Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre has made CBC ‘defunding’ a cornerstone of his campaign platform, going so far as to ask Twitter to add ‘government funded’ to the account. of the public broadcaster. But the right of the right does not have a monopoly on hating CBC/Radio-Canada. In the past, Quebec Liberals and nationalists have also spilled their gall on Radio-Canada.
From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the charge against Radio-Canada was brought by the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. “A nest of separatists”, even said the father of the current Prime Minister of the country. In a sweeping statement, the leader of the Liberal Party had threatened in veiled words to put the key under the door, to broadcast only programs on “Chinese vases”.
If the attacks only came from one side, I would have wondered
Jean-François Lépine, who hosted the public affairs program Here when the Parti Québécois took power in 1976, remembers this time very well when there was a great climate of suspicion in the big brown tower. “We had published quite important files on corruption within the Bourassa government, and there are people in the federal government who believed that it could have influenced the election. So much so that an investigation has been launched. The people from the committee met with the journalists. They attended our production meetings, watched our programming for hours and hours, and finally concluded that our coverage was balanced. »
The Liberals under Jean Chrétien also on occasion scorched CBC/Radio-Canada. Moreover, it is the government that has slashed the expenditures of the Crown corporation the most. In a context of budgetary restraint throughout the federal apparatus, public funding for the broadcaster had been reduced by almost a third in the space of barely two years. Cuts that had resulted in some 2,400 layoffs.
Federalist propaganda?
And yet, at the same time, Radio-Canada journalists were also regularly accused by the separatists of promoting a federalist editorial line. It will be remembered that the fiery director Pierre Falardeau, a fierce independentist, popularized the expression “Radio-Cadenas”.
Criticism of the public broadcaster remains entrenched in nationalist circles. The leader of the Bloc Québécois, Yves-François Blanchet, denounced this week “the ideological crusade” of Pierre Poilievre over the CBC, but he did not fail to recall the “federalist leaning in the chain of command” of the company. of state.
“Throughout my career, sovereignists have called me a federalist and federalists have called me a separatist. It never stopped me from sleeping and doing my job. If the attacks only came from one side, I would have wondered. But since it came from both sides, I thought it was proof that I still had to do a good job. job says ironically former parliamentary correspondent Daniel Lessard, who covered federal politics for Radio-Canada for almost 40 years.
Daniel Lessard retired in 2011, shortly after the election of the majority government of Stephen Harper, who did not hold the public broadcaster in high esteem. In three years, public funding has been reduced by 10%. During the 2015 election campaign, the Prime Minister said that Radio-Canada “hated” conservative values, such as the consolidation of public finances, tax cuts or the affirmation of Canada in the world.
A left lean
It is not new that the public broadcaster is accused of having a bias for the left. In his memoirs, René Lévesque said that the very conservative Maurice Duplessis avoided journalists from Radio-Canada, whom he considered to be too progressive. Rightly or wrongly, since René Lévesque, the social democrat, will end up leaving Radio-Canada to go into politics with the Liberals of Jean Lesage.
Professor of journalism at the University of Ottawa, Marc-François Bernier is among those who believe that a left bias is indeed sometimes felt in the coverage of Radio-Canada.
“From the outset, the profession of journalist attracts people who are interested in subjects that are more marked on the left. When the right says that CBC and Radio-Canada are on the left, it is therefore not just an illusion, there is a basis for that. The public broadcaster must be aware of this and do some introspection so as not to accentuate this feeling. When we ban certain words on the air or when we invite journalists to participate in demonstrations for the said social justice, we are just giving ammunition to people like Pierre Poilievre, ”slices Mr. Bernier.
Pierre Poilievre asked Twitter last week to add the description “government funded media” to the official CBC account. The social network owned by Elon Musk finally added this mention earlier this week to the profile of the English-speaking public broadcaster, to which CBC and Radio-Canada responded by suspending their activities on Twitter. This label suggests that the Canadian government “may intervene to varying degrees in editorial content”, which is not true, said the senior management of the Crown corporation.
Words in the air?
Since being elected leader of the Conservative Party, Pierre Poilievre has never hidden his aversion to the CBC, which he calls the Trudeau government’s “propaganda” arm and which he promises to “defund” its he becomes prime minister. However, the leader of the official opposition in Ottawa is committed to preserving Radio-Canada, at the very least to meet the needs of francophones outside Quebec.
“There is not the same attachment to English Canada for the CBC as in Quebec for Radio-Canada. So it’s quite politically clever for Poilievre to target only the CBC,” emphasizes Jean-François Lépine, who has worked in both languages during his long career.
ICI Radio-Canada Télé accounts for close to 25% of the market share among Francophones, while CBC monopolizes only a meager 6% of TV audiences on the Anglophone side.
But even if CBC is an eternally unloved in English Canada, Daniel Lessard doubts that Pierre Poilievre would go so far as to completely privatize the English-language public broadcaster if he took power. “Harper could have done it, he didn’t. Mike Harris, who was making cuts across Ontario, did not touch TVOntario. Even Margaret Thatcher, in the United Kingdom, did not privatize the BBC,” likes to recall the former parliamentary correspondent.