Jonathon Kay: Between the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons alone, CBC television lost 25 per cent of its viewers. Its English-language audience share is now less than four per cent— a predictable consequence of policies that prioritize quotas and activist mono-think over editorial quality. At Thursday’s CRTC hearings into the renewal of CBC’s broadcasting licenses (the transcript of which is available online), virtually every question and talking point went, in some way, to identity politics. On one of the few occasions when CBC CEO Catherine Tait mentioned actual programming, it was to boast about Canada Tonight with Ginella Massa, a newly announced show that looks exactly like every other similarly conceived CBC news show, except that — plot twist! — the host has a hijab. This is what now passes for fresh new thinking at the CBC: the same bad food served by a waiter of a different hue.
There is not a single organization in all of Canada — private or public — where this kind of clown show wouldn’t result in wholesale management change. The reason this hasn’t happened at the CBC is that no one even pretends that the place still exists to serve ordinary Canadians, so there is no longer any real metric for evaluating performance. As symbolized by the eight (lily-white, by the way) members of the senior executive team, the CBC now staggers on largely as a make-work project for a certain kind of privileged urban virtue signaler who can be counted on to have the right opinions, post the right hashtags, and keep the broadcaster’s dirty laundry behind closed doors in New York and Boca Raton. These are the people living large off the $1.2-billion that Canadian taxpayers send the CBC every year. Not so long ago, that outlay seemed merely indefensible. Under Tait’s watch, it seems positively grotesque.
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