After the TVA Group last month, it is the turn of CBC/Radio-Canada to make significant cuts, which would amount to $125 million. Around 600 positions could be lost. The announcement should be made Monday afternoon.
The president and CEO of the public broadcaster, Catherine Tait, will address all employees of the French service at 2 p.m. on Monday to take stock of the institution’s “financial challenges”, as well as “on this which is coming in the coming months. She will then meet all CBC employees.
Everything indicates that major cuts will be announced. According to our information, the cuts would be around $125 million. Some 600 positions would be affected at the moment. Radio-Canada and CBC would be affected equally, and other cuts could be announced in the spring.
One thing is certain, since the employees received the summons last week, the rumor machine has gone into overdrive, giving rise to a lot of internal concern. Some are talking about 600 to 700 job cuts across the country, as reported Sunday by The Montreal Journal. Joined by The dutyCatherine Tait’s office did not deny this information, refusing to comment for the moment.
CBC/Radio-Canada currently has just under 8,000 employees from coast to coast.
Hard times
Already last October, the public broadcaster had decreed a freeze on new hires, both on the French and English sides, until further notice. At the time, Catherine Tait explained that the state-owned company was facing a shortfall of $100 million per year for the next three years. At issue: the drop in public funding granted by the Trudeau government, the increase in production costs and the fall in advertising revenues.
It has been rumored in the corridors for several months already that management will make cutbacks. And many in Montreal have long feared that Radio-Canada would be affected to the same extent by these as its English-speaking counterpart: a serious injustice in their eyes. Because the French service is doing much better in the current context than CBC. In 2021-2022, CBC represented 6% of the television market share in the English-speaking market, ICI Radio-Canada Télé reached nearly 25% of audiences on the French-speaking side.
The former vice-president of French services, Michel Bissonnette, was among those who believed that the cuts should target CBC rather than Radio-Canada, according to our information. CBC/Radio-Canada surprisingly announced his departure at the beginning of October in what had the appearance of a dismissal. Michel Bissonnette would have been removed from the senior management of Radio-Canada for this reason, among other things, we learned at the time.
CBC/Radio-Canada is not the only broadcaster having to deal with the exodus of advertising revenues to the benefit of digital giants. The TVA Group has particularly suffered in the last year. A month ago, the company confirmed the elimination of 547 positions, or almost a third of the workforce.