Jen Gerson: The Conservative case for the CBC

Comments on immigrant communities and their media consumption from country of origin sources as a reason to revitalize the CBC. Her reform suggestions have merit:

It was at the recent Canada Strong and Free Network conference — formerly known by the much less awkward title the “Manning Centre” conference — in which I overheard one of those conversations that is so often considered taboo in tête-à-têtes that are more Liberal or NDP-adjacent. It was a discussion on immigration, and specifically, on the obstacles to cultural integration that rapid immigration can sometimes entail. 

The speaker noted with some dismay the number of satellite TV dishes affixed to the balconies of apartments in urban areas that tend to become the first homes of new arrivals to the country. With the advent of affordable global satellite television, those who had relocated to Canada could keep abreast of news at home, in the languages they were most comfortable with. This influx included not only the plethora of private television networks, but also their public counterparts: RT, IRA, CCTV — virtually every country in the world invests in some content offering, and makes that offering widely available both domestically and abroad. 

In liberal democracies, public broadcasting tends to value at least a degree of journalistic independence. In authoritarian nations, well, not so much. But they broadcast just the same. 

Of course there’s nothing inherently wrong with seeking news and entertainment from one’s homeland. Nothing could be more natural than the desire to seek out the familiar, especially while adapting to a new culture and a new home. My fellow conversationalist was not unsympathetic to that desire, yet those satellite dishes concerned him, nonetheless. Canada is welcoming a nearly unprecedented number of new immigrants at the same moment in which its sense of itself as a nation has, arguably, never been weaker. Or, as Justin Trudeau himself once put it “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” 

If that’s so, how do we expect this influx of new Canadians to cohere to the vacant identity of their adopted homeland? Is the move to Canada a thing that exists in the body only; the spirit to remain entrenched in the values, language, news and entertainment of the citizen’s soul? His homeland? How does a nation as widely dispersed and malleable as ours, one that welcomes people from around the world, create some kind of pan-Canadian values and identity? How the hell do we actually work together?  

I don’t have an easy answer to that question, but I did note at the time that this individual had unwittingly articulated the best Conservative case for the CBC. 

And he had done it in a place where promises to “defund the CBC” generated unabashed whoops of glee. 

“Perhaps don’t defund the CBC” is a contrarian position in my circles, of late. Conservatives hate this institution — and I don’t use the word “hate” lightly. It may be too late to make an appeal for reform, caution or reason. Blood is high. 

They are angry that the CBC sued the Conservative party — and only the Conservative party — for a fair use of news material in political advertising. They are angry at an organization that seems to be ideologically driven to, and hell bent on, closing the Overton window on a range of policy positions and values that many of them care about. They resent being forced to pay for a public broadcaster that they feel has alienated them. 

While I think some of these positions are clouded by the poor judgment that inevitably accompanies anger, many of these grievances are valid. And, privately, I know at least some employees in the CBC will admit to it. The CBC is not what it ought to have been in recent years, and calls for it to be defunded are a predictable and inevitable consequence of adopting a set of cultural values that are openly at odds with a plurality of the taxpayers that fund it. 

The organization still does necessary work, and employs many hundreds of diligent and grounded journalists. However, at least some sections of the organization do come off as high handed and patronizing, as if the outlet sees its role as imposing a set of Canadian Values onto a benighted populace eager for the Call On High of the Annex, rather than as an institution whose fundamental role is to serve those very masses. 

Take the carbon tax, MAID, government spending, contentious protests, gender identity, sex work, safe supply, diversity and inclusion, homelessness, and crime — these are some of the most pressing and contentious issues facing Canadians today. These are complicated issues, often morally fraught, and offer rich opportunities for real debate, reporting, and investigation. I don’t think that’s what we’re getting from the CBC right now. That is a problem, and an abrogation of the CBC’s duty to inform and serve a geographically and ideologically diverse public. Hence the anger. 

However, I cannot pin this failure solely on the CBC. 

If our public broadcaster is not producing the kind of journalism that we want, need and expect, then the negligence lies also within ourselves. We taxpayers, political leaders, and citizens have failed to communicate to the CBC what we expect. And weak management, poorly guided by a vague mandate, has been unable to establish a clear vision of what the outlet needs to prioritize — and, more crucially, what it must deprioritize. 

What I see when I look at the CBC is a Byzantine hall, ruled by competing fiefdoms, and dug five stories deep into the forbidding earth. What I see is mandate creep.

Is there anyone in senior management who can seriously blank-face defend CBC Gem? Or CBC Comedy? Why is the CBC replicating widely available language learning apps with their own version, Mauril? Or how about its vertical devoted to first-person opinion pieces? In an era of Substack and Medium and X, is there market failure that a public broadcaster really needs to address, here? A real lack of opportunity to write articles like: After coming out as trans, my return to sex work has been unexpectedly rewarding.

I could go on, but you get the point. Is there anyone, anywhere, within the CBC hierarchy who can say: “No”? 

All of these efforts reek of a senior management that so lacks a sense of self direction that it instead tries to be everything to everybody, and then blames its lack of adequate funding when it fails to do anything particularly well. And that’s before we get into the management bonuses, and last minute budget top ups. This isn’t sustainable. And it’s why I don’t find arguments for increasing funding right now compelling — absent a clear mandate and strong internal management, the government could double or even triple the CBC’s funding and not create anything better; all we’d get is an even more sprawling bureaucracy trying to churn out more #content in categories that are already amply if not ably served by the private sector. 

So, yeah, I understand the emotion, here. I understand how gratifying it is for Conservatives who squeal with delight when Pierre Poilievre screams “defund the CBC.” Whatever that means. 

