Peter Menzies: Carney is good news for the CBC, and bad news for the rest
The more the CBC gets, the more the legacy media will demand (and receive). And long term, that'll kill their credibility — it already is killing it.
By: Peter Menzies
Now that everyone at CBC is sleeping through the night again and the fear of defunding has been erased, Canadians can look forward to what could be a new Golden Age for the Mother Corp.
That is probably seen as good news by those born before 1970. According to a Nanos poll on the eve of the election, they were voting for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberals over Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives by an overwhelming margin — 18 points. They also tend to still consume traditional media. Their political preference is not shared by those under 55, who were opting for the Conservatives by eight points, with the 18–34 cohort (which is far more likely to be forming its opinions watching YouTube than via something grandma watches) leading the way.
First, a little context.
Poilievre had promised to defund English CBC and make it dependent on subscribers and donors. Carney guaranteed it an additional $150 million immediately and, in the long term, wants to double CBC funding from its current $1.4 billion. So, the CBC — which already employs one out of every three working newshounds in Canada — is happy. If its funding and newsroom numbers double, that proportion will move up to more than 50 percent. Again, great news for its fans.
Carney is also content to allow it to continue not as a public broadcaster but as the publicly funded commercial news and entertainment corporation it has become. He will not interfere, he said, with its ability to sell advertising and engage in other revenue-related competitive activities. More good news for CBC.
For its competitors, though, life is about to get more difficult. Way more. Like, for them, this really sucks. The playing field for those within our news ecosystem was already tilted. If Carney stays faithful to his campaign vows, the angle of that incline will become so severe that many of those trying to compete for viewers, advertisers, and subscribers could simply slide off the edge and into the abyss of receivership.
Once that becomes obvious — and it should be blatant to an economist — Carney can either watch the bodies pile up or increase the subsidies the Liberals have already been providing for Postmedia, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, etc. (The broadcasters expect to get their salvation through CRTC levies on streamers.) These increases in financial aid represent the scenario most likely to play out because, in a centrally planned economy, nothing subsidized ever dies.
This outcome would thrill Postmedia’s hedge-fund owners. Thanks to Carney, they could profit unto eternity while continuing to provide their stable of Living Dead platforms with just enough to keep them vertical. Also satisfied would be the Globe’s billionaire and The Star’s multimillionaire proprietors. This, after all, is Canada — where if you are in the subsidy game, Liberal times are good times, and what’s wrong with a billion or two between pals?
Plenty.
As hard as these wards of the state work to keep the ties between their executives and those with political power on the down-low, the more people find out about the arrangement, the less they like it. The image of journalists as rugged individualists fighting on behalf of workin’ men and women to reveal the truths that corrupt and influence the powerful just goes … poof!
Most within the industry are aware of this and the harm it is doing to the craft’s reputation, which means the thinking must go something along the lines of: “Better we lose trust than I try to explain to the missus that we can’t pay the mortgage because of my, uh, principles.” In other words, take the cash or there goes the house, the wife, and the kids. And the car.
The damage doesn’t stop there.
The subsidies may keep the lights on and the recipients’ kids in hockey in the short term, but it won’t preserve the loyalty of readers. Just as physics teaches us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, the more people feel betrayed, the greater the number that will flee to nouveau media.
Those keep popping up despite the Trudeau government’s decision to subsidize broken 20th-century business models at their expense — a practice Carney appears poised to reinforce.
The Liberals may be determined to halt progress, but it remains relentless and, while the online news world is still very much under construction, there are many solid options out there for those looking to “re-partner” with media they can trust. Good information is available daily, for instance, on Substack, where people such as the proprietors of The Line, Terry Glavin, and Paul Wells earn a living. The same goes for other unsubsidized, web-based products such as Western Standard, Blacklock’s Reporter, and The Hub. Podcasts abound and, south of the border, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press was recently reported as having a $100 million value.
Alas, there are also a number of information options out there that align with the immortal words of the Northern Pikes: “She ain’t pretty, she just looks that way.”
They exist on the left and the right. They are entitled to their space and to their freedom to speak. But there is often nothing fair, balanced, or dependably accurate about their agenda-driven work. Journalism is not their purpose; it is a means to an end. And, once hooked, readers can easily slide down any number of algorithmic rabbit holes, never again to emerge as rational, fully informed human beings.
All that said, the bottom line is that the more money Carney and the Liberals pour into the CBC, the more they will have to pay to others. The longer that goes on, the more people will move away from legacy news and its increasingly narrow definition of acceptable opinions.
The nation’s Economist-in-Chief would be well advised to ponder these realities and the Law of Unintended Consequences as he moves forward. Otherwise, he could find himself spending a lot of money on products fewer and fewer people want to consume.
Peter Menzies is a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, past vice-chair of the CRTC and a former newspaper publisher.
The Line is entirely reader and advertiser funded — no federal subsidy for us! If you value our work, have already subscribed, and still worry about what will happen when the conventional media finishes collapsing, please make a donation today.
The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Please follow us on social media! Facebook x 2: On The Line Podcast here, and The Line Podcast here. Instagram. Also: TikTok. BlueSky. LinkedIn. Matt’s Twitter. The Line’s Twitter. Jen’s Twitter. Contact us by email: lineeditor@protonmail.com.
The Liberals' whole appeal and approach is to make something obviously unsustainable last just a bit longer. Media is part of that. The fact that our current media system will collapse completely as soon as government money runs out bothers them no more than the deficit, the disastrous impact of mass immigration on the Canadian people, or the disastrous impact of net zero ideology on our economic sustainability.
Which is to say, not at all.
But Peter, as you alluded to in your article, Carney is an economist. Not only an economist but the greatest economist and crisis manager in the history of economics and crisis’s. - just ask him and his supporters. He would not possibly lead us down the wrong path for some lowly political reason, impossible I say, impossible!