One column on the CBC in a week just isn’t enough, so I’ve decided to make it the main course in this week’s newsletter as well. That’s because our public broadcaster, and the campaign to undermine it, really matters. We’re living in a world where facts and accurate reporting are harder than ever to come by, and where they represent a direct threat to one of our biggest political parties. I have my own list of complaints and concerns about the CBC, and I’m sure you do, too. But at the end of the day, a Canada without the CBC isn’t really a Canada at all.
Anyways, here’s my blueprint for how the CBC can defend itself from the attacks being launched against it — and why it needs to start fighting. I’m sure some folks will protest that it can’t possibly behave in a way that politicizes its existence, but rest assured: it’s already been politicized.
If management at the CBC wasn’t taking the existential threat posed by Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre seriously before, they probably will now. After tattling on the corporation to Elon Musk, who’s busy trying to undermine public broadcasters and legacy media companies by either stripping them of their verification status or sticking a label on their accounts, Poilievre succeeded in getting the CBC branded as “government-funded media.” True to form, he took that 10 steps too far by claiming: “Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news.”
The CBC’s initial response was to “pause” its participation on Twitter, a move that echoed NPR’s response a few days earlier. But withdrawing from this fight won’t help the CBC win the bigger one it’s currently engaged in with Canada’s Conservatives — one that’s similar to campaigns being waged against public broadcasters in other western democracies. Poilievre is dead serious about defunding the CBC, and he’s better positioned to actually do something about it than any Conservative leader in a decade. CBC’s leadership can try to call his bluff and hope he doesn’t follow through with his promise if becomes the next prime minister, but they may not like the cards he decides to play.
I have a better idea: they should stand and fight. That begins with a social media campaign that marshals all of the nostalgia and goodwill that’s tied up in our collective memories of the CBC and its biggest personalities, from news legends like Peter Mansbridge and Ian Hanomansing to comedic talents like Rick Mercer and Mary Walsh. They should remind Canadians of the good work they do, the value it brings to their lives and the cost of leaving that behind. Tug on the heartstrings as hard as possible. This is no time to pull any punches, since Poilievre and his fellow travellers aren’t about to pull theirs.
The CBC’s fight should also involve a redefinition of its mandate and the programs and content it delivers to Canadians. As any number of commentators have already suggested, the CBC should get out of advertising and stop competing with smaller upstarts for those scarce dollars. It should substantially reduce the amount of opinion it produces and commissions, since that’s not exactly something we’re lacking for these days — or something that reflects well on the CBC’s image. And it should probably steer clear of the sort of overt advocacy journalism that’s better left to actual advocates and issue experts.
But in making these changes, it should also ask for an increase to its funding, one that would put it on more equal footing with other public broadcasters around the world. If Canada were to simply match the per-capita funding that other western countries provide for their public broadcasters, the CBC’s funding would more than double.
That money could go towards more local news coverage, an area that continues to suffer as other legacy media companies pull back, restructure and otherwise slim down. It could go towards more factual programming, whether that’s television and radio documentaries or digital explainers of key issues and events. And it could go towards bolstering the CBC’s coverage of marginalized and underserved communities that aren’t being served by the private sector.
Bigger and better: that should be the vision presented by the CBC. After all, as legacy media organizations continue to shrink and bad-faith actors try to spread misinformation and sow chaos in western democracies like ours, we need to reinforce our bulwark against bullshit.
The CBC isn’t some ephemeral institution, as Conservatives would like to pretend, and the work it does can’t and won’t be replaced by the free market if it disappears. Instead, it’s one of the foundational pillars of a free and open society. As historian Timothy Snyder has said: “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.”
That might suit Poilievre just fine, of course. But the rest of us should be ready to fight like hell to prevent that from happening — and to protect one of the institutions that’s standing in the way of it.
Canadian Bacon, American beef
Life can sometimes end up imitating art, but this is one case where it would be better if it didn’t. Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has mused repeatedly in the past about why Canadians need to be “liberated” from their godless socialist dictatorship, is at it again — this time with a short film on the same subject.
O, Canada will apparently focus on the Trudeau government’s pandemic management strategy and feature far-right luminaries like People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier, Rebel Media personality David Menzies and an assortment of pro-COVID pastors. To Carlson and his film’s subjects, Canada’s efforts to fight a pandemic make it the same as Libya and Iraq — countries worthy of liberation (no mention of how said “liberation” turned out in and for those countries, mind you). “For more than 100 years, the United States has as a matter of official policy opposed dictatorships around the world. But what if tyranny arrived right next door?” he asks. “Would we liberate the people living under authoritarian rule as we have around the world?”
This is, of course, impossibly dumb. It’s also perfectly on brand for Carlson, whose previous foray into filmmaking was a 2022 documentary about the “end of men” that included him talking up the virtues of testicle tanning in order to boost testosterone levels.
While this should ring a bell for anyone who watched Canadian Bacon, Michael Moore’s 1995 satire of American politics and its relationship with Canada, there’s nothing funny happening here. Carlson is clearly trying to change the channel on his role in spreading lies about the 2020 election (and his private disdain for them), ones that brought Fox News to the brink of a trial and just cost them $787 million to settle out of court. What better way to distract Fox viewers from his mockery of them than a phony war against a caricature of Canada?
In Moore’s film, a couple of low-information Americans take the phony war aimed at distracting voters into their own hands and decide to invade Canada themselves. And while that’s unlikely to happen here, there are a lot of heavily armed Fox viewers with far too much time on their hands and anger in their hearts.
As I wrote in my last column on Carlson’s dangerous obsession with Canada, “There’s a substantial subset of his viewers, and a smaller slice of the American population as a whole, that takes this portrayal of Canada seriously. They genuinely believe we’re being governed by communists, that we’ve fallen prey to a far-left dictatorship, and our freedoms are being suppressed in order to advance the wishes of the World Economic Forum or some other tinfoil-laden conspiracy theory. The longer people are fed that sort of toxic nonsense, the more likely it is that it winds up in the head of someone who could do something about it.”
Life probably won’t imitate art here. But just in case, we might want to shore up the security at our power plants and hydroelectric facilities located near the border — and give Moore’s film a rewatch so we know what else to look out for.
The Wrap
As I wrote earlier this week, Pierre Poilievre’s attack on the CBC (and the Canadian Press) is part of a broader strategy to reduce the reach and salience of fact-based journalism — one that’s shared by his new friend Elon Musk.
Some of you sent up the bat signal when former Calgary Herald columnist Licia Corbella appeared on Real Talk with Ryan Jespersen and proceeded to say a bunch of things that were demonstrably false. I threw up a Twitter thread debunking most of her falsehoods, and then did a hit on Jespersen’s Friday show to elaborate on those concerns and complaints.
Next week’s podcast will be with Janet Bufton, the co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Studies and an articulate defender (and critic) of libertarianism. We talked about the pandemic, the things everyone got wrong about it, and what libertarians can and should learn from the experience.
And that’s it for this week. Please share this with your friends and family if you haven’t already, and be sure to rate and review (positively!) the podcast on Apple.