National Post (National Edition)
Inside the CBC's toxic workplace
When the Winnipeg Blue Bombers won the Grey Cup on Nov. 24, 2019, 23-year-old CBC journalist Ahmar Khan was in the thick of the crowd at Portage and Main, reporting on the celebrations. After everyone went home, he wrote up his coverage, headed back to his office and returned the laptop he'd signed out. It was the last story that Khan would ever cover for the CBC.
At the time, Khan was already on thin ice because he'd just gone on a scathing Twitter bender about Don Cherry's continued presence on Coach's Corner. Khan's superiors told him to delete his tweets, which they said were unbecoming of a reporter.
In the time-honoured tradition of all umbraged CBC staffers, Khan responded by leaking his boss' admonitions to Canadaland. Khan wasn't identified as the source, and he wasn't punished by his employer. But his exasperated manager, Melanie Verhaeghe (remember that name), did instruct him to lay off social media for a while.
It was on Nov. 28, 2019, three weeks after Khan blasted Cherry as “xenophobic,” that one of his fellow CBC reporters — Austin Grabish — booted up the laptop that Khan had used to cover the Grey Cup, whereupon he discovered that Khan had forgotten to log off his personal Twitter and WhatsApp accounts. This oversight would lead not only to the end of Khan's CBC career, but to a sordid in-house melodrama that's now been documented in an arbitrator's ruling upholding Khan's union grievance.
It's worth pausing here to consider Khan's reputation within the newsroom at the time. Given CBC producers' seemingly inexhaustible appetite for stories about racism, you'd think he would've been treated as a hero after blasting Cherry on Twitter. But the arbitrator's ruling suggests that, among some colleagues at least, Khan was resented as a hothead who'd embarrassed the CBC.
Which brings us back to Grabish, who now saw an opportunity to sink Khan with the contents of his own private social-media correspondence. Later on, Grabish would claim that Khan's dirty secrets were sitting there in plain sight on the screen. But with a little digital detective work, the arbitrator deduced that Grabish had methodically gone back through months' worth of Khan's past posts, sometimes even searching on specific terms as he sought out dirt on his colleague.
Grabish found proof that Khan had been the source for the Canadaland story, as his colleagues suspected. But Grabish also turned up other, unrelated tidbits, which he then passed on to his (and Khan's) boss, the aforementioned Melanie Verhaeghe, in the form of screenshots. These tidbits included the fact that Khan had once used the word “fag” in a WhatsApp conversation with friends. There was also a juicy snippet from a January 2019 WhatsApp conversation in which, as Grabish presented it, Khan seemed to describe Verhaeghe as someone who “looks real nice.” On the surface, it looked like incriminating stuff.
But the scheme to smear Khan fell apart when the arbitrator discovered that Grabish had cropped the screenshots in a misleading way before passing them on to his boss. Khan's “looks real nice” comment actually referred to a “young woman who appears to be of South Asian background.” This was obvious to the arbitrator because — as Grabish himself would have known — that woman's photo is embedded in the WhatsApp correspondence. Verhaeghe would have known that, too, had Grabish not cropped it out before sending her the screenshot.
Grabish also cropped out the date on Khan's “fag” comment — which (unknown to Verhaeghe) turned out to be from Oct. 14, 2018, well before Khan even joined the CBC. And, when seen in the full context, the comment doesn't even seem to betray homophobic intent. Khan's “nonsense banter,” as the arbitrator described it, actually seems more of a send-up of the sort of homophobic “patter” you hear from “thugs.” I suspect Grabish knew that, too.
At one point in his conversations with Verhaeghe, Grabish calls Khan a “pathological liar” — which is a bit rich, given how Grabish himself comes off. My own experience with the pathological types who seem to disproportionately afflict Canadian arts and letters is that they deal with conflict in one of two ways: sadistic bullying and morbid self-pity.
And so, right on cue, Grabish, the office data stalker, phase-switched into wounded-victim mode just as soon as the arbitrator spilled the beans. Quoted in a Jan. 14 CBC News article by Mark Gollom on Khan's legal vindication, Grabish presents as a delicate ingenue who was “shocked and disappointed” by what he found on the computer: “As a gay man, I know what it's like to be marginalized.”
Amazingly, Gollom's article dedicates four paragraphs to Grabish's absurd victim shtick, yet omits almost all of the details I described above. Nowhere in the CBC article does Gollom detail the extent of Grabish's data mining, or the cropping out of dates and identities. The CBC's apparent effort to use its news service as a propaganda tool in this way is arguably as big a disgrace as the underlying workplace scandal.
When I began my career in journalism 20 years ago, a lot of people I worked with dreamed of a career at the CBC. But the Jian Ghomeshi story taught us a lot about the toxic nature of the CBC's work environment — and Ahmar Khan's saga suggests not much has changed. This week's arbitrator's judgment describes a largely dysfunctional bureaucracy, in which union rules and identity politics are weaponized to prosecute grubby internal feuds, and relatively little time is spent on actual journalism.
Between the 2017-18 and 201819 seasons alone, CBC Television lost 25 per cent of its viewers. Its English-language audience share is now less than four per cent — a predictable consequence of policies that prioritize quotas and activist mono-think over editorial quality. In fact, the only time most of us talk about the CBC anymore is when the outfit generates an internal scandal.
CEO Catherine Tait spent much of the last year holed up in a New York mansion. Not to be outdone, the head of the CBC's French arm, Radio-Canada, spent December in Miami. He faces zero punishment — as opposed to Wendy Mesley, one of the few CBC hosts with any audience loyalty, who was viciously cancelled when she used the N-word in quoting a guest on an upcoming show (a public shaming that the CBC's own reporters naturally covered with great enthusiasm). The show Trickster, one of the CBC's scarce hits, is in turmoil because the director, Michelle Latimer, turned out to have the wrong racial DNA.
There is not a single organization in all of Canada — private or public — where this kind of failure wouldn't result in wholesale management change. The reason this hasn't happened at the CBC is that no one even pretends that the place still exists to serve ordinary Canadians, so there is no longer any real metric for evaluating performance.
The CBC now staggers on largely as a make-work project for a certain kind of privileged urban virtue signaller who can be counted on to have the right opinions, post the right hashtags and keep the broadcaster's dirty laundry behind closed doors in New York and Boca Raton, Fla.
These are the people living large off the $1.2 billion that taxpayers send the CBC every year. Not so long ago, that outlay seemed merely indefensible. Under Tait's watch, it seems positively grotesque.