Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre in 2023. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilièvre’s threat to cancel CBC’s annual Parliamentary grant would, if implemented, be a disaster for smaller, rural provinces like New Brunswick where local news coverage is already on its way to the morgue.

Federal Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge issued a series of half-hearted proposals this month for strengthening the public broadcaster in the interests of national sovereignty and combatting the pervasive influence of U.S. tech Goliaths such as Facebook, Google and X.

But hostile federal Liberal and Conservative governments have relentlessly weakened the CBC with a 45-year string of budget cuts starting with Pierre Trudeau’s 12.3% cut in 1979-80. (See Knowlton Nash: “The Microphone Wars: A History of Triumph and Betrayal at the CBC,” page 440.)

In 2020, the non-profit Forum for Research and Policy in Communications calculated that Parliamentary funding for CBC’s operations had decreased in real, inflation-adjusted dollars by 36% since 1985, while CBC commercial income had fallen by 40% since 2014.

In its 2022 report commissioned by the CBC, the international consulting firm Nordicity concluded that Canada ranks near the bottom when it comes to Parliamentary funding for public service broadcasters (PSBs) at $32 per capita.

Poilièvre portrays defunding CBC as an exercise in cutting waste, but a Parliamentary grant of $1.4 billion is not even a drop in the ocean when measured against the $449.2 billion the federal government is spending this year.

CBC is by far, Canada’s largest journalistic organization with community-based locations from coast-to-coast-to coast including 27 TV and 88 radio stations as well as local and regionally based online platforms in every province and territory.

(In 1994, New Brunswick was the last province in Canada to receive full CBC television service thanks to the efforts of Premiers Richard Hatfield and Frank McKenna who wrested the partial service we were getting away from the Irving empire — paid from public coffers to carry a few hours a week of CBC programming on their private broadcast outlets.)

Nowadays, only two big journalistic outfits have outlets that are based in New Brunswick: CBC and the American-owned, Postmedia newspaper chain (which cut about half of its editorial staff after buying the Irvings out in 2022).

CTV and Global do provide some New Brunswick coverage from headquarters that are out-of-province.

In spite of Poilièvre’s constant harping on defunding CBC, a poll of 2055 Canadians conducted from August 28 to September 6 found that an overwhelming majority said they need the CBC. The poll was sponsored by The Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University:

Poilièvre’s threat to erase Canada’s largest journalistic organization comes as other, like-minded politicians take calculated steps to sidestep scrutiny.

In Nova Scotia, Conservative Premier Tim Houston, in one of many anti-democratic moves, is dismantling the province’s communications agency that was supposed to provide journalists with factual information from every government department.

Henceforth, all inquiries will have to be funnelled through the premier’s office and by decree, no more media questioning of the premier and his ministers outside the legislative chamber, but only in the “media room” across the street where reporters may or may not get access to the power holders.

And perhaps worst of all, the Houston government is giving itself the power to obstruct freedom of information requests that both journalists and members of the public rely on to ferret out frequently hidden facts.

Meantime, in New Brunswick, reporters are forced to file access to information requests that take from weeks to months to get even partial answers and sometimes no answers at all.

Why is one lane of Sackville’s Main Street highway overpass still closed after recent attempts to repair the bridge? Repeated inquiries to communications staff at the N.B. department of transportation go unacknowledged and unanswered even when the minister’s office is copied.

And at the municipal government level here in Tantramar, question periods have been reduced from three per month to one and strictly limited to 15-minutes.

And was Mayor Black really serious when he told reporters that he would only answer questions e-mailed to him in advance?