Last year marked the 95th anniversary of the Royal Commission’s recommendation for the creation of a national public broadcaster. The onset of the Great Depression in that same year delayed the creation of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission until 1932. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was created in 1936.
Then, as now, the argument in favour of a public broadcaster was that a country as vast and thinly populated as Canada needs a publicly funded utility to counter the pervasive effects of the American media.
Free enterprisers have long argued for an end to government-sponsored broadcasting to level the playing field with private broadcasters like CTV. Pierre Poilievre says if he is elected prime minister, he will defund the CBC. That would effectively close it down.
And that’s a bad idea.
CBC provides services for which there is simply no business case in the private sector, like radio in the many indigenous languages of the north and a television station on P.E.I.
There’s nothing wrong with taking a long, hard look at how the CBC spends its money, whether it should be a public streaming service and podcaster, whether its online, radio and television services are appropriate in the new media landscape. It’s time for a “right-sizing” of the CBC mandate. All government departments, agencies and corporations should be subject to such critical scrutiny.
Rather than terminating its public funding, the Government of Canada should order the CBC to stop accepting commercial advertising so revenue can flow back to private broadcasters and other media organizations, many of which are struggling to survive, particularly in online platforms where ads are now worth only a fraction of what they were broadcast “on the air”.
This move will require an adequate and consistent albeit lower, level of financial support from the government, at least some of which could and should come from a tax on big foreign services like Netflix and Apple.
CBC has played an important role in the development of Canadian culture and the broadcasting industry. This is the right time to consider its future and what the new CBC will look like, but certainly not whether some kind of CBC will continue to exist.
