EDITORIAL: CBC/Radio-Canada Devours Its Own Children — The Betrayal Is Complete

The Click War That Private Media Can’t Win

While traditional advertising competition was already problematic, it is in the digital realm that CBC/Radio-Canada’s betrayal reaches its peak. The public broadcaster’s digital platforms—its website, apps, and streaming content—benefit from brand recognition built on decades of public funding, technical infrastructure maintained at the taxpayer’s expense, and a capacity to produce and distribute content on a large scale that few private media outlets can match without bleeding themselves dry. In this environment, when CBC.ca or Radio-Canada.ca publish general news, cultural analysis, lifestyle features, or entertainment content, they are no longer fulfilling their distinctive public service mission—they are directly encroaching on the editorial niches that private media outlets have developed to survive in a market already saturated by American giants like Google, Meta, and their counterparts.

The battle for clicks is a war that Canada’s private media outlets are waging on two fronts simultaneously: against American digital platforms that capture the lion’s share of advertising revenue, and against CBC/Radio-Canada, which does not depend on that same revenue to survive. It is an asymmetrical war by definition. Private media outlets must win every click, every subscriber, and every advertising dollar to pay their employees. CBC/Radio-Canada can afford to lose money on digital for years—the check from Ottawa still comes. This fundamental asymmetry does not create healthy competition that would benefit Canadian readers and viewers. It creates a sloping playing field on which private media outlets slide inexorably downward, while the public broadcaster remains comfortably ensconced in its subsidized position.

Content That Shouldn’t Exist

Let’s be clear about what lies at the heart of this digital betrayal. It’s not that CBC/Radio-Canada covers general news—that’s its founding mission. The problem arises when the public broadcaster develops content that clearly falls within the commercial realm rather than the public service realm: food columns, travel guides, fashion content, entertainment recommendations, and mainstream cultural analysis—all of which would be perfectly at home in a private magazine but have no place in a taxpayer-funded public service. When this content generates traffic and advertising revenue, it does so directly at the expense of private media outlets that previously occupied these niches—and which, in turn, had to pay to occupy them. This is where the betrayal becomes inexcusable: the public broadcaster is no longer content to fill the gaps that the private sector does not cover. It is encroaching on areas already covered by the private sector, with the structural advantage of not having to make this encroachment profitable.

The question is not whether CBC/Radio-Canada has the legal right to publish cookbooks or travel guides. The question is whether this constitutes a legitimate use of public funds in a context where private newsrooms are closing due to insufficient revenue. The answer is no. Categorically no.

Journalists from Regions That No Longer Exist

Behind the numbers and economic arguments are real people. Columnists, reporters, photographers, and editors who lost their jobs not because they lacked competence, but because the newsrooms that employed them could no longer stay afloat in an environment where a publicly funded competitor was siphoning off the same meager regional advertising revenue. Canadian regional media have been particularly devastated by this dynamic. Entire communities—in rural areas, in mid-sized cities, in electoral districts that deserve coverage—no longer have a local journalist to cover city council meetings, school board decisions, local environmental issues, and the human stories that make up the fabric of a community. This information vacuum is a silent catastrophe for local democracy—and CBC/Radio-Canada has contributed to it, not by disappearing, but by remaining present in places where its very presence was suffocating private players who might otherwise have survived.

The cruel paradox is that CBC/Radio-Canada itself has cut back on its regional coverage in recent years, reducing its presence in certain communities at the very moment that local private media outlets were disappearing. The result is the worst of both worlds: regional markets where neither the public broadcaster nor the private sector adequately covers local news, but where the public broadcaster has nonetheless contributed, for years, to weakening the private players that could have maintained that coverage. It is a double betrayal—first against the private media, and second against the communities that everyone claimed to want to serve.

Readers Who Deserve Better

The real victims of this situation may not be the media owners—who have their own interests to defend and their own responsibilities in the sector’s crisis. The real victims are Canadians, who deserve a diverse, dynamic media ecosystem capable of holding those in power accountable at every level. A strong public service and a strong private media sector are not incompatible—they are complementary, in an environment where the playing field is level. What the current situation is producing instead is a sprawling public broadcaster encroaching on the private sector’s niches, and a weakened private sector that no longer has the resources to carry out the investigative, watchdog, and countervailing functions that are the very essence of independent journalism. Canadians deserve better than this choice between two diminished models. They deserve real reform.

Every time a regional newsroom closes, an entire community loses its voice. Not its voice in a metaphorical sense—its voice in the literal sense: someone who attends city council meetings, who questions the mayor, who documents what is really happening in neighborhoods and villages. When that voice disappears, local power goes unchecked. And unchecked power does what unchecked power has always done.

What the Public Mandate Really Means

CBC/Radio-Canada’s fundamental mission, as defined by the Broadcasting Act, is clear in its core principles: to inform, educate, and entertain Canadians; to reflect the country’s cultural diversity; to serve communities and regions; and to provide programming that enriches Canada’s cultural and democratic life. Nowhere in this mandate does it state that the public broadcaster must maximize its digital traffic, develop commercial offerings in every possible niche, or seek to dominate the online advertising market at the expense of the private sector. Nowhere. And yet, this is precisely what the institution has done, gradually, under the combined pressure of digital transformation and its institutional ambition to remain relevant in a changing media landscape. The mission has been betrayed not by external enemies, but by the institution itself, through its own strategic choices.

