From Canada’s public broadcaster to its publicly-funded legacy media, the country’s journalistic institutions are in a woeful state.
The newest window into problems at the CBC comes from Travis Dhanraj, the former host of CBC’s Canada Tonight. He testified on March 10 to a Canadian Heritage parliamentary committee looking at the journalism and media landscape.
Dhanraj was inspired by watching CBC anchor Knowlton Nash as a child. The respectable era of the 1980s seems long gone. Dhanraj said after 25 years in journalism, the CBC forced his resignation.
“I raised concerns. I challenged centralized control and bias. I fought for real diversity and equal standards. I tried to do my job as a journalist. Within months, I was pulled off the air, disciplined, restricted from speaking, stripped of my primetime program, and eventually out altogether,” he said.
The “real diversity” Dhanraj sought included diversity of thought and perspective, but he found it wasn’t there. He said he was given a list of about 45 people that he was banned from having on his program. “There were repeated episodes of conservatives being blocked,” he explained.
Dhanraj said he complained internally that the CBC was going against its own mandate. “I said, ‘We are in contravention of Section 11…of the Broadcast Act if we are not providing equitable time for all perspectives.’” His bosses didn’t seem to care.
Dhanraj also read into the record statements from some former and one current CBC employee. One, he said, was someone who lost their anchor job after a year in Vancouver. She was explicitly told the reason was that as a white person she did not fit their diversity targets. While there, she was also “forced to check a box if somebody of a diverse background appeared on the air, and she said that that was concerning to her.” She is now working as a journalist in another country.
Apparently, being a Canadian doing her job well was not reason enough for Canada’s public broadcaster to keep her.
“There are a number of these stories, and it is shocking. These people have been traumatized. They are scared to come out. They’re scared of the professional repercussions,” Dhanraj said of their anonymity. “It should blow the Canadian public’s mind that this was the stuff that was going on.”
Dhanraj also read complaints of a toxic CBC workplace. We’ve heard this before. Karl Johnston worked in human resources with CBC North from 2018 until 2023. In a lawsuit, he claimed the CBC building in Yellowknife, N.W.T. had a “crying room” where employees could go to cope with workplace stress.
“This set the tone for a workplace culture that tolerated and perpetuated toxicity, discrimination, and harassment,” Johnston’s lawsuit alleged.
Adam Johnston, another former CBC North HR employee, also mentioned the “crying room” in a lawsuit. Jason Unrau, a former CBC reporter who worked in Yellowknife and Ottawa, said last year, “I’ve seen the CBC’s culture of ideological conformity and censorship up close.” The CBC denies all of these claims.
Shortly prior to these revelations, the Liberal government announced a $192 million cut to CBC, leaving their annual subsidy at $1.38 billion. Their timing was welcome. However, the government could go farther by selling off the CBC and ending its handouts to media.
After all, it’s not just CBC that gets taxpayer dollars. The Canadian Media Fund, paid partly by cable fees and partly by taxpayers, pays $346 million for digital and traditional content. The Canadian Journalism Labour Tax Credit pays up to 35 per cent of journalists’ salaries, capped at $85,000. The Canadian Periodical Fund adds $86.5 million, while the Local Journalism Initiative adds $19.6 million. Google agreed to pay outlets $100 million under the Online News Act. Facebook refused and blocked news content in Canada over it.
The Liberal government is probably okay with the Facebook ban because its greatest critics are online-only media, some of which have refused government money on principle. The ban has driven down traffic to these outlets, lowering advertising dollars. The government has a taxpayer-funded “solution” for their funding shortfall, of course, one that might encourage soft coverage lest they lose that money.
Whether due to ideology or dollars, Canadian media backs the Liberals. At the Prime Time conference in January, Reynolds Mastin, president and CEO of the Canadian Media Producers Association said, “Prime Minister, know that every person in this room and the 180,000 people who work in this industry have your back, just as we know that you have ours.”
No wonder fair and balanced journalism is so hard to find. It would be better for the government to stop reaching into our wallets to subsidize the media it wants us to consume. Let Canadians decide for ourselves what they want to watch, hear, and read—and maybe even pay for.
