CBC president and chief executive officer Catherine Tait waits to appear at the Heritage Committee in Ottawa on May 7.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
Sparks fly whenever CBC president Catherine Tait appears before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, as MPs of all stripes seize on the growing politicization of the public broadcaster to engage in their very worst behaviour.
Tuesday’s hearing of the Heritage committee, to which Ms. Tait had been summoned to update MPs on job cuts at CBC/Radio-Canada, was particularly incendiary as the Conservative MP Rachael Thomas accused the main witness of “lying” about the who, what, when and why of bonuses that the CBC may or may not pay out to top executives this year.
The hearing degenerated into a cacophonic free-for-all as Liberal MPs criticized Ms. Thomas for badgering the witness and Liberal committee chair Hedy Fry chastised the Tory MP for showing “a penchant for arguing with everyone.” The sad display of unparliamentary conduct only ended after Liberal and New Democratic MPs used their majority on the committee to abruptly adjourn the hearing, mercifully sparing Ms. Tait another second of misery.
Ms. Tait, who is in the final year of her mandate, arrived at the committee bearing what she believed was good news. The CBC will not have to cut 800 jobs to deal with a $125-million budget shortfall in 2024-25, as Ms. Tait had announced in December. After eliminating 346 positions (200 of them vacant) and receiving an extra $42-million from Ottawa in last month’s budget, Ms. Tait said on Tuesday that the cutting is over.
Indeed, compared to almost every other media organization in the country, CBC/Radio-Canada is swimming in money. The main estimates released in February revealed a $96-million increase in taxpayer funding for CBC/Radio-Canada in 2024-25, bringing its total federal grant to $1.4-billion. The $42-million unveiled in the budget is on top of that.
Ms. Thomas pressed Ms. Tait to commit to not using any of the extra money to pay bonuses to senior managers. Ms. Tait refused to make that promise, saying the decision on bonuses for the 2023-24 fiscal year that ended in March belongs to the public broadcaster’s board of directors, which will not meet to discuss the issue until next month.
It was at this point in the hearing that Ms. Thomas accused her of “either lying now or lying in January,” when Ms. Tait had told the committee: “Performance pay is pegged against targets and it’s measured at the end of the fiscal year, which will be the end of March. The board of directors will decide.”
A simple review of the transcript of the January hearing would have absolved Ms. Tait of the serious allegation Ms. Thomas made against her. Back then, Ms. Tait also said that after the fiscal year-end, “We’d take some time to do the assessment. Normally, we would present the results to the board at our meeting in June.”
To be clear, it is legitimate to ask whether the CBC should be paying bonuses at all. But that issue could have been dispensed with in relatively short order, and without all the acrimony, leaving the committee to get to the truly important questions.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has vowed to “defund” the CBC, while keeping Radio-Canada intact, based on the pretext that the English-language network is a ratings failure that mimics (and poorly, at that) what private broadcasters do and, hence, no longer serves any useful purpose. The francophone network, the Conservatives argue, is a ratings success and indispensable to the survival of French Canada, both within and outside Quebec.
Supporters of Radio-Canada have been in an uproar since La Presse reported last week that Ms. Tait and chief transformation officer Marco Dubé have been working on a “rapprochement” between the English and French networks – which now largely operate independently from one another – to save money and better compete against foreign digital platforms. But the unstated objective of the exercise, critics charge, is to make it harder for a future Poilievre government to cut loose the CBC.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Ms. Tait insisted the “editorial independence of CBC and Radio-Canada remains a fundamental principle,” and would not be affected by any move by the two networks to collaborate on technology initiatives as they transition to “an entirely digital world.”
But Radio-Canada’s defenders remain skeptical. They point to Ms. Tait’s botched handling of a controversy over the use of the N-word on a 2020 Radio-Canada broadcast and a decision last year by a Toronto-based producer to have the French-language adaptation of a CBC podcast done in Paris. Ms. Tait later apologized for the podcast faux pas, and ordered up a Quebec version, but the damage was done.
It will fall to Ms. Tait’s successor to try to rebuild the shattered trust, face the loaded questions from grandstanding MPs on the heritage committee and, if the polls hold true, deal with a hostile Conservative government.
Who in their right mind would want the job?