The CBC used to air The Simpsons after school.
One of the best episodes was the Cape Fear homage, in which an FBI agent tries to change Homer’s last name to Thompson.
After hours of explanation, the kids have fallen asleep, Marge has given up and the agent says, “When I step on your foot and say: ‘Hello Mr. Thompson,’ you nod your head! Got it?!”
Homer did not get it.
The Liberal members of Parliament on the heritage committee still don’t get it.
The committee has sent a report to the House of Commons urging the government to give the CBC even more money.
“That the Government of Canada provide a substantial and lasting increase in the parliamentary appropriations for CBC/Radio-Canada, allowing it to eliminate its paid subscription services and gradually end its reliance on commercial advertising revenues,” reads the report.
Really? More money? The CBC already takes $1.4 billion a year from taxpayers. And that’s not enough?
That amount of money could already cover the salaries of about 7,000 police officers and 7,000 paramedics.
If Trudeau’s MPs want to give the CBC more money so that it can get rid of its advertising and subscription funding, that means a huge cost for taxpayers.
According to it’s latest annual report, the CBC collected about $493 million in revenue other than government funding in 2023-24 — the bulk being subscription fees and advertising.
This means these Trudeau government MPs want taxpayers to fund the CBC to the tune of about $2 billion per year.
This is the opposite of what needs to happen.
The CBC should be defunded for three key reasons.
The CBC is a huge waste of money, nearly nobody is watching it and journalists should not be paid by the government.
The committee knows this. And we know they know because the Canadian Taxpayers Federation told them to their faces in testimony before the committee.
CBC CEO Catherine Tait repeatedly testified at the committee and each time she inadvertently made a stronger case to defund the CBC, due to her entitlement and lack of accountability.
Tait refused to say if she will take a severance when she leaves the CBC next year, claiming it’s a personal matter. It’s not personal if it’s taxpayers’ money.
Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation show Tait is paid between $460,000 and $551,000 this year, with a bonus of up to 28%.
That’s a bonus of up to $154,448. That’s more than the average Canadian family earns in a year.
Just before Christmas last year, Tait cried broke to the committee and afterwards the CBC announced layoffs in its newsrooms.
Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC handed out big bonuses that year anyway, costing taxpayers $18 million.
As the CBC fan group Friends of Canadian Media put it: “This decision is deeply out of touch and unbefitting of our national public broadcaster.”
It gets worse because the state broadcaster isn’t even doing a good job.
According to the CBC’s latest quarterly report, CBC News Network’s national audience share is 1.7%.
Documents obtained by the CTF show the CBC’s supper-hour newscast drawing microscopic audiences, with 0.7% of
Toronto watching the 6 p.m. news on CBC.
Journalists should not be paid by the government because it’s an obvious conflict of interest. You can’t hold the powerful government to account if you’re counting on that government for your paycheque.
Such government funding of media has contributed to the rapid erosion of trust in the news media, with 61% of Canadians saying they think journalists are “purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
CBC’s entertainment programming barely fares better. The Murdoch Mysteries, which is not produced by the CBC, pulls in its biggest audience with about 1.9% of the population watching.
The politicians on the committee know all of this, and yet, like Homer Simpson, they are not getting the message.
If the CBC needs money, it should earn that money itself.
Taxpayers can’t afford the state broadcaster’s bill now, let alone hundreds of millions more.
It’s time to defund the CBC.
Kris Sims is Alberta director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery