Outgoing CBC/Radio-Canada CEO Catherine Tait said this week that dismantling the nearly 90-year-old public broadcaster would be “absolutely tragic” and politicians like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should think twice before torpedoing something so closely linked to Canada’s “cultural fabric.”
But Tait acknowledged the company has work to do to rebuild trust among Canadians who have become leery of the public broadcaster and its programming.
Tait said that, as she approaches the end of her six-years-plus tenure at CBC in January, her biggest source of regret is the erosion of trust in the broadcaster among some people.
Polls suggest Conservative voters are among those most likely to support scrapping the CBC.
Poilievre has vowed to “defund” the company if he’s elected, a promise that often gets loud applause and cheers from receptive audiences at his rallies.
Delegates at the Conservative Party’s most recent policy convention also moved a proposal to pull CBC’s funding because of what its backers described as the broadcaster’s “increasingly politicized agendas.” It was ultimately defeated by party members.
“If I could rewind the clock, I would have started the conversation around trust earlier,” Tait said in an interview Thursday with CBC News on the sidelines of the Public Broadcasters International (PBI) conference in Ottawa.
“We need Canadians to feel ownership of their public media service. People have become dissociated from us and that’s the work that lies ahead.
“And it’s not just the Conservative leader. I say to all Canadians — we’re here to serve. We are an absolutely critical part of the cultural fabric of this country.”
CBC CEO Catherine Tait calls the public broadcaster an ‘enormous treasure’ and a ‘critical part of the cultural fabric’ of Canada. Tait says she would ‘pause before thinking of dismantling that.’
A January 2024 poll of 1,300 respondents conducted by the Gandalf Group for Friends of Canadian Media, an advocacy group for Canadian public media, found that about 40 per cent of Conservative voters surveyed want to see the government continue to fund CBC/Radio-Canada.
Roughly 48 per cent said they want to see that funding cut, while 11 per cent were unsure, the poll found.
That means a majority of Conservative respondents want to do away with Ottawa’s support for the Crown-owned broadcaster, or aren’t sure what to do about it at all.
A strong majority of Bloc Quebecois (68 per cent), Liberal (82 per cent) and NDP (77 per cent) voters, meanwhile, want to see the broadcaster federally funded, the poll found.
Most Canadians want a public broadcaster to tell the country’s stories, Tait said, especially as other media outlets wither and die and foreign, largely U.S.-owned companies come to dominate the broadcasting landscape.
‘Public broadcasting is worth fighting for’: Tait
“I would pause before thinking about dismantling that,” she said of CBC/Radio-Canada.
“It’s an enormous treasure. It’s a legacy of almost 90 years — it would be absolutely tragic” to close down the company, she added.
Tait pointed to the broadcaster’s extensive coverage of the recent Olympic games, which attracted a big audience to its free programming.
“Public broadcasting is worth fighting for,” she said.
“I just think it’s an amazing gift that Canada has a public broadcaster. It’s up there with health care, as far as I’m concerned. It distinguishes us from the United States in a profound way.”
CBC CEO Catherine Tait says her ‘sincere hope’ is that the conversation about media bias ‘falls away’ as the public broadcaster earns people’s trust ‘every day and the journalism is excellent.’
As CBC News reported last week, the Liberal government will soon pick a new CEO to replace Tait, release a reworked mandate for the broadcaster and decide how best to fund the company in the years ahead as it grapples with a rapidly changing media ecosystem.
Asked whether the CBC could become an election issue, Tait said the company will handle whatever comes its way.
“We’ve got to put aside the noise and focus on trusted news and on facts and the job that we are paid to do,” she said.
“The noise out there between political parties is actually not our business. That’s not where the focus should be. If we demonstrate that we will earn trust every day and the journalism is excellent, my hope — my sincere hope — would be that that issue falls away.”
While insisting that he would maintain parts of the French-language Radio-Canada to serve minority francophone communities outside of Quebec, Poilievre has said there’s no need for an English public broadcaster when there are private options available.
He has said CBC/Radio-Canada’s parliamentary allocation — about $1.3 billion last year — would be better spent elsewhere or saved to reduce the deficit.
Poilievre and his party have been particularly critical of the company’s decision to go ahead with performance pay or “bonuses” for its management team in a year when hundreds of employees were due to be laid off.
Dozens of people did lose their jobs but the worst of the cuts were avoided when the federal government came through with more money in its recent budget.
CBC bonuses ‘insulting, sickening’: Conservatives
The Canadian Press filed an access-to-information request and found the company paid out $18.4 million in performance pay for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
The company has defended the measure, saying part of a manager’s pay is held back and only paid out when certain performance metrics are met and it’s not fair to call it a “bonus” in the traditional sense.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, have said the payments are “beyond insulting and frankly sickening,” especially when many Canadians are facing homelessness and other challenges.
Asked if she had any regrets about how the company handled the issue and the resulting reputational damage, Tait was unmoved.
“All people need to be fairly paid for the work that they do,” she said.
“And I don’t live in regret. I believe that we’re doing the right thing and the fact of the matter is we are subject and targets of a kind of conversation that’s happening for certain purposes.”
But Tait said the company’s board of directors is considering an overhaul of the performance pay program and compensation policies more generally.
“The board will look with a third party at whether or not our approach to performance pay and compensation is appropriate in the current environment and what other public broadcasters and other media companies do,” she said.
That’s not the only thing that needs to be reviewed, Tait said.
‘We absolutely need sustainable funding’: Tait
Speaking to delegates at the PBI conference during a panel discussion focused on social media, Tait said the company faces an existential threat if it can’t broaden its audience to appeal to younger media consumers.
CBC/Radio-Canada is working with other public broadcasters, including Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC), RTBF (Belgium), SRG SSR (Switzerland) and ZDF (Germany), on a “public space incubator” which, when finished, could change how media companies engage with their audiences online at a time when traditional social media platforms are becoming increasingly toxic.
The broadcasters are working with an American firm, New Public, to develop “prototypes for digital conversation spaces that offer a healthy forum for connection and increase engagement in civic discourse,” according to the website for the project.
“Social media is where the audience is today, the young audience,” Tait said Wednesday.
“They’re not on TV, they’re not listening to the radio and they’re barely on our streaming platforms. If we don’t figure this one out … If we can crack this nut, we have a future. And if we don’t, I wonder,” she said.
To that end, Tait said she is hoping the government comes through with more money for CBC/Radio-Canada.
In her interview with CBC News, Tait said efforts to engage with new audiences online will take resources.
“We absolutely need sustainable funding into the future to remain relevant,” she said.