Catherine Tait, president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, at the CBC headquarters, in Ottawa, on Feb. 15, 2019.Dave Chan/The Globe and Mail
In the spring of 2018, when the Liberal government announced Catherine Tait as the new president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada, the journalist Tom Clark, who had chaired a committee of industry experts to help with the selection, said Tait was “the audacious choice.” Though she had never worked as a journalist and therefore had no experience in the central mission of the public broadcaster, Clark noted Tait had a track record as a TV producer. “She has spent all her life telling stories,” he told The Globe.
Stories can be powerful tools, but they can also be dangerous. That’s one reason Tait was excited about the job, which she’ll hand over at the end of the year to Marie-Philippe Bouchard, who was named as her replacement on Tuesday.
Tait framed the public broadcaster as “one of the custodians of democracy,” a bulwark against the rising tide of mis- and disinformation. This was back in the middle of the Trump era, when we were still comparatively naive, before the cancer metastasized.
But maybe Tait was also naive, thinking that if only she told a good enough story, she could control the narrative about her and CBC. She was, as Clark suggested, an unusual choice for the job: not just because she was the first woman to lead the Corp, but because she followed a long, stolid line of businessmen, lawyers and bureaucrats who rarely spoke with any passion – or even evident understanding – of public broadcasting as a public good.
Tait seemed to figure that if she allowed people to see her earnestness, her humanity, they might cut her some slack.
She got a nasty lesson early on in how easy it was to lose your own story, to be chewed up and spat out by the political and media machinery that was then emerging, where small missteps are quickly weaponized. A little more than six months into the job, appearing at an industry event in Ottawa, she went off script and suggested Netflix might not be an entirely benevolent or beneficial cultural force. Though she praised the streamer and said she was “grateful” for its programming, she also raised the spectre of the British Raj, saying, “we are at the beginning of a new empire,” and warning Canadians to be mindful of “what happens after imperialism, and the damage that can do to local communities.”
Oops.
She was accused of historical ignorance, of being insensitive toward those who had suffered under colonialism, including, of course, Indigenous Canadians. On – let’s call it the other side of the political divide – others mocked her for the heavy-handed comparison: it’s just TV, they said. C’mon. Chill.
And sometimes Netflix was helpful. After CBC nurtured Schitt’s Creek into a popular hit in Canada, it found a worldwide audience on the streamer and won seven Emmys in 2020.
Still, was Tait entirely wrong? Almost six years later, sure, it’s hard to be churlish about the oceans of foreign programming that Netflix and the other streamers have brought to Canadian audiences. But it’s also true that, under pressure from those companies and their global scale, our homegrown TV landscape – and the news ecosystem that used to be supported by the fat profits spun off by domestic broadcasters – is in the midst of free fall. And we still haven’t really had the conversation – about how to navigate the effects of that cultural imperialism – that Tait was trying to ignite.
It was sometimes hard to square her defence of public broadcasting with some of her attempts to raise revenue, such as the ill-advised introduction in 2020 of branded content – a.k.a. advertising – into CBC’s news offerings, prompting a revolt by current and former employees including Peter Mansbridge, Linden MacIntyre, Gillian Findlay, Bob McKeown and Adrienne Clarkson. Tony Burman, a former editor in chief of CBC News, told The Globe that the program, known as CBC Tandem (that is, advertising and editorial working in tandem, ugh) was “selling the journalistic reputation of the CBC to the highest bidder. That’s not what a public broadcaster should be doing. In an era where the fiction of so-called fake news is undermining trust in journalism, I think this just makes it worse.”
But with public broadcasting on the ropes around the globe, Tait believed the best defence was a good offence. She pledged to “take Canada to the world” and struck partnerships with CBC/Radio-Canada’s international brethren, including NPR, the BBC, Australia’s ABC, the European Broadcasting Union and others.
Still, Tait never quite seemed comfortable absorbing and deflecting the vitriol that is an inevitable part of the job. Unlike her predecessor, Hubert Lacroix, who never said anything negative in public about his government overlords, even when they gutted federal funding, Tait sometimes let slip what she was actually feeling, such as when she told The Globe last year, accurately, “There’s a lot of CBC bashing going on, somewhat stoked by the Leader of the Opposition.” The Leader of the Opposition responded by bashing her and tweeting out a fundraising pitch.
For the better part of this year, Tait has been under fire for CBC/Radio-Canada’s practice of giving about 1,200 employees what it calls “performance pay,” and most people call bonuses. Of course, that practice is a common feature of private industry, which believes with an almost religious fervour that hiring the best people means paying them what the labour market demands, including sometimes eye-popping bonuses. Champions of private industry are always banging on about how the public sector should adopt more of its practices. Just not this one, I guess?
Tait has taken a couple of stabs at making that argument, but her heart never seemed in it.
On Monday, under questioning from MPs during her third appearance this year before the Heritage committee to discuss the bonus/performance pay issue, Tait turned scrappy, arguing that “there is a clear effort on the part of members of this committee to vilify and to discredit me, and to discredit the organization.”
She’s not wrong. She may have been unwise to say it out loud, but with 10 more weeks left on the job, wouldn’t you feel the urge to do the same?
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