CBC slapped with 10 per cent reduction
Not clear where axe will fall at favourite Conservative target
OTTAWA— Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC, has been hit with10 per cent cuts to its budget, in what Liberal Leader Bob Rae is describing as a “deep, ideological cut” by the Conservatives.
The 10 per cent reduction wasn’t a total surprise, especially from a government whose backbenchers have been regularly delivering petitions calling for an end to CBC financing altogether.
CBC had already prepared plans for cuts of 5 per cent and 10 per cent — plans that will start to be revealed in coming days and weeks. No details were immediately available on which CBC programs or employees would take the brunt.
The Canadian Media Guild, which represents CBC employees, predicted “a devastating impact on programming and services.”
“This is a sad day. We don’t yet know exactly what these cuts will mean for Cbc/radio-canada services and employees,” Marc-philippe Laurin, president of the Guild’s CBC branch, said in a media release. The cuts will roll out over the next three years: $27.8 million this year, rising to $69.6 million in 2013-14 and $115 million by 2014-15. A special $60 million programming fund — which the CBC has received annually for 10 years almost as a budget bonus — has been made a fixture in the money the CBC receives from the federal government. One of the favourite refrains for critics of the CBC has focused on its “more than a billion-dollar” annual budget. Even with the 10 per cent cuts, the budget will still hover around $1billion, but the government will be able to tell critics, all the way up to the next election in 2015, that it is shrinking CBC’S coffers. CBC, like all media organizations, has been adjusting to a rapidly changing environment and completed a five-year plan last year — a plan endorsed late in 2012 by Heritage Minister James Moore, who promised that the broadcaster would have enough money to achieve its goals. And CBC President Hubert Lacroix told the Commons heritage committee last fall that the broadcaster would be sticking to its plan, no matter what bad financial news came its way. “Should government, in its quest to balance its books, choose to take dollars away from our government appropriation, that will not deter us from the three priorities that we have . . . more national, more regional, and more digital,” Lacroix said.
Other cultural institutions were hit too.
Telefilm’s budget will be $10.6 million smaller in 2015, the Library and Archives will be $9.6 million smaller annually and the National Film Board has to get by on $6.7 million less a year.
Some, however, were spared the axe — no cuts were made to the Canada Council of the Arts, the National Gallery of Canada or any museums.