Ample research has painted a bleak picture: the crisis facing the media world is exacerbating the decline of democracy.
While authoritarian populism and the far right have been on the rise, the availability and accessibility of information has sharply declined, particularly information from media sources that follow the standards and practices of professional journalism.
To make matters worse, we have seen politicians, such as Pierre Poilievre, running on promises to defund public media. In 2023, Poilievre pledged to “defund the CBC” under his leadership, calling it a biased outlet that serves no justified purpose. As far as the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada is concerned, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation / Société Radio-Canada is an unnecessary public entity.
If CBC/Radio-Canada were privatized, the argument goes, then private news media companies could take over the role it currently plays and generate profits while doing so, without relying on taxpayer dollars. The problem is the business model underpinning this theory has collapsed in recent years and is no longer viable.
Finding ways to better support the vital work of the news media sector is essential to restoring and maintaining a healthy democracy. We propose that public support for CBC/Radio-Canada be increased.
How the media crisis started
To understand how we got here, we need to understand the magnitude of the crisis facing Canadian media.
Between 2008 and 2024, 101 local media outlets closed their doors, and 37 others scaled back their operations in Quebec. In 2023 and 2024, Quebecor cut more than 600 jobs in Quebec, while Bell closed or sold 54 radio stations across Canada, centralized its programming operations, and cut 6,100 jobs.
In some parts of Quebec, the number of journalists dropped by 30 per cent between 2006 and 2016.
Worse still, in rural areas, where journalism coverage is already weakest, the number of workers in journalism decreased by approximately 20 per cent.
The decline of media has made outlets unable to do their job, especially local news reporting. The undermining of local news began in the 2000s with mergers, acquisitions and the formation of media conglomerates, and the digital media boom of the 2010s led by Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon brought the crisis to unprecedented heights.
Over time, the Big Four tech giants came to capture more than two thirds of the $22 billion annual revenue of the Canadian advertising market, depriving media outlets of their primary source of revenue.
In 2022, daily newspapers in Quebec still made 60 per cent of their revenue from advertising. The numbers were even higher for conventional television (85per cent), regional weeklies (93 per cent) and radio stations (97 per cent).
Between 2012 and 2020, advertising revenue dropped by $375 million for daily newspapers, $190 million for television, $111 million for weeklies and $114 million for magazines.
The collapse in ad sales underscores the importance of publicly funded media. The broken business model of news media has reignited conversations about public funding, especially for Canada’s leading media institution: CBC/Radio-Canada.
Underfunding Canada’s public broadcaster
CBC/Radio-Canada receives public funding in the form of government appropriations and has three sources of self-generated revenue: 1) advertising revenue, 2) subscriber fees for discretionary services, and 3) financing and other income.
Historically, government appropriations have accounted for 60 per cent of total CBC/Radio-Canada funding, with self-generating revenue as a secondary funding source coming in at under 40 per cent. Advertising revenue makes up approximately 20 per cent of its total funding, and financing income is typically less than 10 per cent.
CBC/Radio-Canada faced substantial cuts to its funding on multiple occasions in the 1980s and 1990s.
Brian Mulroney reduced CBC/Radio-Canada’s budget by $85 million in 1984, then by another $240 million toward the end of the decade.
In the 1990s, Jean Chrétien implemented a $227 million cut and imposed austerity measures into 1998.
In 2012, Stephen Harper announced $115 million in cuts over three years. Only in 2016 did CBC/Radio-Canada finally get a break, when Justin Trudeau pledged an additional investment of $675 million over five years.
The 2016 funding boost was not enough to undo the damage wrought by three decades of cutbacks. Funding for CBC/Radio-Canada has not kept pace with the Consumer Price Index since the 1980s, and investment in the institution declined further and further between 1985 and 2024. As our analysis shows:
“The $837 million in government appropriations granted in 1984-1985 would be worth $2.1 billion in 2024 dollars. That’s far higher than the $1.4 billion in appropriations granted for 2023–2024. Adjusting for inflation, there is a $667 million difference between the 1984-1985 appropriations and the 2023-2024 appropriations. In other words, CBC/Radio-Canada’s public funding has been slashed by 32 per cent since 1984.
“These appropriations account for an ever-shrinking fraction of the federal government’s total spending. In 1990-1991, its share was 0.68 per cent. In 2009-2010, it was 0.42 per cent. Since 2020, government appropriations for CBC/Radio-Canada have amounted to less than 0.30 per cent of projected federal spending, and only 0.26 per cent in 2023-2024.”
It is unsurprising, then, that Nordicity’s latest report has Canada ranked 18th out of 20 countries in financial support for public media. In fact, Canada is part of a group of countries rated as having low levels of public media funding (less than $50 per capita), even though CBC/Radio-Canada is the only public media outlet in the world that operates two distinct services and produces content in two languages.
In addition, public media funding is unpredictable and allocated on a year-to-year basis, resulting in short-term management strategies, and the discretionary nature of the funding makes CBC/Radio-Canada leadership vulnerable to political and partisan pressures.
Ways to improve the CBC/Radio-Canada
We at the Institut de Recherche et d’informations socioéconomiques (IRIS) propose three measures that would bolster support for CBC/Radio-Canada:
1) Restore and stabilize CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding.
2) Give CBC/Radio-Canada’s board of directors greater autonomy.
3) Develop a digital strategy for CBC/Radio-Canada that is not driven by profit motives.
We propose that CBC/Radio-Canada’s public funding be planned over a five-year horizon and correspond to a minimum of $50 per capita.
We propose that a public representative and an employee representative be added to CBC/Radio-Canada’s board of directors and that the chair be appointed by the board rather than the government.
And we propose that CBC/Radio-Canada have a strategy for digital development that is not contingent on pressures of profitability.
We believe that these actions will provide better support to Canada’s public broadcaster and enhance its ability to produce, disseminate and deliver reliable news coverage—a cornerstone of any functioning democracy.
