Evidence of meeting #140 for Canadian Heritage in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was radio-canada.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
I'm sorry, but I'm not following your logic here.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
If you are competing in the ecosystem, as you described it, are you having, potentially, to pay executive vice-presidents $1 million a year?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
I think MP Champoux raised this question with me at my last appearance, when we talked about the compensation at Bell, TVA and other media companies. We are not paying anywhere near.... As I said, we stay to about 50% of market rates.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
Gotcha.
Could you confirm how many CBC employees may be earning in the range of your salary or higher?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
I don't believe anybody at CBC/Radio-Canada has a base salary higher than mine.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
What if you factored in bonuses? Would there be salaries that would be comparable to yours?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Yes, there would be, at the executive vice-president level.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
Okay. Would there be any indicators in your business performance that would cause you to consider that you might be overpaying some of your employees based on the performance of the organization? Are there any indicators that would cause concern in your mind to overpayment for what the CBC is producing and what the outcomes are of the organization?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Absolutely not. As I've said before, we do an annual review with the board of directors with outside experts to check on that very question. We're constantly mapping salaries right through the unaffiliated groups to look at whether they are, as I said, at a 50 percentile.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
Just to confirm, as you're doing this mapping, there would be nothing you could foresee that could make you pause and say that this would be a reason we should not be paying bonuses or high salaries. Would there be no cause for concern that maybe people are being overcompensated with taxpayer dollars at the CBC?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
I absolutely do not believe that people are overcompensated. If anything, we are not competitive in the market.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
To the Canadian people who pay all of these salaries and fund the organization, you'd like to say to them now that there's nothing that could come on your radar, there's no data point that could come across your desk, that would make you pause and consider that maybe we're paying too much, maybe the organization's not performing well enough, maybe we have to restructure how we're doing things or maybe we need a bit of self-reflection on why the “defund CBC” movement is growing so exponentially?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
As I said before, the reason the board of directors made the decision to do a compensation review was in fact to make sure all the information we've been working with is, in fact, 100% accurate, and perhaps we should be looking at other ways to approach compensation. There's an openness to change and to review, absolutely.
Conservative
Jamil Jivani Conservative Durham, ON
However, declining viewership wouldn't be one; declining revenue wouldn't be one, and broad public distrust of your organization wouldn't be one. It seems to me that maybe it would be fair to ask the average Canadian taxpayer what you need to see to consider that the CBC is heading in the wrong direction. Therefore, asking for more money, as you have done today, seems not only out of touch, but rather audacious.
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Let me be clear: Digital revenues have tripled. CBC Gem, which was launched at the beginning of my tenure, now reaches millions of Canadians. Let's be clear that the facts you are—
Liberal
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Digital ad revenue and subscription revenue are both up. TV ad revenue, as per all media companies, is down or flat, depending on the market. It's actually higher right now in Quebec than it is in the rest of the country. The country is suffering inflation, so sponsors and advertisers have withdrawn. Quite frankly, to say that viewership and ad revenue are down, and those are the determining features of these last six years, is simply inaccurate.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Hedy Fry
Thank you, Ms. Tait.
I now go to the Liberals.
Mr. Noormohamed, you have five minutes, please.
Liberal
Taleeb Noormohamed Liberal Vancouver Granville, BC
Thank you, Madam Chair
Thank you, Madam Tait, for being with us again.
I just want to start by saying that I think a couple of things are clear.
First, if the CBC, which is government-funded, is being held to a particular standard, then that same standard should be applied to private sector organizations like Bell Media, CTV and Postmedia, which have been taking millions of dollars in subsidies from the people of Canada.
I don't hear the same revulsion from the Conservatives when it comes to the private sector, which continues to hemorrhage money and whose executives are paid in the millions of dollars yet are still gladly laying employees off and taking taxpayer dollars at the same time.
I think it's a bit disingenuous for people to say they're going to attack the public broadcaster. It's the only broadcaster that unites Canadians and brings in the voice of rural, indigenous and francophone communities from coast to coast to coast and whose employees, yes, are paid materially less than what they might make in the private sector.
