THIS JUST IN.....

It’s true, CBC government funded and fully left-leaning

If the CBC doesn’t like being labelled as “government-funded media,” there’s a simple solution, stop taking government money. Not only has the CBC been outraged at the label assigned to it by Twitter but so, too, has Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his coalition partner, Jagmeet Singh of the NDP.

The problem for everyone complaining is that the label is completely accurate.

The CBC is a creation of Parliament with a board appointed by the government to fulfil a mandate set out in legislation and most of the CBC’s funding comes from taxpayers. After some complaining by the CBC, Twitter boss Elon Musk, the Canadian whom Trudeau dismissively calls an American billionaire, adjusted the CBC’s label to read: “69% government-funded media.”

That too, has been met with howls of outrage and the CBC has said it’s pausing its use of the social media platform in protest.

The CBC’s latest annual report states that it received $1.24 billion in direct support from government and $651 million in “other revenue.”

Of that $651 million, $122 million was for subscriber fees, mostly cable fees mandated by a government agency, the CRTC, to force every household in Canada with cable or satellite to pay for CBC News Network and it’s French counterpart RDI.

So, yes, the CBC is a government-funded media outlet and Musk’s 69% label is accurate.

While Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre who had publicly asked for the CBC to be labelled “government-funded media” said this is the right thing to do, Trudeau is acting as if this is an attack on Canadian identity.

“Attacking this Canadian institution, attacking the culture and local content that is so important to so many Canadians, really indicates the values and the approach that Mr. Poilievre is putting forward,” Trudeau said last week.

Singh said that Poilievre is trying to “take down a Canadian broadcaster.”

Look, it’s true that Poilievre is no fan of the CBC and its programming but that just makes him like most Canadians. The broadcaster’s annual report details that CBC English reached just 5.8% of the available prime time audience in 2021-22 and it expects that to fall below 5% in the year just ended, while CBC News Network is below 2% over the course of the full day.

So Trudeau’s claim that this content is “so important to so many Canadians” wouldn’t be accurate.

And while Poilievre has campaigned to defund the CBC, Trudeau has campaigned in multiple elections to increase its funding by $675 million over the past several years.

The Liberals even have an online petition on their website boasting of this and asking people to sign to show support for the CBC.

Of course, none of this has any impact on the CBC’s reliability left-leaning news coverage. The fact that the CBC adopts the same talking points as the Liberal’s on every issue is simply a coincidence, I’m sure.

The fact that the CBC launched a lawsuit against the Conservatives in dying days of a tightly contested election campaign is also just a coincidence.

The CBC claims to be neutral on political matters, but it’s anything but neutral. Like every newspaper, they all have an editorial stance. Some differ from paper to paper,  but unlike the CBC, those newspapers don’t take more than $1 billion a year from Canadians to fund their operations.