We had worked for a number of months researching a documentary to air on CBC television in Edmonton. Back in the early 1980s, several of us freelance broadcasters had crafted a story about what would happen in Alberta when the oil ran dry. One can imagine the volatility of such a subject given Alberta’s economic dependence on fossil fuel production, not to mention hostility in the oil patch over the National Energy Program at the time.
“Before the documentary goes to air,” a CBC producer told those of us writing the documentary, “the content has to be lawyered.”
“Lawyered? Isn’t the CBC arm’s-length from politics?” asked one of my colleagues.
“That’s exactly why it has to be vetted,” the producer said. “It’s got to be fair to both sides of the debate.”
The National Energy Program (NEP), you’ll remember, was a policy drafted in 1980 by then prime minister Pierre Trudeau to ensure Canada could supply its own oil and gas needs for 10 years. Intended to reassure energy-poor parts of the country they’d have fuel to run their cars and heat their homes, the NEP also appeared to restrict fossil-fuel development and sales.
By the 1990s, global economic conditions had made the NEP unnecessary, but to this day the concept continues to alienate Conservative Party faithful.
My point is that despite the potential for infuriating every political party in the country – both Peter Lougheed’s Alberta Conservatives and Pierre Trudeau’s federal Liberals – in the 1980s, the CBC felt it vital to explore Canada’s future energy needs with a timely documentary.
Put another way, despite the fact that the CBC has depended largely on federal government funding for over 90 years, its radio and TV journalism has remained true to its Crown corporation mandate – to pursue facts in the public interest, not to favour its funder.
A week ago, new Twitter owner Elon Musk decided to label the British Broadcasting Corporation and National Public Radio in the U.S. as “government media.”
In other words, in his ignorance, Musk equated a British Crown corporation and an American public broadcaster the same as the People’s Daily in China, or Putin’s TASS news service, or Iran’s IRNA News Agency, i.e. as “state-run media.” Mimicking Mr. Musk, Canada’s current Opposition leader has decided he’ll use the same misguided labelling to rile his base and attack mainstream media.
“We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media,” Pierre Poilievre wrote last week. “That’s why I’m asking Twitter to accurately label the CBC as government funded.”
Pardon me? I don’t think anybody who’s paid attention to broadcast history in this country (since Canadian Reginald Fessenden made the first ever radio broadcast in 1906) has thought for a minute that the CBC wasn’t government funded. But to equate tax dollars allocated to a public Canadian broadcaster with disinformation and manipulation is simply Poilievre-generated bunk.
Full disclosure here: In 50 years as a professional broadcaster in this country (longer than Mr. Poilievre has been alive), I have never been a CBC employee. And while a large proportion of my freelance broadcast work has been on CBC airwaves, in all those thousands of words of scripting or hundreds of broadcast appearances on the CBC, nobody has ever told this journalist what he should or should not present on-air at the behest of the federal government.
Let’s face it. The CBC has been the Conservatives’ whipping boy almost since its creation in 1932. Hating, defunding or eliminating the CBC all together has been a platform plank espoused by Conservative politicians going back to John Diefenbaker (who regularly offered vitriol for CBC broadcaster and critic Norman DePoe) … And Stephen Harper (who blamed the CBC’s woes on low ratings, not his $115 million budget cut) … And Erin O’Toole (who announced in 2020 that he’d end funding to CBC English TV and News Network by 50 per cent by the end of his first mandate).
Like many anti-CBC politicians, who eventually realize that hating or killing the CBC is a bit like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, Mr. O’Toole changed his mind.
“I want to maintain and modernize (the CBC) and make more accountable our development funding,” he said in 2021.
Clearly, Pierre Poilievre’s ideas of fair news dissemination are the likes of Twitter or Fox News – the former whose owner only understands monopoly and firing employees who speak out, and the latter which perpetuates disinformation about a former president’s lie of election rigging. If that’s the kind of news environment the Opposition leader prefers, let him go live in Elon Musk’s phony Twitter-verse.
I prefer a national publicly funded broadcaster that vets my work in pursuit of the truth.