Yuan Yi Zhu is a research fellow at the University of Oxford.
In April, Twitter labelled the accounts of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as “government-funded media”.
CBC responded with sound and fury, accusing Twitter of undermining its independence and suspending its activities on the website (it resumed tweeting a month later, proving the narcotic-like quality of the platform).
In many ways, CBC’s complaint was a strange one. Depending on your view, CBC is anything from the fulcrum of Canadian identity to the purveyor of some of the worst television shows in the English language. That’s not to mention its digital content: CBC’s onetime foray into online comedy was so painfully unfunny that it was continually bullied until it was shut down.
But there is no doubt whatsoever that the CBC, a federal Crown corporation, is literally funded by the Canadian government, for better or for worse; in the most recent fiscal year for which numbers are available, it received $1.39 billion in government funding, versus $504 million in revenue.
Even the CBC’s own write-ups of the spat had to admit this inconvenient fact, albeit buried under many paragraphs of outrage.
But CBC’s future as government media may be in doubt, and not in a way which is to its liking. Pierre Poilievre, the leader of Canada’s Conservatives, has pledged to defund CBC once in government (Radio-Canada, its French-language arm which is culturally hegemonic in Quebec, is excluded from the commitment).
After almost a decade of lavish funding under Justin Trudeau, CBC may soon find itself fighting for its existence.
It has to be said that, much like the abolition of the BBC licence fee in the UK, the defunding of the CBC has been a Conservative talking point for some years without anything concrete having been done about it.
But Catherine Tait, CBC’s president, seems determined to fight to the death with Poilievre. After he turned down a request for a meeting last year, she wrote to him to accuse him of lying in a letter that was later leaked. She repeated the charge in February, this time publicly, leading to open hostilities between the two.
Tait’s behaviour can only be rationally explained as that of someone thinks that the Liberal Party will remain in power indefinitely (not impossible, given the LPC’s dominance of Canadian politics). But she will only have fortified the view among Canadian Conservatives that the CBC is their sworn enemy and must be destroyed.
Tories have long complained about the CBC’s editorial bias, a fact so hoary it needs no elaboration to anyone who has watched its channels recently.
Unlike the BBC, whose bias often appears to be the unconscious result of organizational monoculture, the CBC often acts as if it was the media arm of the Liberal Party – when it does not act as the American Democrats’ Canadian affiliate, given its obsession with the politics of our southerly neighbour.
When Trudeau was exposed for wearing blackface in 2019, CBC’s first reaction was to write an exposé of the man who published the photo and to harass him at his home, as if he, and not the Prime Minister, had been guilty of an unspeakable act.
A month later, right before the federal election, CBC sued the Conservative Party for copyright breach for using its news footage in an election ad. The lawsuit originally named Rosemary Barton, a high-profile CBC presenter known to be especially badly disposed toward the Tories, as a co-plaintiff, which did nothing for her reputation for partiality.
The suit was thrown out of court two years later, but by then the damage had been done, both to the Conservatives and, in their eyes, to the CBC. Whatever residual pro-CBC sentiment that might have persisted within the Party had gone, never to return.
The irony is that the CBC, originally established by a Conservative prime minister, does not have to exist in a state of perpetual existential struggle against one of the country’s two main parties. CBC’s unstated mission, that of a government-funded bulwark against the cultural hegemony of the United States, is one that many Conservatives once sympathized with.
But if CBC continues to not even pretend to care about the neutrality which it is required to maintain by law, its days may truly be numbered.