Saving the CBC is really about saving Canada

Donald Trump’s return to the White House will transform any number of issues here in Canada, from trade and energy to immigration and our relationship with NATO allies. One aspect of Trump’s second presidency that’s gotten less attention so far is what it means for the CBC and the Conservative Party of Canada’s repeated promise to defund it. But make no mistake: if the CBC is eliminated, our national sovereignty won’t be far behind.

As with Trump’s more grandiose declarations, it’s tempting for some people to dismiss Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to kill the CBC as partisan bluster. But as with Trump, that would be a mistake. Just ask Harrison Lowman, the managing editor of The Hub. “This week,” he wrote, “I was told by a well-placed Conservative that Poilievre intends to eliminate all funding for the English arm of the broadcaster. And that he’ll do it in his first 100 days in office.”

If that happens, Canada would be mostly defenceless in the information war that would be fought online over our future. One of the declared combatants in that, Elon Musk, has already made it clear he will do almost anything — including manipulating the algorithm at Twitter/X — to advance the interests of Trumpism. It’s not hard to imagine him putting his thumb on the scale again if Trump decided to wage economic and political war against Canada. 

And then there’s the growing spectre of separatism in Quebec. The Parti Quebecois is suddenly riding high in the polls there, and the prospect of another independence referendum feels almost inevitable at this point. Imagine how that might play out in a country where the traditional institutions of mainstream media are a shell of their former selves, if they even exist at all, and the CBC — in English Canada, at least — has been scattered to the wind. Mix in social media, the ever-present problem of Russian disinformation campaigns, and you have the recipe for a very bad outcome. 

Sean Speer, the founder of The Hub, thinks this is all much ado about nothing. “The CBC is now one of virtually infinite sources of information and cultural content available,” he wrote on social media. “This growing competition is reflected in its declining audience. Less than 5 percent of English Canadian viewers are watching CBC television and barely 2 percent are tuning into the CBC News Network.”

I hope you can see the sleight of hand at work here. As the Globe and Mail’s editorial board wrote last May, “The TV side’s dismal performance – and atrophying relevance – does not carry through to either English-language radio or the CBC’s French-language arm, Radio-Canada. Even while TV audiences shrank, CBC Radio has managed to increase its market share, which was already much healthier than the English TV branch.”

The future of the CBC clearly isn’t in television, and it’s long past time it realized that. But its radio and online news services clearly fill a valuable role in our shared information diet, one that becomes all the more urgent as newspapers continue to shrink and retreat into themselves. Entire communities in our country are now barely served by private-sector media, and therefore depend heavily on the CBC for access to reliable information. Eliminating that would be sacrificing them to the whims (and perils) of social media — and at the moment where we can least afford it. 

Speer suggests that when it comes to the CBC, “a combination of technology and evolving consumer preferences have rendered its public purpose obsolete.” I’d say it’s actually the exact opposite. From its inception in the 1930s to its glory days in the 1970s and 1980s to now, the CBC has been a deliberate instrument of national unity. It has connected Canadians from coast to coast to coast in our vast country, and served as the connective tissue in a place that might otherwise have fallen more fully into the cultural and political orbit of the United States. That is its public purpose: one that’s more essential than ever as Canadians risk being lost to information silos and social media algorithms that push them ever-deeper into their own frustrations and away from any sense of common cause or mutual interest. 

I understand why Conservatives like Pierre Poilievre and his various proxies want to defund the CBC. If they can marginalize its influence or eliminate it entirely, it clears the field for media outlets like True North, Rebel Media, and other openly (and flagrantly) partisan organizations to shape our shared beliefs which are are increasingly being debated and discussed on social media platforms that have no regard for things like accuracy or the truth. If the CBC loses, they win. 

But if Canadians lose the CBC, we will lose the ability to understand and talk to each other. If we lose the CBC, we lose one of the last safe spaces we have to come together and try to understand the vast and disparate land we share. If we lose the CBC, we lose a key institution that connects us with our past and helps us understand our future. And if we lose the CBC, we risk losing the ability to separate and sort objective fact from self-interested fiction.

If we lose that? Well, then we lose our country.