is about as diverse as a Maoist Struggle Session.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is blasting the CBC for spending more than $93,000 to enter and attend journalism award galas since 2019.

According to access-to-information records, the CBC spent $54,390 on entry fees for the Radio Television Digital News Association awards and another $38,668 on travel and attendance, for a total of $93,058.

(Incognito)