Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on April 18.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The case for reforming medicare is not so that we can get even with the doctors. Yet that – reform as vengeance – is essentially the basis of Pierre Poilievre’s campaign to defund the CBC. The CBC says things that conflict with Conservative Party dogma. Therefore, a Conservative government will take away its funding. It isn’t a lot more complicated than that.
Hence the performance art of the past few days, in which the putative next prime minister of Canada issued a public appeal to Elon Musk, the Emperor Nero of Twitter, to formally label the CBC as “government-funded media.” That may seem obvious – the CBC receives more than a billion dollars a year from the government – but that is not the sense Mr. Poilievre had in mind.
“CBC officially exposed,” he whooped, when Emperor Elon obliged. “Now people know that it is Trudeau propaganda, not news.”
Bias, of course, is just one of the criticisms commonly levelled at the CBC. Its programming is also said to be bad, and its viewers few. And broadly speaking, all three are true.
The CBC isn’t biased in the partisan sense that Mr. Poilievre claims, but the idea that it leans to the left, ideologically is not especially novel. Indeed, it is not even much disputed: it is simply considered in bad taste to bring it up.
Even the CBC’s strongest defenders, similarly, would concede that the quality of its programming, especially on its flagship English-language television service, is spotty at best. As for viewership numbers, the CBC’s annual reports tell the tale: down to less than 6 per cent in prime time.
But the same criticisms could be made of any broadcaster, public or private. The media generally lean left, not so much because of any overtly ideological agenda, but because progressivism better fits the needs of storytelling. “Villagers band together, defeat monster” is a great story. “Is there really a monster? Maybe it would be best to leave it alone” is not.
Most television anywhere, likewise, is bad, for the same reason most books are bad, most businesses fail, and most political campaigns lose: mediocrity is the great constant of human existence.
And every broadcaster is grappling with smaller audience shares: a function of the sheer multiplicity of channels. The difference, of course, is that most of these channels are not publicly funded – not, at any rate, to the tune of a billion-plus dollars a year.
But even accepting these critiques does not make the case for defunding the public broadcaster. Bias might be dealt with by less drastic means. Poor quality and shrinking audience numbers might even be cited as arguments for more funding. The BBC receives three times as much funding, per capita, from the licence fee.
The real case for defunding the CBC has nothing to do with its defects, real or alleged. It is simply that it is no longer necessary. Public funding was, at its origins, a kludge, a patch, devised to address early television’s technological limitations and the market failure to which they gave rise: the inability to charge viewers for what they were watching, or to exclude those who did not pay.
Advertising was another such patch, but came with its own limitations: namely, the tendency to produce broadly similar programs for the largest possible audience. Subsidies, like regulations, could be defended in such a world, as a way of recreating the diversity of offerings found in a well-functioning market.
But we are no longer in that world. There are hundreds, thousands, even millions of broadcasters, if you count YouTube, many of them subscription services. The case for public funding, like that of regulation, has disappeared.
It is perfectly possible to charge the CBC’s viewers a subscription fee, and if we can we should: for to go on paying for things with taxes that could be paid for in other ways leaves less for the things that can only be paid for with taxes.
That said, a pay-CBC would probably also be a better CBC. It is not accidental that the current “golden age” of television coincides with the rise of pay services like HBO and Netflix. A paying audience, it turns out, is a demanding audience, in a way that an audience packaged and sold to advertisers never was.
Putting the CBC on pay could be the best thing that ever happened to the corporation and its employees. No longer obliged to please either the government or advertisers, they would at last be free to focus on pleasing their audience.
That’s the case for defunding, or rather re-funding, the CBC. That’s the sort of “adult conversation” we might have about the public broadcaster, if we did not have adolescents for party leaders.