The CBC matters more than ever

Pierre Poilievre’s rallies are a big hit, even if they’re not as big as his supporters would like to pretend. But the thousands of people turning out to them might have noticed something missing from the Conservative leader’s rendition of his greatest political hits: an attack on the CBC. 

It used to be one of his biggest political applause lines, whether he was delivering it to a crowd or through a fundraising email. He would turn the CBC’s headquarters into affordable housing, he liked to say, and would immediately defund the irredeemably woke and corrupted institution upon winning the election. That line, and the obvious glee with which he delivered it, has been notably absent from his more recent speeches. 

He still intends to defund the CBC, though. As he told a reporter during a recent Montreal event, “I’ve already made my position clear on that, and it hasn’t changed.” His recent reticence to talk more aggressively about his plans are almost certainly part of a broader effort to sound less like Donald Trump, one that has met with mixed results. 

That’s because for all of his newfound discretion on this issue, Poilievre still has plenty in common with Trump. Last week, for example, the US president called for NPR and PBS to be “DEFUNDED by Congress, IMMEDIATELY” on his Truth Social platform. He described them as “arms of the Radical Left Democrat Party,” an accusation that sounds an awful lot like how Poilievre used to describe the CBC. In 2023, for example, he called it “a biased propaganda arm of the Liberal Party.”

Poilievre and Trump aren’t the only Conservative leaders attacking their country’s public media. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany has called for an immediate abolishment of funding for public broadcasting. National Rally, the rebranded far right party of Marine Le Pen in France, said it would privatize the country’s public television service if it won the last election. Reform UK has called the BBC “out of touch,” “wasteful,” and “institutionally biased” — sound familiar? — and said it would scrap the TV license fee that helps fund it. 

They do this because they understand the role public media plays in informing and educating the public — and, by extension, proactively immunizing them against conspiracy theories, crackpottery, and other leading Conservative political exports. As American journalist Joshua Benton noted in a 2022 piece on the relationship between public media and democratic health, “the benefits of a robust public broadcaster come from the simple fact that it exists — a centering anchor in the media marketplace — not only that it attracts a big audience.”

The CBC can do better than just existing, though. Liberal leader Mark Carney has pledged an increase in its core funding, which has remained stagnant for years in the face of a growing population and growing responsibilities on new platforms like digital. “When we compare ourselves to the UK, France or Germany, we see that our public broadcaster is underfunded,” Carney said in French during a campaign stop in Montreal. “That has to change.”

In a world where Donald Trump is threatening Canada’s independence, and where large American tech companies control the levers of our social media platforms, having access to reliable and accurate information is no mere aesthetic concern. It is instead a matter of national security and sovereignty that will inform our ability to push back against threats from other parts of the world, be they American, Russian, or Chinese. If we’re willing to spend tens of billions of additional dollars every year to reinforce our military, why wouldn’t we spend a few hundred million more to protect ourselves against misinformation? 

As Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett said in 1938, the CBC was to serve as an agency by which “national consciousness may be fostered and sustained and national unity still further strengthened.” That might be even more important today than it was back then. We should be asking why someone who wants to be prime minister, and who presumably believes in the importance of national unity, would ever want to kill it.