I expect, Madam Tait, that in the private sector you would make a heck of a lot more money than you make at CBC. I know many journalists at the CBC and others who work in the executive and other parts of CBC, who make a lot less than they might make in the private sector. They do this because of love for the country and because of the mission of the CBC.
It is clear to me that the “defund the CBC” movement is largely because of the rage farming and ideological stuff coming from the Conservatives. For some reason, they want to keep driving division between Canadians rather than having a unified public broadcaster that actually provides high-quality content to Canadians.
The question I would put to you, Madam Tait, is this:
Why do you think the Conservatives detest the idea of having an independent broadcaster that works for Canadians, Quebeckers, people across the country?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
As you know, I don't comment on political matters.
All I can say is that defunding the CBC would mean denying 80% of the population local news. It would be denying thousands of independent producers, creators, musicians and authors their livelihoods.
We can criticize how, in the last year, CBC/Radio-Canada had to lay off 141 people. It was very tough. Let us not forget that defunding the CBC represents, at a minimum, laying off 3,500 people at this corporation, plus the thousands of musicians, artists, performers, producers and sound technicians, etc., who depend on CBC/Radio-Canada.
Defunding the CBC would be denying French language minority communities from their lifeline to le fait français. Defunding the CBC would be denying the right of communities and indigenous communities across the north to hear their news in their language and connect with the south. It would deny the south the ability to learn about the north.
To me, it is absolutely without reason. When you ask me what the reason is, I say to myself that there is no common-sense reason for eliminating CBC. In fact, I ask myself the question, “Why?” This organization, this Crown corporation, was created by Parliament. Why would parliamentarians want to undo this Crown corporation that has existed for 90 years? If they have a problem with how we execute on our mandate, let's fix the problem.
We talk to Canadians every day. It's why we launched a show like Cost of Living out of Calgary. It was because we knew we needed more local shows in the regions. It's why we've launched local podcasts across the country and local FAST channels across the country. It's why we're hiring more journalists in the west.
We do not see defunding the CBC as a solution. We see that as making Canada worse, not better.
Liberal
Taleeb Noormohamed Liberal Vancouver Granville, BC
Thank you, Madam Tait.
Building on that, we heard another falsehood come from the Conservatives about the fact that the CBC has lost the trust of Canadians. In fact, that's actually not true.
All the data point to the fact that the majority of Canadians continue to believe that the CBC is a trusted voice, including half of Conservative voters. I'm not sure which half they're talking to, but it seems to me that if the data show that at least half of Conservatives and many others believe that the CBC is a good thing, then it seems like their data points and their research perhaps aren't as solid as they think it might be.
I'd like to lean in a bit on this fanciful notion the Conservatives have that they could support French language programming in Quebec only. We know that they don't care about French language rights outside of Quebec. It's probably too woke to think about indigenous communities and to think about the idea of telling the stories of Canada.
Let's talk about brass tacks in Quebec. They perpetuate this myth that you could run a successful Radio-Canada without CBC's infrastructure.
How ridiculous is that, exactly?
Can you quantify for us what would actually happen if you said that you're going to cut all the funding to CBC and focus entirely on Radio-Canada? Your Olympic example was one.
What would that actually do to the quality of Radio-Canada and its ability to deliver what it's trying to do?
President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
I would say the Olympics is just one example. There are many examples.
As I said, technology is the backbone of the organization. We are now a digital company. The Internet protocol technology on which all of our services live is shared and paid for by both services. If you cut one out, it is, by definition, going to weaken the other.
I will point out another example. When I joined CBC/Radio-Canada, Gem was in its infancy. We launched Gem, and Tou.TV was sitting on its own platform. We had two separate platforms. We harmonized those two platforms, because it made sense, with public dollars, to focus on one platform. CBC Gem and Tou.TV live on the same platform.
If you take away the financing of CBC Gem that contributes to that one platform, you will have half a platform. Let's just think. With each of those things where there's technology involved, we are, as I said to MP Champoux, weakening Radio-Canada.
Liberal