Canada Lives Here?

When David Cayley was writing The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back), a Conservative victory in the 2025 election seemed inevitable. Pierre Poilievre, with his party more than twenty points ahead of the governing Liberals under Justin Trudeau, was touring the country drawing enthusiastically cheering crowds responding to his pledge to “defund the CBC.”

It would be natural for someone like Cayley, who spent almost forty years at the public broadcaster, much of it as a producer with the radio program Ideas, to recoil at such vitriol, even though he is harshly critical of what he believes the CBC has become. For him, the CBC’s invocation of “the public,” as it makes the case for its future, is “nothing more than a veil hiding the CBC’s ideological prejudices and sheltering its preferred styles of thought.” In reality, he suggests, the organization “has lost any vital connection with its past; it has lost contact with a large number of Canadians who don’t share its increasingly homogeneous worldview; and it has largely stopped trying to foster critical thinking at the very moment when nothing could be more needful.”

Critical thinking on air is needed, Cayley believes, because social order has broken down and the legitimacy of Canada itself is now in doubt: “More than once, in recent years, I have heard the phrase ‘so‑called Canada’ pass without comment on CBC Radio.”

Cayley suggests how the public broadcaster might save itself from Conservative cuts — specifically through a major philosophical rethinking of its role. The CBC, he argues, needs to become an antidote for a country being torn apart by deep polarization. By implication, Cayley sees our political and social fracturing as not much different from the discord in the United States. If that perception of Canada was ever correct, everything changed with Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office a year ago. As Jean Chrétien, in jest, told the Liberal leadership convention in March 2025, “We are proud Canadians, and yes, in fact we owe a debt of recognition to Mr. Trump. He has united us as never before. So I want to say thank you to him, and I think I will propose him for the Order of Canada.”

Flag waving and outpourings of Canadian nationalism, a Buy Canadian fervour, a sharp drop in travel to the United States, a new Liberal prime minister, and even an apparent economic reconciliation between Ottawa and Alberta . . . A lot happened last year. After all that, Cayley’s description of a divided country and his prescription for the survival of the CBC seem like artifacts of a suddenly bygone era. Even so, there is value in how he has structured his argument.

The first part of The CBC is a solid and concise history of the creation and evolution of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation throughout the twentieth century. The emphasis, not surprisingly given Cayley’s experience, is on radio. It reads like a good background paper that might have been distributed to those Tories tasked with the defunding, had they formed a government.

Cayley traces the early decades of radio, joined by television in the 1950s. He highlights both the personalities and the programming that played key roles in establishing the broadcaster’s place within the media and in Canadian society alike. He notes the attempted politicization of the CBC by various governments and is rightly critical of regulators: the Board of Broadcast Governors, created in 1958, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, formed a decade later. Cayley laments how private-sector broadcasters were aggressive and successful in pushing those regulators at almost every turn to restrain, limit, and reduce the role of the CBC in the national broadcasting system. In particular, regulators forced CBC Television to emulate private networks that, Cayley argues, were operating in Canada as replicas of American ones in all but name.

Walking through that history also gives Cayley the opportunity to prod some sacred cows and especially CBC management. For instance, he spends considerable time exploring This Hour Has Seven Days, the mid-1960s investigative current-affairs television program hosted by Patrick Watson and Laurier LaPierre. The Mother Corp. killed it after only two years in response to political complaints about its critical coverage of the Liberal government. That gave the show legendary status, Cayley explains. “Seven Days has gone down in CBC lore as a program before its time, a tall poppy cut short by a timid management, a kind of AVRO Arrow of broadcasting.”

Cayley also spends appropriate time on the radio revolution of the 1970s, led by Mark Starowicz and Margaret Lyons, and the so‑called Creative Renewal process launched two decades later when the revolution, in the eyes of some, had run out of steam. He describes the impetus behind Creative Renewal as “revolution from above,” driven by managers rather than by the programmers — an aside that would produce a smile from decades’ worth of CBC employees who have been caught in the downdraft of such rethinking from above.

