CBC chief owes us some answers
Why was poor performance rewarded?
Canadians have never paid so much for so little. We see it every day as the cost of government goes up, driving up the cost of everything else, while service levels go down. The same is true of our public broadcaster, the CBC.
Last December, CBC’S CEO Catherine Tait told Canadians she would be slashing 800 positions (200 of which were vacant to begin with), sending 600 people to the unemployment line during an affordability crisis. She just couldn’t afford them, despite the $1 billion or more in taxpayer dollars they receive every year.
The most shocking part came in the next breath as employees were clearing out their desks and packing their boxes. Tait declared in January that millions of dollars in big bonuses were still on the table for herself and her top executives. When asked whether she personally deserved a bonus she said, “Absolutely yes.”
She may as well have said, “Let them eat cake.”
In March we learned from access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that 1,000 managers and executives received taxpayer-funded bonuses to the tune of $15 million.
Most people would find it hard to justify big bonuses when the CBC’S viewership is just half of what it was in 2018, the year Tait was handed the helm by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Viewership, ratings and ad revenues have all plummeted. The CBC is clearly failing to produce the content that Canadians, and the market, want to consume.
As the CBC continues to gobble up taxpayer dollars to produce less revenue and relevant content, it is clearly failing to deliver on its mandate by turning itself into a costly propaganda arm of the Liberal government.
Nowhere is this more obvious than the trend of bias, incorrect reporting and lack of journalistic standards that favour the government. About 100 corrections have been published by the CBC since 2021. In one notable example, the broadcaster had to retract an unsubstantiated report about alleged political interference by Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in the justice system. In January, it had to correct a “fact check” on a Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) video about housing affordability.
If that didn’t make it clear, the CBC demonstrated its bias in the 2019 federal election, during which it sued the CPC for using a publicly-broadcasted news clip in an online advertisement. The suit was later dismissed by a judge.
Taken together with lavishness and incompetence, it’s clear Trudeau’s handpicked top boss of the CBC has some answering to do.
Or are incompetence and waste acceptable so long as the puppet CEO remains favourable to the government that handed her the job?
In the real world, bonuses are determined by meeting “key performance indicators” (KPI). Public records show that only one of the CBC’S five published strategic KPIS were fully met, a 20 per cent success rate — or in other words, an 80 per cent failure rate. Imagine telling your boss you deserve a raise after failing 80 per cent of your goals. You’d be laughed out of the room. But not at the CBC. When it comes to dysfunction at the CBC, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Trust in media — and especially in the CBC — has declined. Not a surprise when Tait stood to defend the broadcaster’s errors.
One would expect the CEO of this failing venture to be replaced after her organization gave out big bonuses during the most disastrous period in its history. At the very least, this person should attempt business logic when trying to fumble an excuse. Instead, Tait said the corporation should not be “evaluated based on market trends,” and left the door open for another round of bonuses for her and her top executives in the future.
TRUST IN MEDIA — AND ESPECIALLY IN THE CBC — HAS DECLINED.
The buck stops with the CEO. If the CEO isn’t leading by example to meet a higher standard and states publicly that she and her executives deserve their bonuses, then it comes as no surprise when the board approves them. And clearly, none of them are complaining when that big taxpayer-funded bonus cheque comes in.
So, either the CEO and her board are happy to collect big cheques while knowingly driving the broadcaster into the dirt, or rose-coloured lenses are mandatory in the white tower of the CBC boardroom. Maybe both.
In the end, Tait (like her boss, the prime minister) reverted to blaming the taxpayer for her failures, claiming the CBC is underfunded. The more than $1 billion in public dollars it received last year just wasn’t enough to compete with all those other broadcasters who are not receiving the same.
Make no mistake, the CBC should get no more tax dollars and Tait’s office along with the rest of the broadcaster’s headquarters should be turned into beautiful homes for Canadian families.
Canada’s national broadcaster should do better to live up to what Canadians expect of the title. And instead of making the news, they should be accurately reporting it. Six hundred people lost their jobs not because the workers failed, but because the Trudeau government’s hand-picked CEO did.