Major cuts should be announced Monday to employees of the Société Radio-Canada and CBC. They could lead to the elimination of several hundred positions.
All Radio-Canada and CBC employees were called to a meeting on Monday. The objective of these meetings is to “provide an update on our financial challenges and to take stock of what is coming in the coming months,” according to the convocation email consulted by The Press.
According to our information, executives and managers will also be met on Monday, followed by union presidents.
Up to 700 positions could be eliminated within the state-owned company as a result of these cuts, announced The Montreal Journal And The duty.
The Press was able to confirm that an announcement of this magnitude is indeed expected for Monday. Both the English and French services of the public broadcaster would be affected.
The president of the Radio-Canada Workers’ Union, Pierre Tousignant, did not want to comment on the news on Sunday evening. Radio-Canada also specified that it had “no comments at this time,” Marc Pichette, senior director of promotion and public relations, indicated by email.
Inevitable cuts
At the beginning of November, in front of an audience of some 300 guests invited by the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, the president and CEO of the state corporation, Catherine Tait, confirmed that there would be a cut of 100 million in the next annual budget of the public broadcaster. “There will be difficult decisions to make,” she said, without wanting to comment further on the jobs under threat.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Catherine Tait
At the beginning of October, the state-owned company also announced that the creation of positions was suspended until further notice. The replacement of departures, for example upon retirement, was also called into question.
End of September, The Press reported that information about the upcoming cuts was already circulating internally. “We recently indicated to our employees that Radio-Canada is currently facing financial pressures,” confirmed the spokesperson for the public broadcaster, Marc Pichette, in an email to The Press.
“These pressures are largely attributable to the drop in advertising and subscription revenues, the impact of inflation on operating costs and production costs as well as the savings requested by the federal government from departments and to state corporations, including CBC/Radio-Canada,” he explained.
At that time, it was already expected that the extent of the cuts would be communicated in December. However, we will have to wait until the spring to know the jobs affected.
Declining income
According to Radio-Canada’s second quarter 2023-2024 management report, the Crown corporation’s revenues decreased by 5.4% during this quarter, “mainly due to the weakness of the television advertising market” , we can read. “The decline in other revenues from content sales also contributed to this decline. »
During the same period, spending decreased by 4.7% “due to lower programming costs and pension costs,” it said.
A difficult time for the media
These cuts at CBC/Radio-Canada come during a slow period for several media outlets in Quebec and Canada. At the beginning of November, 547 employees were laid off at Groupe TVA, or around a third of the workforce. These cuts were in addition to the 240 positions abolished last February.
In August, Métro Média ended its activities in the metropolis. Last March, the Information Coops (CN2i) announced that their six regional dailies would no longer be printed in paper format from the end of December. Around a hundred positions, which represents around a third of the organization’s workforce, were to be eliminated, in particular through a voluntary departure program.
Last January, newspaper publisher Postmedia – which holds the Montreal Gazettebut also the National PostL’Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun – had announced that it would have to lay off 11% of its newsroom staff.
An agreement with Google
Last Wednesday, Google and the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, finally reached an agreement three weeks before the entry into force of the Online News Act (C-18). The agreement reached provides for a sum of 100 million per year, indexed to inflation, well below the 172 million which had been estimated by the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Under the Online News Actweb giants will have to pay royalties to Canadian media if they broadcast their content on their platforms.
In the process, the government of François Legault asked Ottawa to exclude CBC/Radio-Canada from the royalties that Google will pay to Canadian media. The Minister of Culture and Communications, Mathieu Lacombe, is also of the opinion that the state-owned company should completely withdraw from the advertising market.