The twenty-first-century operation gets a more episodic and less thorough treatment, perhaps because Cayley is no longer on the inside. The content, programming, and personalities on radio and television are not addressed with the same intensity that he applies to the earlier decades of the institution. Cayley does note Watson’s push in the 1990s to set the broadcaster apart in the media landscape by providing distinctive programming — even if that limited its audience size. That strategy was reversed the following decade by Richard Stursberg, head of the CBC’s English-language services from 2004 to 2010. He focused on boosting audience numbers, arguing that TV is primarily an entertainment medium. Along the way, Cayley bemoans the narrowness of CBC Radio’s definition of popular culture, which he perceives as not looking beyond “the current market in songs, movies, and celebrities.”

The second half of the book is devoted to Cayley’s recommendations for how the CBC should change. He draws on the writings of a wide range of philosophers and communications theorists to explore how the CBC should become a “free space for critical thought” as opposed to the current bubble, in which “the truth is already securely in its possession and need only be preached to the choir.”

Throughout this section, Cayley frequently returns to one underlying question: “What would happen to the news if the CBC were to abandon the idea of a single, authorized version of things and adopt a pluralist philosophy?” He believes that it is only through pluralism and respect for “everyone’s condition in the present state of the world” that the CBC can lay a foundation for true conversation. But that’s not the attitude Cayley sees today: “Canadians now disagree fundamentally and, for the time being at least, irreconcilably; and, insofar as the CBC tries to maintain the fiction of consensus, it disqualifies, disparages, and antagonizes the divergent publics who don’t belong to, or identify with the CBC’s confident but outdated we.”

Even if such irreconcilable disagreement hasn’t lasted as long as Cayley assumed it would, there are more fundamental questions about his recipe for a new CBC. He is most distressed by the CBC’s unwillingness to recognize that it has become “a monoculture that actively excludes competing points of view and depresses intellectual inquiry.” Cayley argues:

Can that be done, however, without devolving into both-sidesism: always presenting one take and then an alternative viewpoint on a given subject? Should the requirement to provide evidence to back up arguments be the qualification for the voices that participate in such conversations, or is simply offering a range of opinions enough? In the twenty-first century, will the public broadcaster ever be more than the convenor of such conversations? In the spirit of enlightening and informing its audiences, doesn’t the CBC have the obligation to ask participants “How do you know that?” and then assess the basis of their responses as a prerequisite to participation?

Nor does Cayley indicate how a new philosophical framework would respond to the many challenges the public broadcaster currently faces. There is no recognition or discussion of the competitive media environment within which the CBC operates, now that the internet and social media have fundamentally changed Canadians’ relationship with traditional media. He does not differentiate between the unique relationships that radio, television, and online programming should or might have with their various audiences. He fails to grapple with the collapse of local news in many communities across the country — and how that has created news deserts. There are many potential ways for the CBC to re-engage Canadians, but how should it take advantage of them?

It is not clear how Cayley’s remedies would apply more specifically to television or the CBC’s online presence nor to major elements of its current programming. Should CBC Television continue broadcasting in eight Indigenous languages, including Inuktitut, Cree, and Dene? Should it continue to feature dramas and game shows, children’s programming, sports, news, and current affairs? Should its focus and ambitions be narrowed to meet the times? If so, how? Cayley also does not deal with Radio‑Canada at all.

Even when the Conservatives were riding high in the polls, it was never clear how or whether a Pierre Poilievre government would actually defund Canada’s national broadcaster. They certainly never contemplated getting rid of French-language Radio-Canada. Their target was always CBC English-language television, because radio has been looked upon more favourably by Conservative voters, particularly in rural ridings that are losing their community media.

References to “the listener” in the second half of The CBC suggest that Cayley is primarily proposing a new mandate and approach for his former program Ideas or, at most, yet another round of creative renewal for radio. That’s just one part of a much larger story.