NO CAPITALISTS, PLEASE, WE’RE CBC.

The CBC News Network announced last week it was cancelling its flagship business program On the Money, ending the tradition of covering business news in-depth since the all-news channel’s inception in 1989. The cancellation seemed inevitable after being shifted from a prime-time evening slot to 4 p.m., where it was regularly interrupted by news conferences and weather reports.

But killing off the national broadcaster’s main vehicle for business news and commentary raises the question of whether the CBC was motivated by its growing bias against business people’s views of the world, which inevitably tend to be more conservative. No one cited ratings as a factor in the decision; rather, CBC management blamed budget constraints, as the $500 million of additional funding newly provided by the Trudeau government is supposedly not enough to cover the development of a digital platform for its broadcasts. If true, this shows just how serious is the disadvantage of privatesector news broadcasts that cannot possibly match the CBC in developing new platforms, especially when the CBC gives all its programming away for no fee.

However, budget constraints are a lame excuse. Everyone has a budget, which only forces management to reveal its priorities. The CBC’S budget has expanded sharply under the Liberal government, but it chose to divert funds into costly ventures such as The National, while starving other programs. True to its public sector roots, the CBC never trims employee compensation as part of its search to cut costs.

It seems more likely that On the Money was targeted because it was the last bastion of pro-business commentary (at least by comparison with other CBC programs). After all, the show and its predecessor The Exchange helped make Kevin O’leary famous enough to make a run for the leadership of the federal Conservative party — a dangerous precedent. The extensive airing of O’leary’s conservative views on The Exchange was subsequently shrunk to five-minute roundups by such right-wing thought leaders as professor Ian Lee and entrepreneur Mark Satov. Mercifully, viewers will no longer have to listen to the equal coverage the show insisted on giving to raving redistributionists such as Armine Yalmizyan and Angela Mcewen.

While cutting On the Money the CBC continues to subsidize various programs such as The Current and The Sunday Edition, which have come to resemble graduate school humanities seminars on identity liberalism, encouraging listeners to view themselves in terms of victimization and identity politics and against the growing greed of the business class. The most honest title of a CBC program is the radio show The 180, which covers not the whole 360-degree spectrum, but half: from the centre to the far left.

It is an open question whether the federal government suggested the CBC cut its business coverage. Half-a-billion dollars in extra funding represents enormous leverage for a government to wield over any public agency. Can the public really be confident that the increase in funding by the Liberal government after the 2015 election has not influenced its coverage of the Trudeau Liberal agenda? That’s the type of question journalists at the CBC like to ask when it comes to other organizations’ financial motivations, but not of its own.

The inability of the CBC to be objective about itself became most vivid to me when it covered a report I wrote in 2015 about the abuse of sick-leave benefits in the public sector. Every interview I gave on the subject was balanced — except for the CBC, where interviewers ferociously defended their own generous sick-leave package. One outraged CBC journalist accused me of forcing sick people to work. It was as William F. Buckley Jr. observed when running for mayor of New York in the 1960s: when a conservative is being interviewed, “the interviewer is honing his axe, the interviewee baring his neck.”

Happily for viewers, there are many alternatives for serious business news outlets that discuss the creation, and not just the redistribution of wealth — notably BNN Bloomberg TV and the Financial Post. Liberal media bias ultimately backfired in the U.S. as people tired of its elitist message that contradicted the reality of their everyday lives. American conservative media exploded in the 1990s in response to the perception that mainstream media was ignoring so many people’s views due to the bias that Buckley correctly pinpointed.

In Canada, the playing field remains uneven as competing private media outlets do not directly receive the public subsidies the CBC receives. The many friends of the CBC who believe it serves a national purpose should be free to send their own money to help fund it; they should not be able to compel taxpayers who are not receptive to the CBC’S business-unfriendly message to divert their tax dollars to its coffers. Once a genuinely national broadcaster, the CBC has now become merely a state broadcaster. The end of On the Money is just one of the last of many signs that it no longer represents anyone in the Canadian public willing to question the reflexive reliance on government to solve everyone’s problems.

ON THE MONEY WAS ITS LAST BASTION OF PRO-BUSINESS COMMENTARY.