For Canada, Defund CBC

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation was founded in Ottawa in 1936 to mitigate the influence growing networks from the US expanding north of the border and to keep Canadian National Railway users informed.

Today the federal Crown corporation operates many arms, managing national radio, television, and news—and receives a lot of taxpayer money to do so.

A question being increasingly asked is: but should it?

The Inefficient State

The government is not always the best place for creation and innovation. In fact, it virtually never is.

In How Innovation Works, author Matt Ridley points out that the vast majority of inventions and creativity stem from the free market of ideas. State-funded initiatives, such as the patent system and research grants, tend to yield quite inferior results.

For example, in 2003, the OECD published a study called Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries, which found that the quantity of private R&D has a direct impact on the rate of economic growth, whereas the quantity of publicly funded research does not.

“The question thus becomes not whether the state can support innovation, which it clearly can, but whether it is better and more effective at doing so than market forces,” Ridley writes. “Both history and statistical evidence favour the latter.”

A theme of Ridley’s books is the dire mistake of leaning on top-down approaches, such as relying on the state to produce and manage all aspects of modern society versus the individual, independent business, and free market sharing responsibility.

Midway residents have known this since the settlement’s existence. “It’s no use waiting for the government to do anything,” a gold-rushing local lamented in the Advance in the 1890s.

His words ring true more than a century later. One can look to the notoriously ineffective and inefficient Justin Trudeau for many recent examples: housing prices have more than doubled since his party’s promise to bring housing affordability back to Canada. Despite record per-capita expenditure, the economy is in shambles. State solutions have not only failed, they have had the opposite intended effect, thus negatively impacting millions of Canadians.

If the head of Canada were a regular employee, a performance foul as this would warrant immediate firing.

We feel the same way about CBC. Were this Crown corp not forcibly kept alive by Canadian tax money, the free market would supply all the necessary components of the CBC’s offerings while ceasing to waste valuable resources on the baggage, bloat, and complacency that the network has become infamous for today.

“We cannot presume to know how these resources would have been otherwise allocated by rational self-interested, decentralized market actors,” suggests Ridley. “It is entirely likely that they would, in fact, be invested more efficiently by private companies with better knowledge and incentives.”

Fraser Institute scholar Matthew Lau agrees, noting that while government does serve critical functions for modern society, most political administrations have a nasty habit to overspend and under-deliver.

“Cutting government spending is almost always beneficial,” Lau observed for the Financial Post.

The inefficient behemoth that is CBC receives more than $1 billion in annual funding from government coffers—your taxes and mine—while producing less than half of that in self-generated revenue. In a free market, this ship would have sank decades ago.

It’s also fair to ask: what exactly do we get for this extremely expensive bill? Certainly we are rewarded with biased news in favour of the political party which funds the corporation. The weaponizing of journalism should be illegal but it’s all fair game on CBC.

On top of that a smattering of occasionally decent Canadian content—again, the best of which would consistently rise to the top on its own. Just take a look at the vast swaths of original content created for streaming services in the private market; quality content can indeed be profitable. Yet the CBC, wearing its invincibility cloak, produces poor content and loses money.

The CBC is a shoddy deal and one that few Canadians would agree to were it directly offered to them. Instead, they are forced to pay for it.

Yet despite funding it, taxpayers have minimal control over the corporation, which serves itself first and the government second. The reader is considered merely a target or customer, not a stakeholder, despite our pried-open wallet.

Milton Friedman once pined: “Any institution will tend to express its own values and its own ideas.” Like many outsize and outdated institutions from another era, CBC is an too old and too big to serve anything but itself. It has lost all other incentive.

Which brings us to the next point: beyond abusing the basic standards fiscal responsibility, the CBC risks doing irreparable harm to the unity of Canada through publishing and promoting divisive, fear-mongering, and agenda-based programming.

Say it with me, folks…

Say “No” to Propaganda!

It’s not just about the money. Beyond wasting billions of Canadian tax dollars, the CBC insults and harms its audience through the publishing of propaganda. And this is far more dangerous.

As Lau points out, modern “news” from CBC often consists of climate alarmism, identity politics, and other divisive or fear-mongering topics. Often, something debatable is presented as hard fact, and just as often, something factual is dismissed as conspiratorial or just plain false.

Many who have left the company describe a workplace culture that is increasingly narrow-minded and “woke,” which is clearly reflected in the end products. This is despite the CEO—who allegedly resides in New York City—insisting that what her organization produces is objective. But it only takes one glance at a television segment or news article from the CBC to detect smoke in her statement.

To gaslight the very people forced to fund your corporation is abominable. The CEO and her anti-journalistic lackeys should bear shame but it appears few to none do.

Loserthink author Scott Adams likes to point out that humans brains are far more computer-like than we care to admit: input, output. We think we are immune to brainwashing influence, but that’s simply not true. Even the intelligence among us tend to be more vulnerable to trickery and manipulation that we expect.

Critical thinking, healthy skepticism, independent research—these are great defences against information intended to manipulate but also widely under-practised skills. And yes, they are skills, which does mean they must be cultivated and maintained.

This is why propaganda has historically worked so effectively to spur some of history’s worst atrocities, and continues to muddy the water today. And it is why we cannot underestimate the dangerous impact of federal entities like the CBC.

Moreover the average voter—assuming they are equipped with critical thinking—does not have time in the modern hustle-and-grind society to apply such processes to the bombardment of issues each wave of political campaigns dredges up. This chink in the layman’s armour is in the digital era being exploited beyond measure.

InfoWars creator Alex Jones may not be the most stable gentleman alive, but he was prescient in the late 90s in describing the future of political warfare as being based on information. The Internet has amplified and empowered conventional propaganda channels by orders of magnitude, while Big Data now allows for more advanced and precise manipulation tactics than most minds can comprehend.

A centuries-old social science is today thriving as a potent weapon in the technological age. Many Canadians do not realize that today, everything from newspaper websites to social networks to original streaming service content is designed to addict, manipulate, or otherwise serve an ulterior motive that is consistently not to the benefit of the user.

In Canada, state-funded programming remains just that: Programming of you, a citizen, by the government. There is nothing the CBC can offer that the free market cannot. And the market will do it better for cheaper.

Defending Canadian Culture

The government has never been a touchstone for culture in any country, and Canada is certainly no exception.

The CBC is arrogant to wear the mantle of Canada’s culture while spreading content that “broad swaths of Canadians find morally repugnant,” as Jasmine Moulton eloquently put it on Reality Check for True North. “The idea that government spending can create culture is absurd.”

As data from True North shows, the CBC has been bleeding viewers for several years now. Their market share is down, viewership is down, and advertisers are losing interest.

These downward metrics suggest many Canadians are wisely tuning out of CBC’s culture push. The stats also provide more reasons to “fire” the CBC for not doing its job. (Instead, Trudeau increased funding which turned into raises for everyone.)

For decades, the CBC has been accused of a Toronto-centric lens that ignores many Canadians throughout the country. This urban and sharply leftward political bent has only escalated in recent years. For us, it marks the last straw for an organization that has not served Canada well in some time.

“A free and independent press that holds the government to account is a key pillar of our democracy,” argues Ontario MP Leslyn Lewis. “It’s vital the press stays independent so our democracy can remain strong.”

Let’s save billions of dollars, protect Canadian heritage, and return journalism to Canada.

Let’s #DefundCBC.