With Conservatives promising to 'defund,' could the next election kill the CBC?

The CBC logo is projected onto a screen in Toronto on May 29, 2019. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Tijana Martin Tijana Martin

In late 2023, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said it was time for the federal government to redefine what the CBC does and how it does it.

A year later — and with a federal election expected sometime this spring — her office is promising the minister will unveil the planned changes to the public broadcaster's mandate in "due course." But with Parliamentary business on hold until late March due to prorogation, and opposition parties champing at the bit to trigger an election, getting any legislative changes to the CBC's mandate passed may be a long shot.

In the meantime, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is sticking to his promise to "defund" the CBC if his party forms the next government.

"Yes, I am going to do it," he said in a recent interview with the Toronto Sun, adding he would be "very quick" to follow through on his promise.

That means the CBC's current role, its prospects for reform and its very existence are set to become election issues in the coming campaign.

Peter Menzies, a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, predicted "the CBC will find itself in the very ticklish position of reporting on an election campaign in which it is a significant feature."

Sarah Andrews, director of government and media relations at the advocacy group Friends of Canadian Media, said the public broadcaster will be a "huge" election issue for Canadians.

"We're talking about the very existence of the CBC," she said. "For some people, it’s as Canadian as maple syrup and as the beaver. It's fundamental to our identity."

The Conservatives aren’t offering any details on how their plan would work. Damien Kurek, currently the party’s heritage critic, said in a media statement the Conservatives would "defund the CBC while preserving funding to ensure francophone Canadians continue to receive news services."

He called the CBC a "broken and failing propaganda machine" and said the party would "turn the CBC headquarters into beautiful homes for Canadian families."

In the Toronto Sun interview, Poilievre was asked whether his plan entails "shutting them down." He committed again to defunding the CBC to save the government $1 billion annually.

In 2023-2024, CBC/Radio-Canada received $1.44 billion from the federal government and generated $493.5 million in revenue.

Menzies said that for the Conservatives, promising to defund the CBC "very much speaks to a significant portion of their base. It lights up a crowd. It has inspired fundraising like crazy."

But that message may not resonate the same way with the electorate as a whole. Jessica Johnson is a senior fellow at McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, which conducted survey research that found most Canadians — even Conservative voters — want to keep the CBC around.

Overall, only 11 per cent of those who responded to the survey in late August and early September 2024 were in favour of defunding the public broadcaster.

If a party put a defunding promise in a platform it would be an "ideological decision and a statement that they would then have to defend to the country," Johnson said.

She said that while most Canadians don't want to see radical changes to the public broadcaster, "they want to see improvement."

"They want it to do a better job at what it's currently supposed to be doing."

Critics of Poilievre’s plan have pointed out that cutting funding to English services alone would be difficult. The English-language CBC and French-language Radio-Canada share many resources, such as buildings.

CBC/Radio-Canada’s new CEO Marie-Philippe Bouchard told a Parliamentary committee in November the two services are "clearly very interconnected." She said "all support services outside Quebec are actually provided by English services. Without that support, there is no service."

The CBC’s mandate is set out in the 1991 Broadcasting Act. It says the public broadcaster should "provide broadcasting services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains."

"What the statute does is it simply creates or … establishes that this entity exists," said Monica Auer, executive director of the Forum for Research and Policy in Communications.

"If the entity is completely defunded, it technically exists. It just can't operate."

In 2021, the Liberal government tasked then-heritage minister Pablo Rodriguez with modernizing CBC/Radio-Canada and updating that decades-old mandate.

"In those 30 years, the internet became a thing … The platforms on which the CBC operates have obviously changed," Andrews said, citing the addition of online news and the CBC Gem streaming service to the older TV and radio services.

"The mandate needs to be brought into the modern world."

The Liberals haven’t offered many indications of how they plan to do that. The government opted not to launch a public consultation on the new CBC mandate, saying it had enough feedback from prior proceedings like the broadcasting and telecom review panel that considered a wide range of communications-related questions between 2018 and 2020.

Auer said there were some key takeaways from those previous consultations.

"The first conclusion is that a majority of Canadians value the national public broadcaster," she said. "I think it's also fair to say that many people in those proceedings have expressed concern about its performance."

She added that "many people have criticized the corporation for the fact that, in many ways, it seems to resemble a publicly-funded commercial private broadcaster. However, that's the symptom. The cause is inadequate public funding."

Auer said Canada funds its public broadcasting "very poorly" compared to other countries.

In December, the House of Commons Heritage committee recommended the government "provide a substantial and lasting increase" in its funding for CBC/Radio-Canada, "allowing it to eliminate its paid subscription services and gradually end its reliance on commercial advertising revenues."

In a report, it said defunding CBC would trigger thousands of layoffs and "many more indirect job losses."

It said CBC/Radio-Canada "is often the only outlet to offer news service" in some areas of Canada. The report noted the public broadcaster is "failing to fulfil its obligations in this respect" in some cases.

Conservative MPs on the committee dissented on the report and called for the CBC to be defunded.

In a statement, a spokesperson for St-Onge said the minister "has worked closely with experts, Canadians and caucus colleagues for many months on possible policy changes for CBC/Radio-Canada. She looks forward to having more to say on the specifics in due course."

The statement noted that Bouchard only started her job earlier this month. Bouchard replaced Catherine Tait, who attracted controversy over executive bonuses and other issues. St-Onge’s office said Bouchard would be "doing important work at this time to advance our public service media."

A spokesperson for CBC said the broadcaster looks "forward to hearing the results of the minister's work."

Menzies said the Liberal government may have "missed an opportunity" to introduce the new mandate, and that creates problems for Bouchard.

"She may have her own vision, but I don't think she can express it to her staff until she gets a new mandate, which now she might not get. So she's kind of left hanging there."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 11, 2024.