CBC/Radio-Canada to cut 10 per cent of workforce, end some programming as it faces $125M budget shortfall
CBC/Radio-Canada to cut 10 per cent of workforce, end some programming as it faces $125M budget shortfall
I'm a full supporter of the CBC ... the public absolutely needs a publically funded broadcaster and news organisation.
What we don't need is high paid executives that soak so much needless waste just to hold on to supposed high ranked talent. Spread the money around and fund more young journalists, writers, producers and production people. It would be better to have lots of moderately paid professionals, rather than try to spend as much money as possible in a few high priced executives.
And move the headquarters away from an expensive downtown city. Place it in a part of the country that needs the money. We live in a digital world so there is no great need to physically locate your office in the most expensive place possible.
I can't get any reasonable source of where CBC money goes because the federal government doesn't provide a sunshine list of what people actually make and how much they actually spend. Which is also a problem as the costs the CBC incurs should be fully disclosed. How are we to judge how much to give to the CBC if we don't fully understand where their funds go.
There are ways to save the CBC, we don't need to save a few high priced people, high priced contracts in order to do it.
That's great ... but I shouldn't need a financial degree or specialized training and vocabulary and knowledge in order to be able to understand what an organization has done with public money.
The accountability is to average people ... so the documentation that should be shared should be understood by average people.
If you only go after unknowns that want to live in a remote community then all talent will go to the private sector
If you list salaries more people will call for defunding
Which further lowers quality
You saw the same thing with Post Media claiming CBC has tons of expensive real estate but they didn’t list their own holdings
CBC actually rents most of its office space now, including the new building in Montreal, it doesn't own the building. Which complicates things about leasing the space to other businesses or modifying the lease agreement depending on their financial situation in a short timeframe.
I wouldn't trust high priced talent of any kind ... public or private ... because they don't care what happens to any institution public or private - they'll always just go to the highest bidder.
Whereas if you have more moderately paid talent .. you have more individuals working and competing inside their organization. It would never be a utopia and there would still be lots of headaches and stupidity ... but I'd rather put my trust in 20 people rather than 1 person who is working for top dollar.
I would rather place my bets on ten potential talents ... than on one sure bet that could easily just sabotage everything and everyone to make a bit more money.
Every talent comes from somewhere and seeding those chances are liable to spring new talent more often than in endlessly holding onto one overly hyped talent that we're made to believe is irreplaceable
We shouldn't be having CBC depend on ad revenue either. The federal government needs to fund them better.
Fuck them for defunding CBC. They have too much value to lose to austerity.
Inflation (increasing production cost, hardware, licensing, salaries) and dwindling ad revenue was a double-whammy on their finance projection, and now they sadly have to adjust where layoffs are necessary.. :(
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10%?
The slow squeeze to kill the CBC, by letting it die on the vine, has begun.
They compete with corporate media. Corporate media, rightly or wrongly, see this as an opportune time to try again to quash the information railroad of our country.
They have cajoled the Govt to have TB(I assume?) dictate terms to reduce staff. Always starts with that fucking “10%”. The savings will be spent on corporations in the form of tax breaks and “incentives “. Or some other bullshit.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Radio-Canada announced Monday that it plans to cut about 10 per cent of its workforce and axe some programming to cope with a potential $125 million budget shortfall.
The corporation said earlier this year it had begun cutting $25 million through measures such as limiting travel, sponsorships and marketing, and delaying technology initiatives.
The public broadcaster blamed its budget issues on "rising production costs, declining television advertising revenue and fierce competition from the digital giants."
Chris Waddell, professor emeritus at Carleton University's school of journalism, said the cuts come as no surprise at a time when news organizations around the world are struggling.
In June, Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) Inc. announced it would be axing 1,300 positions and closing or selling nine radio stations.
At the time, Bell — the parent company of CTV National News, BNN and CP24 — said the job cuts were a response to unfavourable public policy and regulatory conditions that it could no longer wait out.
The original article contains 744 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
CBC/Radio-Canada — which received around $1.3 billion in public funding in the 2022-2023 fiscal year
Well, that's all I needed to hear. Shut the entire thing down and reduce our taxes, please. FFS.
Should we shut down public funding for schools while we're at it?
How dare the government spend money to keep the public educated and informed!
/s
P.S. You're an idiot.
You're right, why put an extra $1.3 billion per year into our school system when we can "educate and inform" Canadians through programming like Fridge Wars and Hockey Night In Canada?.
/s
If you'd like to continue funding a dying media group, be my guest. I'd rather not use tax dollars to support an unsustainable entertainment broadcaster.
I’m personally happy with my taxes funding public services like CBC.
While you could argue that we get taxed a lot, and that our taxes are not always well spent, the average person receives a ton of value for the amount of money they put in.
the average person receives a ton of value
I don't doubt that they're offering value to some people with the sheer number of TV and radio programming they offer, but the argument is whether taxpayers should be supporting them.
They generate over a half billion a year from ads and non-government funding, and they charge people (like Netflix does) for their “premium” content.
If they can't sustain themselves through a normal business model, I don't see why we have to keep their business going. $1.3 billion a year is not chump change.
Just to put that into perspective, we give the CBC more than we give Canada Post, VIA Rail, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Canadian Museum of Nature ,Canadian Transportation Agency, Department for Women and Gender Equality, Library and Archives of Canada, National Film Board, National Museum of Science and Technology, COMBINED.
How about we cut all federal funding for fossil fuel and mining companies instead?
Oil Change International finds Canadian governments provided $14 billion per year to oil, gas, coal. Source
The Canadian government announced that the 2022 budget would feature up to $3.8 billion in funding to support mining efforts in Canada over the next eight years. Source
Why stop there? Cut subsidies to livestock and other environmentally destructive industries, too.
How much reduction do you expect to see in your taxes by shutting down CBC? Of course I'd like to see them cut costs but having a public broadcaster for Canadians is worth the couple of dollars you'll save
At 1.3B$/year that would be an average of $34.21/year per Canadian if we round it out to 38M, but more realistically if we go with how many tax returns there were in 2023 (around 31.8M), that would be an average of $40.88/year per taxpayer.
At the current rate of inflation, that's like one meal for a family of four at McDonalds.
Does the CBC need to absolutely return a profit? Should hospitals be held to the same target of becoming profitable no matter what? It's a public service, it's our culture, we have great reporters who are keeping the government accountable by constantly digging. I'm not saying it should be careless financially and it needs to balance its budget so that it doesn't waste the taxpayers money, but to me that is the price of a healthy democracy.