Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre wrote Twitter CEO Elon Musk to ask him to put the government label on CBC accounts.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
It’s no great injustice to label the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. as “government-funded media” on Twitter, because it is. But what’s remarkable is how Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre campaigned for that label – but not for a similar label to be applied to the CBC’s French-language service, Radio-Canada.
Mr. Poilievre went out of his way to write Twitter CEO Elon Musk to ask him to put the government label on CBC accounts and also to tweet about it with a justification: It’s just a fact.
Once Twitter did it, Mr. Poilievre took to Twitter again crowing that the new label proved that the CBC is nothing but “Trudeau propaganda.”
You might think he did all this because Mr. Poilievre just delights in picking culture-war fights. And to an extent, that’s right. Sometimes you have to wonder if this highly effective political communicator is detracting from his own standing with petty trolling.
But there is another aspect of Mr. Poilievre’s political tactics in this episode: He uses culture war as a weapon when it is politically convenient and stays on the sidelines when it is not.
Mr. Poilievre didn’t campaign for the (government-funded) Radio-Canada to get the same label because that would not translate well to Quebec. Mr. Poilievre and his Conservatives are running behind in the province and they are not as courageous when they draw up enemy lists there.
And of course, that is why he stepped into the whole Twitter-label business. To pick a fight that suits him. His Conservative base in English Canada hates the public broadcaster. His promise to defund the CBC always got the biggest cheer at his rallies during his leadership campaign. He keeps the pot brewing because it helps him deflect questions from journalists and the Conservatives use it in fundraising campaigns.
Twitter’s new “government-funded media” label annoyed public broadcasters such as the BBC in Britain and National Public Radio in the United States, who felt they were singled out for labelling that suggested they are akin to government-controlled propaganda outlets. When Mr. Poilievre saw that, he decided to ask Twitter to do the same for the CBC.
The label is accurate in the case of the CBC. It is funded in large part by government. But Mr. Poilievre’s tweets illustrated the issue: He tweeted that the label should be applied because it is factual, and once Twitter applied it, Mr. Poilievre tweeted that the CBC is now “exposed” as Trudeau propaganda.
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But no word from Mr. Poilievre on whether he thinks Radio-Canada is a propaganda tool. He’s already fighting accusations that he will slash the network from people such as Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet.
The Conservative Leader has promised over and over again that he’ll defund the CBC and save $1-billion, which suggested he meant Radio-Canada, too, because both networks get about $1.2-billion in public funding, so cutting $1-billion would mean slashing the French-language service’s budget.
But in Quebec, Mr. Poilievre has been at pains to clarify that he doesn’t intend to defund Radio-Canada. He has said that’s because the CBC does things the private sector can do, while Radio-Canada does things the market will not provide, although Pierre-Karl Péladeau, the owner of TVA, Quebec’s largest private television network, certainly disagrees.
It’s worth noting that while the market is his official reason for wanting to defund the CBC, he often gives another: that CBC News is biased against him and his party. Mr. Poilievre likes it when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau defends the CBC, as he did Monday.
Mr. Poilievre has a right to complain about the media, as politicians do, and even to argue against funding the public broadcaster. But he combines the two together into a campaign that includes criticizing CBC journalists when they ask questions.
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Last Thursday, a reporter from The Canadian Press, the just-the-facts wire service that provides news stories to a wide range of organizations and is owned by three newspapers including The Globe and Mail, tried to ask Mr. Poilievre a question. The Conservative Leader argued that because the CBC is a client of The Canadian Press, the wire service must be biased. He never did really answer the question.
The question, for the record, was about defunding the CBC, but not Radio-Canada.