On Thursday, February 20, Pascale St-Onge, the current federal Minister for Canadian Heritage, proposed long overdue reforms to this country’s public broadcaster, CBC/Radio-Canada.
Those reforms include getting rid of advertising on all news programming, and a new, sustainable funding model for CBC/Radio-Canada.
Unfortunately, St-Onge unveiled these plans just as she was also announcing she would be leaving politics at the end of her current term.
Worse, the House of Commons is not sitting right now. We will almost certainly have an election before the current Liberal government, with a new leader, would have a chance to put any of Ms. St-Onge’s salutary proposals into legislative form.
And so, the Trudeau government’s handling of this file has been, on the whole, an enormous missed opportunity.
Three ministers and a lot of hesitation and dithering
When he was first elected in 2015 Justin Trudeau appointed newly-elected Montreal MP Mélanie Joly to the Canadian Heritage job, where she stumbled badly.
Joly tried to cozy up to the U.S.-based streaming giants, especially Netflix, allowing the latter not to pay taxes in exchange for a vague commitment to commission original programming in Canada.
Pascale St-Onge was a Quebec cultural industries’ union leader at the time and harshly criticized Joly’s ill-fated choice.
Trudeau quickly demoted Joly to the less prominent tourism portfolio. (Joly, who is now Canada’s foreign minister, has since been rehabilitated).
The PM then entrusted Canadian Heritage to long-time Montreal political operator Pablo Rodriguez. But when he needed Rodriguez’s steady hand at the transport ministry Trudeau tapped a relative political newcomer, St-Onge.
It seems that Joly and St-Onge patched over their differences, because in 2021 Joly recruited the then-union leader to run for the Liberals in Quebec’s Eastern Townships.
After that election Trudeau immediately put St-Onge in the cabinet, as minister for sport. She excelled in that role. In the wake of multiple scandals involving federally funded sports organizations she created the new role of sports integrity commissioner.
In the case of Hockey Canada, whose leadership badly botched a sexual assault scandal, St-Onge paused their funding altogether, and called for their leadership to step down, en masse – which they did.
It took no small amount of courage and determination for a rookie politician to take on the establishment of Canada’s favourite sport.
At Canadian Heritage, a post she has occupied for less than two years, St-Onge has been busy.
One of her biggest challenges has been implementation of the Online News Act, which seeks to get the mammoth internet platforms to pay for the Canadian news content they carry.
St-Onge and the Trudeau government argue that the platforms get a good part of the advertising revenue that used to go to Canadian media outlets. Thus, they said, the platforms should not be able to distribute Canadian news without paying for it.
Facebook (and Instagram, owned by the same company) out and out refused. Rather than pay for content Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms block all Canadian news.
Google negotiated a deal with the government for over $100 million in compensation, which is shared among all Canadian media organizations.
That was, at least, a mitigated success for St-Onge.
A solid suite of reform proposals
But when it came to the biggest piece of Canadian Heritage’s ministerial portfolio, St-Onge – and more to the point, the Trudeau government – mysteriously decided to slow-roll the process.
St-Onge’s proposals for a renewed and reinvigorated CBC/Rdio-Canada are mostly excellent.
Presently, the federal government funds our public broadcaster on an annual basis. CBC/Radio-Canada’s managers do not know from year to year how much money they will have to work with.
St.-Onge proposes that the government change that system. She says it should legislate that CBC/Radio-Canada be funded, permanently, on a sliding scale, per capita basis.
Currently, St-Onge notes, the government gives the public broadcaster less than $34 per person, for a total of less than $1.4 billion a year.
That is a bit more than half the average amount G-7 countries allot to their public broadcasters. Canada ranks sixth out of seven in its per capita spending on this crucial service. Only the U.S. is lower.
For now, St.-Onge would allocate $62.50 per person, the G-7 average, to CBC/Radio-Canada. Presumably, that amount would keep pace with the cost of living.
The minister’s other big proposal is to get rid of 100 per cent of advertising on all news and public affairs programming, on all platforms.
Anyone who has tried to view a CBC news story online, and had to first endure two 30 second commercials in a row, will appreciate the merit of that proposal.
An added benefit – Canada’s private sector media outlets would welcome such a move. It would free up scarce advertising dollars for them.
One small reform the Trudeau government implemented in 2017 was to set up an independent group to advise the government on nominations to the public broadcaster’s board of directors.
St-Onge now wants to formalize that process, by putting it into legislation.
Plus, currently the prime minister names the CBC/Radio-Canada president, to a fixed five-year term – which can be, and often is, extended. St-Onge now says the board of directors should choose the CBC president. A partisan politician should not have that power.
Such a reform would follow best practices in other countries, and assure CBC/Radio-Canada remains at arm’s-length from the government of the day.
The minister also proposes that it “could be required in an amended Broadcasting Act that CBC/Radio-Canada develop a strategy in collaboration with First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities to consider their needs in the context of its activities.”
There is no such legislated requirement now.
In making her announcement, St.-Onge referred to the enormous power billionaire American tech oligarchs have accumulated. She even mentioned Elon Musk by name.
More than ever, she said, we Canadians need our public broadcaster to resist that power and to tell our own (and the world’s) stories, in our own way.
Without CBC/Radio-Canada we will have a hard time assuring our cultural – and political – sovereignty in the face of the enormous threats they now face.
That’s all well and good. However, this reform is at least four years late.
Why did Trudeau and his advisors place such a low priority, for the better part of a decade, on guaranteeing the viability of the vital public good that is CBC/Radio-Canada?
We may never know. What we do know is this:
While the Liberals have dithered, Pierre Poilievre has been waiting in the tall grass for his chance to pounce on the public broadcaster and, like a vulture feasting on road kill, rip it to shreds.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
