Pierre Poilievre says he would defund the CBC.

“I can’t wait to defund the CBC and sell off the headquarters for housing,” Poilievre posted on X this summer.

I’d rate the CBC as neutral. As a left-winger I often find it too right-wing for my tastes – this is especially the case in news opinion shows, where the panels are often stacked against the one left-leaning voice. The call-in shows tend to be quite conservative – not the callers, the hosts and (often) the guests picked by the hosts. And they went on and on and on with the very right-leaning drama ‘Afganada’ To a conservative, these are just like water to a fish, but to me, they really grate.

I will agree that CBC radio has leaned into identity politics over the last decade. One the one hand, this in part makes up for 50 years of ignoring anyone who does not fit the majority demographic (I’m sure critics don’t consider CBC’s religion show ‘Tapestry’ to be about religion because it’s not based strictly on one religion).

The irony is that you get this type of programming on CBC precisely because it’s cheap. It’s always easy to find someone to come on and you don’t need to do much in the way of backgrounding. You find this even in the non-Identity shows, like Spark, where the guests are often self-promoters, not real experts in their fields. Instead of guest-radio we should be getting better produced shows about the issues that really do matter, but these are really hard to do because most of the major players don’t really want to be interviewed.

You want better, balanced CBC? Fund it properly. It’s a cheap and chintzy out to just kill it, especially since (as other commenters have noted) utterly nothing but advertorial and propaganda sheets would step in to fill the void.