Let’s call a spade a spade: Pierre Poilievre represents the most radical right that Canada has known since the Harper era. Even the latter would never have gone so far to undermine one of the pillars of the democratic system that prevails in the country, namely freedom of the press and the role of media institutions to inform the population.
Because by threatening to cut off funding from CBC/Radio-Canada, Pierre Poilievre is doing much more than rallying votes and consolidating his support. It aims to undermine this democratic bulwark that constitutes access to information for citizens. A project in which he is blithely active by refusing to grant interviews, by discrediting the professionalism of the people who work for these media, by questioning the autonomy of newsrooms, even by questioning the very relevance of true, accurate and verified information.
In the immediate future, for Pierre Poilievre, CBC/Radio-Canada proves to be the only easy target at hand. Claiming the “unfair” public funding of a public competitor to the private channels, it is the mandate of the CBC/Radio-Canada news service that the Conservative leader wants to attack.
Like many Western nations and countries of the South, Canada has nevertheless chosen to provide itself with an information service for the benefit of the population through the public funding of CBC/Radio-Canada. Over the public broadcaster’s long history, its news workers have laid the groundwork for journalistic standards, ethical rules and editorial independence for all newsrooms across the country.
Journalistic rules of quality and autonomy that even the sovereigntist movement, despite several upheavals, ended up recognizing in spite of itself, by shelving the project to provide Radio-Québec, at the time, with a real service of ‘information.
Even today, the journalistic norms and standards of the public broadcaster contribute to sound practices in our media scene. We can even think that the quality of its information service has been able to protect the population of Quebec and Canada from the excesses of certain private information media that we see in the country of Rupert Murdoch.
However, it is this pillar of our democratic system that Pierre Poilievre wants to attack. After destroying CBC/Radio-Canada — who would be naive enough to think that this calculated embarrassment towards French services would remain after an electoral victory? — it is the private news media that Poilievre risks attacking by ending the 35% tax credit for newsrooms.
After having seen their revenues soar to the digital giants, the majority of private news media are currently surviving thanks to this public funding, with Radio-Canada being excluded for obvious reasons. Noting a number of press room closures and job losses among journalists and the workers we represent there, the CSN and its Fédération nationale des communications et de la culture had taken as far as Ottawa — and then Quebec — this solution to the financial crisis that has affected the media for fifteen years.
The people of Quebec and Canada have every reason to be concerned about such an attack on our democratic system by a Canadian political party which, if elections were held today, would win power. By attacking the news media, Poilievre is replicating the worst strategies of Donald Trump, whose abuses still frighten us. The fact that Pierre Poilievre directly challenged Elon Musk, who openly denigrates the news media and whose empire helps to discredit the very value of journalistic information, is most disturbing.
With the radical right already blowing the embers of intolerance on too many issues, we cannot stand idly by when the leader of the Conservative Party threatens to attack the presence of the news media in our society in this way. .