Poilievre promises to ‘Defund the CBC’ after bonus amount revealed

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After it was revealed this week that the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. paid $18.4 million in bonuses following hundreds of job cuts, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has renewed his promise to cut off funding to the public broadcaster if he’s elected prime minister next year.

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The CBC/Radio-Canada board of directors recently approved over $18.4 million in bonuses for nearly 1,200 employees, managers and executives for the 2023-24 fiscal year after it eliminated hundreds of positions. That number represents a 23% increase over the $14.9 million on bonuses handed out the previous year.

In response, Poilievre shared a post to X with the caption “Defund the CBC” with a link inviting his followers to a website calling on the Liberals to end subsidies to the state broadcaster.

“We the undersigned call on the Liberal government to defund the CBC,” the petition reads. “Whereas the CBC undercuts private sector and independent media and competes for advertising space while receiving more than $1 billion in direct taxpayer subsidies. And whereas the CBC mostly provides opinions and coverage that are widely available in a free and competitive media marketplace. Therefore, be it resolved that we call on this Liberal government to defund the CBC to save taxpayer dollars and ensure a free and competitive press in the Canadian media landscape.”

Poilievre’s post generated over 5,000 likes and hundreds of supportive comments. “100% Less than 4% of Canadians watch CBC. People who want to watch it should pay for it. Not the taxpayer,” one fan wrote, with another likening the bonus payout to “white collar crime.”

“Taxpayers shouldn’t be funding media outlets,” another wrote. “We as taxpayers are paying the media to lie to us. It’s insulting.”

Poilievre shared a follow-up message that included a video compilation from MP Melissa Lantsman in which CBC/Radio-Canada president and CEO Catherine Tait repeatedly avoids answering how much of a taxpayer-funded bonus she’ll receive.

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“Quite frankly there shouldn’t be any bonuses given in years when over a certain percentage of employees were laid off,” one commentator wrote on Reddit. “This is disgusting and just yet another of the countless examples of the wealthy elite enriching themselves through corruption and at the expense of everyone else. This country is exhausting.”

On Wednesday, the Liberal government refused to say if it approved a bonus for Tait, whose annual compensation ranges between $472,900 and $623,900, according to the CBC’s 2023 senior management compensation summary.

Tait’s bonus pay is set between seven per cent to 28% of her salary, if she meets certain criteria. But outside of the Olympics and Hockey Night in Canada, Canadians don’t seem interested in the content CBC produces.

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A year ago, it was reported that CBC’s English language television audience was just 4.4% of the prime time viewing audience, down from 7.6% five years earlier.

According to my colleague, Brian Lilley, CBC’s flagship news program, the most expensive to produce in the country, trails CTV and Global’s national newscasts.

“Clearly, Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government are content to give CBC executives and their handpicked CEO huge multimillion-dollar taxpayer funded bonuses amid dwindling viewership and increasing irrelevancy so long as they remain good servants to their masters and continue to act as the propaganda arm of the Liberal party,” said Heritage critic Rachael Thomas in a statement on Wednesday.

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Last December, the CBC said it planned to cut 600 jobs, eliminate 200 vacancies and slash $40 million from its production budget to help mitigate a projected $125-million shortfall. The movie came despite the Liberals handing over $1.38-billion in taxpayer dollars to the CBC in 2024-25 (which is a significant uptick from the $1.29 billion the broadcaster got for 2023-24).

When Tait, who lived in Brooklyn, N.Y. during the pandemic, was called before the heritage committee to answer for the job cuts, she cried poor.

“At $33 per Canadian — a dime a day — CBC/Radio-Canada is one of the worst-funded public broadcasters in the world, with four times less funding than the U.K. and France and eight times less than Germany,” Tait moaned. “Until that situation changes, we must continue to manage with what we have and do our very best to stretch limited resources to meet our mandate.”

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Poilievre has long maintained that if elected prime minister, he will end funding to the CBC.

“Almost everything the CBC does can be done in the marketplace these days because of technology,” he told True North host Andrew Lawton last year, while offering to keep funding in place for some French-language content.

“I would preserve a small amount for French-language minorities, linguistic minorities, because they, frankly, will not get news services provided by the market,” Poilievre said at the time.

At a rally in Toronto earlier this year, Poilievre taunted the broadcaster when he promised to turn the CBC’s headquarters in downtown Toronto into much-needed housing.

“We’re going to sell off 6,000 federal buildings and thousands of acres of federal land to build, build, build,” he said. “And you know something, it warms my heart to think of a beautiful family pulling up in their U-Haul to move into their wonderful new home in the former headquarters of the CBC.”

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With a federal election still over a year away, Poilievre is making the defunding of the CBC a main selling point. 

In response to Poilievre’s threats, the Office of Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge defended the CBC in an email to Postmedia, maintaining that the service “connects (Canadians) from coast to coast to coast.”

“Pierre Poilievre is recklessly threatening to cut a service that millions of Canadians rely on. He has said he would keep Radio-Canada, but has not acknowledged how cutting CBC would impact them,” the Office of the Minister of Canadian Heritage said in an email to Postmedia last month. “He has repeatedly attacked professional journalists for asking tough questions and reporting the facts. As we face rampant disinformation, including from foreign sources, leaders must stand up for Canadians being able to get reliable, independent news and information. Poilievre and his Conservatives have chosen to leave Canadians with less sources of local, trustworthy, independent news, information and content. It’s irresponsible when CBC/Radio-Canada is supported and regularly used by a majority of Canadians.”

— With files from the Canadian Press

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