At the heart of several scandals over the years, CBC / Radio-Canada big boss Catherine Tait will be reappointed to head the public broadcaster, but for a shortened term, learned The duty.
After a first term of five years, Ms. Tait will be given a second term, this time for a period of about twenty months, until January 2025. The Minister of Heritage, Pablo Rodriguez, must make the announcement. by next week, confirms a senior government source.
Ms Tait, 65, was appointed by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau in 2018, becoming the first woman to serve as president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada. Upon taking office in her “dream job”, she indicated that she would make digital issues, the inclusion of minorities and local information her top priorities.
The federal government is preparing to replace Mme Tait in 2025, but for the moment wants continuity at the head of the public media when a major law on revenue sharing between the giants of the Web and the media is due to come into force. Bill C-18 is currently in the very final stages of its consideration by the Senate.
A mandate for diversity
By wanting to make the public broadcaster a mirror of today’s society, Ms. Tait has set herself up as the architect of a major shift in favor of diversity, both on screen and among employees. Its detractors have rather seen it as an “obsession” with questions of identity.
All dressed in orange, Catherine Tait, for example, led a march in downtown Ottawa in September 2022 to honor the victims of residential schools for Aboriginals. She had previously invited journalists from the ICI Ottawa-Gatineau newsroom to join, creating unease among professionals subject to a code of ethics that prohibits activism.
The incident is far from the only controversy of the CEO’s tenure. The one who runs newsrooms across the country has herself been the subject of embarrassing reports in private media, and has come under heavy criticism.
The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, goes so far as to qualify the public broadcaster under his leadership as “liberal propaganda”, and proposes the “defunding” of its English-speaking part, CBC. In a highly unusual outing, Ms Tait hit back at the Leader of the Opposition last February, calling her position a “slogan” meant to solicit donations. During the same daily interview The Globe and Mailshe spoke of the imminent death of traditional television.
Accustomed to controversy
Hired on the promise of providing Canadians with programming “created by them, for them and in their image”, she instead took the wrong way to hundreds of journalists, producers, former employees and former senior executives of Radio- Canada, who signed a petition in 2020 to denounce the practice of “disguised advertising” in journalism in a service called Tandem. This form of advertising still exists.
In 2022, dozens of journalists joined their names to Céline Galipeau, Patrice Roy, Alain Gravel or Marie-Maude Denis to ask her not to apologize for the multiple radio mentions of the title of the book. white niggers of america. The institution has instead apologized, as requested by the federal regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC).
The first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw another embarrassing revelation for Ms Tait. She ran Canada’s public media from her opulent home in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, when it was banned for its employees and discouraged by the federal government. She justified the trip by the need to take care of her sick spouse.
Ottawa intends to launch a long and rigorous open and “merit-based” selection process to find the next person who will lead CBC and Radio-Canada post-Catherine Tait, taking office in January 2025.