The average working Canadian goes to work five days a week, puts in an honest day’s work and brings home roughly $65,000 per year. For CBC’s executive suite, they would consider that a bad bonus.
We’ve known for months now that close to 1,200 of CBC’s top management employees were going to be getting bonuses, the only question was how much. Now that the numbers are out, it is truly obscene given the state of the state broadcaster.
For the last fiscal year, which ended in March, CBC split $18.4 million between 1,194 employees. That’s a 23% increase over the $14.9 million on bonuses handed out the previous year.
The most recently awarded bonuses work out to an average $15,410, which is nice work if you can get it.
At CBC though — despite, or perhaps because of, their socialist political leanings — not all executive bonuses are considered equal.
Just 45 executives split $3.3 million of that pot, meaning an average bonus among the elites at CBC works out to $73,333. That average bonus works out to more than what an average Canadian earns, according to Statistics Canada.
And for what?
What did these executives at this failing broadcaster do to earn that bonus?
Is CBC running a network that everyone is watching and talking about? Hardly, a year ago it was reported that CBC’s English language television audience was just 4.4% of the prime time viewing audience, down from 7.6% five years earlier.
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CBC simply isn’t offering the programming people want to watch. Sure, they will point to lots of people tuning into the Olympics these past few weeks, but that was part of a consortium with Rogers and Bell and quite frankly, a good fortnight every four years isn’t much to brag about.
Are people texting each other, setting up Facebook groups, or chatting at the water cooler about Family Feud Canadian Edition with Gerry Dees? Not a chance.
Their flagship news program, the most expensive in the country, is the third horse in a three-horse race. They have trailed CTV and Global national newscasts for years and continue to do so.
Their local TV newscasts, where they haven’t been abandoned altogether, are largely irrelevant.
So, what are these executives getting big bonuses for, then?
“For the record, CBC/Radio-Canada does not award so-called bonuses,” CBC CEO Catherine Tait told a Commons committee in March.
“What we have, like every other Crown corporation, is at-risk or performance pay, which is a key part of the total compensation for our non-union staff.”
It doesn’t appear that anyone’s pay is at risk if bonuses are going up by 23%, while CBC’s ratings and relevance are going down.
Did I mention that these bonuses were paid out in a fiscal year when CBC announced hundreds of positions were being eliminated? Did I mention that CBC went to the government demanding more money to be able to keep the lights on in the last fiscal year?
Seems like they have plenty of money for their priorities, like bonuses, or sorry, performance pay.
If CBC were a private company, their awarding of bonus pay would be none of our business, but they aren’t a private company. They work for us, they report to the government, and at a time when they are failing to deliver on their Parliamentary mandate and are crying poor while eliminating positions, these bonuses become obscene.
Tait is doing as much to advance the cause of defunding CBC as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is. Her tenure is even worse than that of Hubert Lacroix and under his watch, CBC’s French division paid for a porn series to be streamed online.
These bonuses should be done away with as quickly as CBC itself, and Tait should be shown the door pronto.