During the spring federal election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre doubled down on claims that the CBC is out of touch—elitist, irrelevant, bloated. Whether or not one agrees, especially in light of growing U.S. incursions on Canadian cultural sovereignty, his attacks raise a deeper question: does the CBC’s public image still reflect its mandate of non-partisan, democratic participation?
How should we read the function of the CBC in an information landscape increasingly shaped by corporate retrenchment?
With Meta scaling back its content moderation teams, X gutting its safety operations, and generative AI poised to flood public discourse with disinformation, what role does Canada’s public broadcaster have to play in a climate of a weaponized U.S. media apparatus?
With two-thirds of Canadians reliant on social media for news, the stakes are high. If the CBC is in an image crisis, then perhaps the right approach isn’t to defend what the CBC has been, but to reimagine what it can be.
Here, a question looms: why not meet this moment of institutional doubt with one of the CBC’s most ambitious precedents—not just reporting on the state of the nation, but helping shape it?
Starting in the 1940s, Canada’s public broadcaster experimented with something bold: programming that treated everyday people as planners of the country’s future. It wasn’t tabloid-ism. It was reconstruction. And maybe—in a world spinning from inflation, housing crises, and great-power realignments—it’s time to reignite that spirit.
It’s time to consider a new Citizens Forum (1942)
The Citizens Forum, a radio program founded jointly by the Canadian Association for Adult Education, Canada’s Wartime Information Board, and the CBC, emerged in a time of crisis. Despite efforts to address social stratification in the interwar period, the Second World War underscored the extent to which the ideal of general Canadian welfare remained unfulfilled.
Big business, Canada’s foreign policy elite, and the mainstream press all had a say in Canada’s future—but what about the average citizen? For a new generation of media reformers, the propaganda excesses of the First World War had revealed an urgent lesson: slogans weren’t enough. To win public support—and to build a more democratic, participatory Canada—government messaging needed to be matched by meaningful policy. Promises of public welfare had to be backed by real, measurable improvements in everyday life.
Figures like Frank Scott, leader of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the precursor to today’s NDP), emerged in the 1930s as a vocal critic of Canada’s failure to protect the most vulnerable during the Great Depression. Scott and others condemned the way powerful economic actors used their monopolistic positions to offload the burdens of collapse onto those Canadians with the fewest resources.
This critique found theoretical backing in the 1933 manifesto Social Planning for Canada, drafted by the League for Social Reconstruction (widely read as one of the CCF’s founding documents). The manifesto argued that Canada needed a radical transformation in its social, economic, and educational structures—one where planning, rather than market forces, would guide the country’s future.
With the advent of war, Scott—along with allies like E.A. Corbett of the Canadian Association for Adult Education and David Petegorsky of the National Film Board—sought to integrate the principles of social planning into a broader project of participatory media.
At a joint conference at McGill University, they proposed a bold fusion of social planning with a new imaginary of public broadcasting.
Building on the legacy of the Farm Radio Forums (1940), an initiative led by Corbett and shaped by the rural socialism that gained momentum in Canada during the 1930s, the Citizen Forum would progress the concept of discussion-based broadcasts paired with study groups to address those governance issues most pertinent to the public.
Although the Citizens Forum was initially sustained through the advocacy of the CAAE, it would, in the postwar years, become integrated into the CBC’s core programming. Here, it’s important to remember that the creation of the CBC—a publicly owned corporation charged with advancing the public interest—ran in parallel to the development of the Farm Forums, emerging at a time when the concerns of Canada’s industrial heartland were central to the nation’s future.
Socially oriented media programs were, at least initially, met with hesitation by both Liberal and Conservative policy-makers. Fears ran deep that such initiatives might foster fellow travelers. However, following the electoral surge of the CCF between 1942 and 1944, these same programs were rapidly incorporated into the state apparatus, largely in step with efforts to contain the CCF.
A dual purpose for the CBC
In this context, the CBC served a dual purpose: it broadcast progressive imaginaries of the welfare state and it operated as a mechanism of containment.
Still, the idealisms crystallized by the exigencies of war continued to animate many of the media reformers who imagined a more participatory public sphere. It was within this complex climate—one marked by both state co-optation and grassroots pressure—that the Citizens Forum took shape. The program’s founders responded to these pressures by adopting a panel format that brought together studio audiences with a mix of subject-area experts and everyday participants.
Topics—voted on by the audience ahead of time and partially curated by program organizers—were structured around pressing national issues. A given broadcast might pose the following: should taxes on oil and gas be levied in the interest of all Canadians?
Roughly half of panel participants came from professional backgrounds—lawyers, professors, engineers—while the remaining voices were drawn from the public. Short study guides, distributed in advance, outlined the spectrum of positions on a topic, offering contrasting arguments from experts across ideological lines.
The result was a distinctive blend of public service broadcasting—part Power & Politics, part Cross Country Checkup, and part grassroots community forum. The advancement of the public interest was neither an echo chamber reflecting a weaponized ‘free speech’ nor was it an insular bureaucratic process—it fostered a non-paternalistic environment where public education mirrored governance itself, reflecting its workings back to those most engaged in the process of public policy.
While programming choices inevitably reflected tensions in political priorities, the deliberate effort to create a balanced forum—open to public scrutiny—ultimately fostered a more transparent model of democratic engagement.
Rather than situating public broadcasting as a wedge issue, policy-makers would do well to double down on the CBC’s own legacy: placing pluralism and public accountability at the heart of its programming structure. Reviving the Citizen Forum may not perfectly mirror today’s needs, but the challenge encapsulated by the forum—to reimagine the ambitious, messy, and experimental nature of public broadcasting in ways that synchronize with the equally experimental nature of democracy—remains remarkably prudent in an era marked by an accelerating crisis in public information.