All I’d ask is for such people to consider that this is, indeed, an emotional response generated by feelings of grievance and alienation. It’s not a rational policy position. Shut down the CBC tomorrow, and Canada is not suddenly going to host 1,000 ideologically grounded private media organizations. That’s a fantasy, totally detached from a solid understanding of the modern media market. The only problem defunding the CBC solves is the continued public funding of the CBC. 

Local news — real reporting that involves sending actual people to write about quotidian court cases and city hall meetings week after week — is a very hard business case in an environment that generates revenue by virality and clicks. There are going to be some successes in this sphere, but not enough to replicate a tenth of even the current skeletal coverage. 

Privatizing the CBC will do nothing other than to create another failing private media outlet. And defunding or shuttering it outright is only going to eliminate what’s left of an already battered local news system at the very moment that the private media sector is heading into its senescence. This is going to contribute to already expansive news deserts, with citizens turning to things like Facebook groups and closed group chats in order to share local knowledge. 

Some of these quasi-outlets will be fine, and even useful. Ordinary journalism doesn’t require special training or a credential. 

But it does mean that more Canadians over time are going to grow increasingly reliant on sources of information that may or may not have any attachment to how the world around them actually functions. Not only is this going to have an impact on our concepts of a shared national identity, but in some cases, even consensus reality. 

We don’t have to peer too deep into the darkness of our hearts to get a sense of where this is going. Travel just a little ways outside a major city and you’ll quickly run into news deserts where a significant subsection of the population already believes that the Canadian government is controlled by Klaus Schwab for the benefit of Satanic, adrenochrome-swilling pedophiles. 

To put it more bluntly: Conservatives, it’s one thing to burn CBC’s downtown Toronto HQ. By all means, paint your bodies in the ashes and scream at the moon until she hears your victory. Revel in it. But then you’re actually going to have to govern people. How long do you think the current crop of “hang the elites” stand by you when you’re the elite

The CBC in its current state is not sustainable. It needs a radical overhaul that includes an extensive mandate review that sets clear expectations for content, tone, and objective outcomes. Personally, I’d cleave everything related to entertainment and leave that to die. The CBC ought to be an exclusively journalistic organization, with a particular focus on local news, beat reporting, and investigations. I’d take the CBC’s mandate out of the Broadcasting Act and create a standalone statute that enshrines objective journalistic standards and practices in law so internal committees can’t dick around with journalistic fads. (I have no objection to “activist” journalism, or concepts like “moral clarity” in private business, or even grant-supported niche outlets; but a national public broadcaster ought to adopt broadly unobjectionable and historically grounded journalistic standards when serving an audience that cannot escape footing the bill.)

I’d demand the CBC create a functional, independent newsroom in every city over 100,000 people in this country. I’d assign specific beats like health, upper courts, legislatures and the like, and I’d write those expectations straight into the mandate. 

Most importantly, I’d have both the CBC and its critics understand that it is one of the most important repositories of institutional knowledge in this country — it is not only a reservoir of Canada’s culture and history, but also an irreplaceable living resource for the craft and practice of journalism itself. I wish the CBC considered itself not as a competitor to private journalistic enterprise, but more like a public service, akin to a library. An institution whose role is to help foster regional journalistic talent — perhaps through workshops, internships, or even equipment or facility rentals. 

If a local journalism student wants to start a podcast in, say, Medicine Hat, the local CBC outlet ought to be a resource to help her make that project a success. The local CBC outlet ought to be her champion. 

In this lurid dream vision, I would make all the CBC’s written and audio-visual materials freely available to any Canadian media outlet. Further, the CBC should be allergic to private advertising. 

I would also put some serious thought into the CBC’s role as a guardian of this country’s digital and physical news archives. If much private media is about to collapse, we risk losing an extraordinary amount of our shared cultural heritage, unless some entity is willing to take on the care, organization, and access of historic documents and material. 

All the above is a napkin sketch for a sustainable CBC mandate. One that fosters an innovative private media sector while ensuring that Canadians will be reasonably well served by a grounded and objective information environment. If Canadians want to wander into QAnon conspiracy land, that’s not for me, or for any government, to restrict. However, in the face of market failure — and objective news reporting is one such imminent failure — there is room for the public sector to act. We should ensure that Canadians have real choices. 

Funnily, when I spelled out that vision of a CBC, most of the Conservatives I spoke to at the conference in Ottawa could get behind it, or some version of it. And that didn’t surprise me. Most Conservatives in this country are not libertarians or even, frankly, true populists. Most, I think, grant that there is some role for a federal government to play in the promotion of a Canadian culture and identity, particularly where the preservation of history and institutions are concerned. I am aligned to the role of a free market in media, as in anything else (like and subscribe!), but I would remind everybody that the media industry doesn’t exist in a pure free market in the Platonic world of ideal forms, and never has. There are bad ways to intervene in it (ahem, the Online News Act) and there are good ways — ways grounded in historic success, both here and in other countries. Public broadcasting is tried and true, which is why almost every country has some version of it in accordance with its national values, needs, and insecurities. 

Ironically, the cultural conditions that prompted the creation of the CBC in 1936 are more prevalent now than at any time previous in living memory. There is more need now for a shared sense of Canadian identity. We need a revitalized social understanding about how to mediate access to information and power in a democracy. I would remind Conservatives of this, and I would ask: if you destroy the CBC, would you have to replace it with something else? I would ask you to put a pin in the anger, and consider how Canada and her people will be best served after the impending collapse of traditional media infrastructure. Lastly, I would remind you of all those satellites on all those apartment blocks and ask: if the CBC, or something like it, isn’t going to fill the gap, who will? 

Source: Jen Gerson: The Conservative case for the CBC