Mr. Speaker, it is an honour to stand on behalf of Conservative members of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and table, in both official languages, a dissenting report to address an important aspect that was missed during the consideration of the report on the national forum on the media. The message is clear and simple, and it might be the shortest dissenting report ever tabled in the House. It contains three words: Defund the CBC.
After failing to produce content that Canadians actually want to watch and want to listen to, missing key performance metrics, cutting hundreds of jobs, and giving $18 million in bonuses to CBC executives and managers amidst declining trust, viewership and ad revenue, the solution is to simply defund the CBC so that we can encourage creative and free journalistic expression and so that we can let journalism thrive through the work of journalists, not by the heavy hand of a bloated, bureaucratic, woke, biased and outdated model that the CBC represents today.