Conrad Black: Pierre Poilievre is the future. His trouncing of the CBC proves it
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Almost all the management should be sent packing
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Published Feb 18, 2023 • Last updated 2 days ago • 5 minute read
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Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre holds a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Photo by SEAN KILPATRICK/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES Article content
The current status of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is absurd and unsustainable. Its share of audience, never very impressive, has crumbled. The president, Catherine Tait, is blaming this on attacks from the leader of the federal opposition, Pierre Poilievre, as if he could simply command the supporters of his party to desist from watching and listening to the CBC and have millions of people do so. That might work for Kim Jong Un in North Korea. The leader of a Canadian federal political party attempting to accomplish such an end would instantly become a stupendous laughing stock. Altogether more credible is Mr. Poilievre’s explanation of the CBC’s poor ratings: that its content is uncompetitive and inadequate.
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I am one of those who thinks that there is definitely a place for a public broadcaster in Canada and that it should be well-funded and obligated to produce high quality, politically neutral programming. I also thought the appointment of Catherine Tait as Chief Executive Officer of the CBC in 2018 seemed like a good one. She is bilingual and has a good background in film production and appeared to be a competent professional armed with the qualifications that unique post requires.
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But it cannot be said that Ms. Tait has been successful, and her current campaign to denigrate and antagonize the leader of the opposition, while pretending that he possesses the totalitarian ability to tank the network’s ratings, is an outrage. The CBC started with a mission that was questionable and has long since become impractical, and none of the 11 governments that have lasted long enough to analyze the CBCs condition and prospects since the network was founded by Prime Minister R.B. Bennett in 1932, have done anything except grumble and in recent years reduce its budget. It was founded to serve the small communities of Canada and resist American competition. The high watermark in its prospects was the Massey Commission report of 1951, in which Vincent Massey and his fellow commissioners recommended that the CBC be given an almost absolute monopoly on broadcasting and telecasting in Canada, an insane proposal, that the St. Laurent government which set up the commission, wisely ignored. (Better recommendations, which were adopted, called for a national library and the Canada Council.)
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Current polling shows that approximately half of the Canadian public would like the CBC to be defunded, as Pierre Poilievre is advocating, and fewer than 40 per cent of Canadians object to that. Like so much else in this country, the CBC was designed as an imitation of the British, the BBC. But the United Kingdom does not have an English speaking neighbour of 10 times its own population with 90 per cent of the British living within 200 miles of that country. The BBC never had any competition whatever until private broadcasting was established decades after the Beeb. The BBC today is, next to the National Health Service, the greatest sacred cow in the United Kingdom. Both are vastly overestimated, but the British health-care system, which includes a vibrant private sector, is as much superior to Canada’s as the BBC is to the CBC. Not only does the British Broadcasting Corporation have no foreign competition in the home islands, and limited competition within the UK, but it is adequately funded and it does have a formidable record for high quality historical dramatizations and cultural programming. The BBC news service is as clichéd, hackneyed, and drearily leftist as the CBC’s, but at least, in this era when Scotland and Northern Ireland are both threatening to secede from the United Kingdom, it has no equivalent to the French language CBC, Radio-Canada, which has provided a rarely interrupted torrent of Quebec separatist propaganda for more than 50 years. One of Pierre Trudeau’s finest hours was when he became so exasperated with the anti-federalist biases of Radio-Canada that he threatened to shut down the network’s French language television service and replace it with “still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases.”
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Rex Murphy: The CBC is boring and preachy and that is why there is ‘CBC bashing’ 
Pierre Poilievre goes to war with the CBC In this somewhat entertaining public debate between Ms. Tait and Mr. Poilievre, the leader of the opposition is trouncing her and few of her predecessors have engaged in a more inane mission than her trans-Canada tear-jerking tour whining and crabbing about the opposition leader saying mean things about her benighted and faltering network. Polls indicate that the country recognizes that there has been no more constant or vocal advocate for the left and relentless opponent of Conservative parties than the public broadcaster, for many years. It now brings in approximately $500 million of advertising revenue and receives an additional $1.2 billion in an outright grant from the federal government, and is producing a mediocre pastiche of programming that relatively few people watch or listen to, and it has announced its corporate intention of abandoning the airwaves altogether and sending out its programming only over the Internet.
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It is time to take the old CBC out behind the barn and shoot it like a spavined horse. Almost all the management should be sent packing, but the competent and professionally reliable on-air and creative people should be regrouped in a reconstructed corporation, heavily reinforced with an expanded budget, trimmed management, and first-class competitive personnel. It’s hybrid status as an inter-meddler in the advertising market should be ended and the network should be repurposed as a high quality programmer and creator of content that serves all of Canada with a full range of programming capable of being sold as content to foreign broadcasters. This would essentially be a public service and if such a mandate were given, funded, and executed, it would quickly become and would remain a matter of pride throughout the country. It would also be a model of what Canada is perfectly capable of doing: leading the world in many fields and attracting the respect and admiration of the world. What we have with the CBC now, with many individual exceptions, is a riffraff of failed or inadequate media bureaucrats squandering an ill-considered annual hand-out of $1.2 billion. In this as in so many other fields, Canada must do better. The attacks on Poilievre are just part of the frenzied and contemptible effort of the mindless, sophomoric, left-wing media of Canada to smear as a reactionary Neanderthal any politician not in a power dive to the bottom of woke and cranky insipidity. Instead of a constant deluge of leftist claptrap with rare tokenistic dissent from valiant individuals like Rex Murphy and, once upon a time, Barbara Amiel (my wife), the relaunched CBC should be scrupulously equivocal in its political reporting.
Poilievre should be the future; his more vociferous enemies should be given a one-way economy ticket to the proverbial Marxist dustbin of history.
National Post
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