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...