The favorite in the Conservative Party leadership race, Pierre Poilièvre, has repeatedly spoken out to cut the live broadcaster. A recurring discourse within the Canadian right, which believes that it is the victim of biased journalistic coverage on the air of Radio-Canada and CBC.
Stephen Harper’s ex-minister has repeatedly criticized the Crown corporation’s alleged lack of objectivity in recent months on social media, often using the hashtag #defundCBC. , including in his coverage of Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. He also joined CBC/Radio-Canada in suing the Conservative Party for copyright infringement.
The Conservatives had appropriated certain program segments to make Justin Trudeau look bad in advertisements broadcast during the 2019 election campaign. The court finally ruled that it was not a violation to intellectual property.
“The CBC was protecting the Prime Minister, not the copyright. Today the CBC lost the case. They should reveal what they charged taxpayers in legal fees and apologize for their bias. Do you agree that it’s time we stopped funding CBC? “wrote Pierre Poilièvre on his Facebook page on May 13 following this verdict.
The duty contacted the leadership candidate’s campaign team on Thursday to find out if this proposal is now part of his program, but our request went unheeded.
The position of his main opponent, Jean Charest, is also not known for the moment, but it will not fail to be revealed in the coming weeks, specified the entourage of the former Prime Minister of Quebec. .
Easier said than done
One thing is certain, the future of Radio-Canada and CBC has been debated for many years in the Conservative clan. Newly elected leader Erin O’Toole said he was considering the possibility of privatizing television and the public broadcaster’s digital services, before softening his speech during the last election.
“There is a certain faction of individuals, including Pierre Poilievre, who keep saying that funding for CBC / Radio-Canada must be eliminated. It goes without saying that these speeches will be amplified during the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party. That said, this point of view is far from being unanimous among the conservatives, or among their voters”, Marla Boltman, director of Friends, an organization which campaigns to give on the contrary more means to the public broadcaster.
Still, many believe the newsroom is infiltrated by the left. Tara Henley, a CBC reporter, walked out last January accusing her former employer of overemphasizing gender and race issues, at the expense of coverage that would reflect a diversity of viewpoints.
But according to Alain Saulnier, former director general of information for Radio-Canada, this idea that the state corporation is pushing a left-wing political program is more of a myth. “It’s true to say that journalists come from roughly the same background, because they all have a certain level of education, they all went to university… But it’s wrong to think that they all have the same political opinions. We only have to think of Bernard Drainville who went to the PQ, to Christine St-Pierre with the Liberals or to Louis Lemieux, today at the CAQ, ”he argues.
The former journalist is convinced that it would be catastrophic to privatize CBC / Radio-Canada, if only because it is the only media that is able to have international coverage worthy of the name. Alain Saulnier also points out that the major private media groups—Bell, Rogers and Quebecor—have more and more financial interests in other sectors, which can interfere with journalistic quality.
Canada is not the only country where the financing of the public broadcaster has become a political issue. At the start of the year, when he was engulfed in the “partygate” scandal, the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, opened the door to an overhaul of the financing of the BBC. Ditto this week for the French President, Emmanuel Macron, which was perceived by the local press as an effort by the centrist to seduce the right-wing electorate a month before the first round of the presidential election.
CBC / Radio-Canada, however, monopolizes a much smaller budget envelope compared to the BBC or the French public service. “At $34 per capita per year, CBC/Radio-Canada ranks 16th out of 18 public broadcasters in the Western world in terms of the level of public funding,” management reiterated in an email sent to the Homework Thursday.