The outside of the CBC-Radio Canada building in Montreal.
The outside of the CBC-Radio Canada building in Montreal. Credit: abdallahh / Wikimedia Commons Credit: abdallahh / Wikimedia Commons

Someone should tell Pierre Poilievre to take off his tin foil hat: The government does not actually control the news that the CBC broadcasts.

As part of his campaign to limit the reach of government, the Conservative leader went public with an April 11 letter he sent to Twitter asking the social media giant to label all CBC news shared on its platform as “government-funded media.” He wrote that “We must protect Canadians against disinformation and manipulation by state media.”

Shortly thereafter, Twitter indeed applied that tag to CBC material, and Poilievre crowed that Canada’s public broadcaster had been “officially exposed” as “Trudeau propaganda, not news.”

If that wasn’t cynical and ridiculously wrong, Twitter made things even sillier. Initially, it put the level of CBC’s government support at 70 percent of its budget, according to a screenshot shared by Twitter owner Elon Musk. It was later reduced to 69 per cent, in what some observers took to be one of Musk’s typical sexual jokes. Musk tweeted on Tuesday that “Canadian Broadcasting Corp said they’re ‘less than 70% government-funded’, so we corrected the label.”

CBC archly announced that it would not post any more news on Twitter. Earlier, U.S. broadcaster National Public Radio made the same move to protest against a “government-funded media” label on Twitter that it said implies government involvement in its news content.

READ MORE: Don’t fall for Poilievre’s war on the media

It’s telling that Poilievre’s right-wing base ate up his political stunt. Columnist Brian Lilley, writing in the Toronto Sun, said “yes, CBC is a government funded media outlet and Musk’s 69 per cent label is accurate.” He went on to say that the CBC claims to be neutral on political matters but it is not. “People can point to this newspaper and my writing and say that I’m not neutral, but I don’t claim to be and neither does the Sun. Like every newspaper, we have an editorial stance, and unlike CBC, we don’t take more than $1 billion of government funding.”

Lilley is wrong not only in his math but in his holier-than-thou claim of being free of government funding. His newspaper is owned by Postmedia, and Canada’s largest publisher claims a healthy share of the $600 million the federal government has set aside over the next five years for tax credits and other incentives aimed at propping up struggling news outlets. I imagine he would be the first to squawk if Twitter put its “government-supported” tag on his columns.

He and Twitter also exaggerated the federal support CBC actually receives. It is not funded by the government, in fact, but through Canadian Parliament appropriations. According to CBC’s annual financial report, it received $1.24 billion from Ottawa in 2021-2022. That accounts for 65.6 per cent of that year’s revenue, not 69.

This tempest in a teapot began when Poilievre asked Twitter to follow its policy for a “government-supported” label simply because he argued the CBC received federal money. But Twitter’s policy actually states that the label should only apply to “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” 

Surely we Canadians know enough about the CBC to know that if the federal government tried anything like that, the CBC president, its board of directors, and its entire newsroom of journalists would go to the mat to fight it.

At Poilievre’s rallies these days, the Conservative leader is often greeted by chants of “defund the CBC,” reflecting his promise to gut the network if he wins power. But even that promise is tailored to politics. He has not made the same threat about Radio-Canada, the broadcaster’s French-language arm.

While CBC’s national audience share has fallen to just 3.9 per cent of the Canadian viewing audience, Radio-Canada retains a massive following in Quebec, a province where the Conservatives hope for a breakthrough in the next federal election.

So Poilievre’s war on the network should be seen for what it is–a wrong-headed and biased attempt to harm a national institution.

It’s worth remembering that as a university student, Poilievre won $10,000 for an essay explaining how, as prime minister, he would build his government on a platform of freedom. During his campaign for the leadership, he promised to make Canada “the freest country on Earth” by limiting the reach of the government, a theme taken right out of his 2,500-word essay.  

In his reach to attack the CBC as a propaganda arm of government, Poilievre should perhaps revisit his 20s and go back to his alma mater, the University of Calgary. I hear they offer good courses in ethics.

John Miller

From media executive to media critic, John Miller has seen journalism from all sides (and he often doesn’t like what he sees). He draws on his 40 years in news, including five years as deputy...