Another Way To Transition to a Post-CBC World

I’ve previously broken down program spending numbers based on CBC’s mandated reporting. Those include $129 million for creating English comedy and drama, $207 million on all-platform news, and $238 million for English and French radio production. You can see those numbers on this spreadsheet.

But as someone recently pointed out to me, when you tally up all that program spending, it comes to just $1.25 billion. That’s far below even the CBC’s base government funding amount of $1.4 billion - which itself doesn’t include at least $200 million in income from various other federal funding sources. And, of course, there’s also supposed to be over a billion dollars in operating revenues. So what else does the CBC do with all that other money?

I’m pretty sure there’s nothing dark and mysterious going on here. We’re probably just seeing an application of accounting protocols or something. Nevertheless, since broadcasting (and online content) is the CBC’s sole mandated product, I can only conclude that “English-language comedy and drama”, for example, actually cost a lot more than $129 million annually.

That’s good to know.

So armed with that observation into how much things might really cost at the CBC, how would they survive the sudden loss of a billion dollars a year in government funding? Would they discover that a lot of their spending isn’t really critical to production after all? Would they bite the bullet and simply shut down, say, their comedy and drama program production altogether?

I don’t know and I don’t much care. At issue is the will of Parliament. If a government were to decide that the country is best served by spending a billion dollars less on its public broadcaster, then it’ll be up to CBC management to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

How might a government of such a mind apply its will? The simple approach would involve passing a budget with a gaping hole where one billion CBC-destined dollars would have gone.

How might the fallout look? Messy. One noisy segment of Canadian society would take to X with energetic claims that the government was stifling free speech, forcing the population into virtual prison camps, and hideously torturing cute bunny rabbits. Lawsuits would soon follow. And a general sense that “kids today have no respect for tradition” would settle over the land.

Or instead, a government could treat its Heritage Ministry remit the same way it handles service contracting in general. Need maintenance for your weapons systems or disposal for nuclear waste materials?

Wanted: Vendor for a five-year contract to provide public broadcasting services. Paying $400 million a year (negotiable). Prior experience welcome.

Invite bids from the most efficient and effective contractors in all the land (plus the CBC itself). I can’t imagine such an opportunity wouldn’t get the attention of Rogers, Corus, and just about every media-adjacent player out there.

What might be possible? I have no clue, and that’s the point. Any time you dangle the right bait over the edge of the dock, you’re bound to get your choice of clever and creative fish. Why not wait to see what treasures the market comes up with?

But we could use TVO (formerly known as TVOntario) as an example. In 2024, they received $53.6 million from the Province of Ontario, $5 million in donations, and $6 million in operating income. That’s it. Yet they managed to broadcast a full schedule of ad-free kids, educational, and current affairs programming, along with coverage of Ontario’s legislature and a full library of their own shows and documentaries.

TVO’s existence demonstrates the kinds of public-interest programming that can be produced for a whole lot less than two billion dollars a year.

That’s not to say I recommend the specific programming they produce. I haven’t seen anything they’ve created since the Elwy Yost and Warner Troyer era back in the 1970s and I suspect I wouldn’t enjoy a lot of the new stuff.

In fact, I was poking around their website today. From what I can tell, their answer to the media credibility problem seems to involve packing website content with variations of the words "trustworthy" and "trusted". I counted 17 separate repetitions of the word through just the few pages I explored. And their 2023-2024 Annual Report used the word in that context another seven times.