Marie-Philippe Bouchard, a Quebec TV executive who has been appointed as the new president of the CBC.Benedicte Brocard/The Canadian Press
The House of Commons Heritage committee is not a court of law, but if it were, CBC president Catherine Tait would be known as a hostile witness. In her appearances before the committee over the course of her six-year tenure, she managed to destroy any goodwill that remained toward the public broadcaster beyond its dwindling core of Liberal apologists.
In her final testimony on Tuesday, Ms. Tait was characteristically tone-deaf, as MPs from all parties pressed her to justify the $18.4-million in bonuses that CBC/Radio-Canada doled out to around 1,200 employees in its 2023-24 fiscal year – despite crying poor and cutting jobs – all while millions of Canadians are struggling to pay the bills.
New Democratic Party MP Niki Ashton asked Ms. Tait if she thought that extending the bonuses – which it calls “performance pay” – had “hurt the CBC’s reputation” and played “into the hands of Conservatives who want nothing less [than] to cut the CBC.” Ms. Tait replied her actions were “irrelevant.”
When Conservative MP Jamil Jivani asked essentially the same thing, Ms. Tait denounced “a clear effort on the part of members of this committee to vilify and discredit me and to discredit the organization,” and chastised MPs for not praising the CBC’s “accomplishments over the last six years.”
She boasted that CBC/Radio-Canada’s digital revenues have increased from $38-million to about $100-million a year, as if this was some great feat rather than being in line with a media-sector-wide shift to online audiences. As the CRTC has noted, the digital revenues of all Canadian broadcasters rose at a compound annual growth rate of almost 17 per cent between 2018-19 and 2022-23.
Even so, conventional television advertising still accounts for more than two-thirds of CBC’s ad revenue – in the first quarter of this year it amounted to $39.5-million, compared with $18.7-million for digital. And the overwhelming bulk of the $1.4-billion the CBC gets in annual taxpayer funds goes toward paying for news and dramatic programming geared toward a traditional television audience.
In that respect, it is hard to identify many, if any, accomplishments made during Ms. Tait’s tenure. While CBC/Radio-Canada still claims to be Canada’s most trusted news source, the value of such a label is not what it once was – not when more Canadians trust The Weather Network than their own public broadcaster. Or when most Canadians outside Quebec have grown so weary of the CBC’s preachiness and activism that they have tuned out altogether.
Rather than responding to critics, Ms. Tait has systematically ignored or dismissed them and attacked those who would “defund” the CBC. She is as responsible for the CBC’s politicization as Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre.
What, if anything, Marie-Philippe Bouchard can do to restore the CBC to its rightful and respected place in the Canadian media landscape remains to be seen.
Appointed this week by Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge to a five-year term that begins in January, Ms. Bouchard is set to succeed Ms. Tait with an election looming that could irreversibly seal the broadcaster’s fate. That alone makes her decision to accept the job a risky undertaking.
The first francophone woman to head CBC/Radio-Canada, Ms. Bouchard certainly has the résumé for the job, having spent almost three decades in senior management roles at the CBC’s French-language network before becoming head of TV5 Québec Canada in 2016. Fans of TV5 (of which I am one) have been treated during Ms. Bouchard’s tenure to the best of French-language content from public broadcasters in France, Belgium and Switzerland, in addition to original Canadian-made programming that puts the CBC to shame.
The network, which operates as a not-for-profit specialty channel, offers a lineup of documentary and dramatic content that is highbrow without being off-putting to modern audiences. One original series now in its third season, 39-45 en sol canadien, (39-45 on Canadian Soil) chronicles the transformative effect of the Second World War on Canadian society.
It is the kind of show that would be on the CBC – if only it took its mandate seriously. Unfortunately, Ms. Bouchard is largely a stranger to the Toronto-centric English network’s culture. She would likely run into implacable resistance from its Family Feud-boosting managers were she to attempt to require more refined content.
Ms. St-Onge keeps promising big changes at CBC/Radio-Canada. But with her departure next month for parental leave and an election nearing, the odds of any meaningful overhaul of the public broadcaster’s mandate under the current Liberal government are slim-to-none.
Ms. Bouchard was a member of a panel Ms. St-Onge struck earlier this year to advise her on changes to CBC/Radio-Canada’s “funding, governance and mandate.” That the whole exercise was conducted in secret does not suggest the Liberals are interested in making the major reforms needed to restore public trust in the CBC.
And that is why the new CBC president just might be its last.