It is important to understand that this shift is not necessarily the result of ill will on the part of the individuals who lead CBC/Radio-Canada. It is often the result of an institutional logic that drives any organization toward expansion, toward platform growth, toward maximizing audience reach—even when this logic directly contradicts the very purpose of the organization in question. A state-funded institution that begins to think like a commercial enterprise—by seeking advertising revenue, developing mass-market content to maximize clicks, and building digital platforms to capture attention across all market segments—has, in a sense, forgotten what it is supposed to be. And when no one at the political level calls that institution to order, the shift becomes permanent, and the betrayal becomes structural.

Public service that no longer knows what “public service” means

There are examples around the world of public broadcasters that have managed to maintain a mission that is clear and distinct from the private sector: the BBC in the United Kingdom, Arte in France and Germany, and NHK in Japan. These institutions share a precise definition of what they do that the market cannot or will not do—high-quality programming, coverage of linguistic minorities, in-depth international news, and artistic creation that does not bow to the demands of immediate profitability. They do not seek to dominate every segment of the media market. They occupy a space that complements the private sector, not one that competes with it. CBC/Radio-Canada has gradually abandoned this philosophy in favor of a strategy of all-out expansion that has inexorably led it to become the very problem it was never supposed to become: a subsidized giant that crushes private players with the very tax dollars of the taxpayers who support those private players.

There is a painful irony in the fact that an institution created to protect Canadian culture and information from the dominance of foreign content has become, for Canada’s private media, a threat as real as Netflix or Google. The threat has taken on a new face—but the result for Canadian newsrooms is the same: fewer resources, fewer reporters, less information.

When the Regulator Looks the Other Way

In this story of institutional betrayal, it would be unfair to single out CBC/Radio-Canada as the sole party responsible. The real scandal is Ottawa’s deliberate inaction in the face of a situation that everyone in the Canadian media industry has been observing for years. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission—the CRTC—has a mandate to regulate the Canadian broadcasting system in the public interest. It has the tools to set limits on what the public broadcaster can do in the digital space and to establish rules of conduct that would protect the complementary relationship between the public and private sectors. These tools exist. They have not been used with the rigor and clarity that the situation demands. And this regulatory vacuum has allowed CBC/Radio-Canada to develop in directions that no one anticipated and that no one seems willing to correct.

Successive federal governments bear a major responsibility for this drift. Public funding granted to CBC/Radio-Canada is never accompanied by clear conditions regarding acceptable competitive behavior vis-à-vis the private sector. There is no transparent mechanism requiring the public broadcaster to demonstrate that its digital activities fill a gap that the private market does not—which is, after all, the fundamental justification for any public intervention in a market economy. Without these safeguards, public funding becomes a blank check that allows the institution to do whatever it wants, wherever it wants, whenever it wants—using taxpayers’ money, many of whom read, watch, and support the private media outlets that suffer from this unfair competition.

Bill C-18 and Its Unfulfilled Promises

The federal government did attempt, through Bill C-18 on online news, to force digital giants like Google and Meta to compensate Canadian media outlets for the use of their content. The intention was laudable. The results, however, were far more mixed—Meta simply chose to block Canadian news on its platforms rather than pay, depriving millions of Canadians of access to information produced by local media. But what is particularly striking about this debate surrounding C-18 is the near-total lack of discussion regarding the unfair competition posed by CBC/Radio-Canada itself. The focus has been on foreign predators—real, undeniable, and ones that must indeed be fought—while carefully ignoring the domestic predator, the one operating out of Ottawa with Canadian taxpayers’ money. This is a political blind spot that reveals a great deal about the real priorities of policymakers.

That the Canadian political class is willing to fight against Google and Meta while refusing to face up to the unfair competition from its own public broadcaster—that says it all about how those in power protect their own creations, even when those creations turn against the ecosystem they were supposed to nurture.

Radio-Canada and the Paradox of the Protected Language

The situation is particularly delicate for French-language media. Radio-Canada—the French-language arm of the public broadcaster—occupies a unique place in the cultural and political imagination of Quebec and French-Canada. It is perceived—often rightly so—as a bulwark against cultural assimilation, a space where the French language can be freely expressed in all its diversity, and a hub of creativity and information that exists nowhere else on this scale. This deep-rooted cultural legitimacy makes criticizing Radio-Canada particularly difficult in Francophone circles—to criticize Radio-Canada is to risk being accused of endangering the Francophonie itself. And yet: private Francophone media outlets suffer from exactly the same competitive distortions as their English-language counterparts. The newsrooms of Quebecor, La Presse, and Francophone regional media outlets across Canada—all are navigating the same waters poisoned by the same asymmetric competition.

The argument that Radio-Canada must be protected at all costs because it is the guardian of the French language is one that deserves to be rigorously qualified. Protecting the French language in Canada is a legitimate and important mission. But this mission does not justify Radio-Canada expanding into commercial ventures that weaken private French-language media outlets, which also contribute to the vitality of Canada’s French-speaking culture. A strong Francophone media ecosystem requires both a robust public service AND a dynamic private sector. Sacrificing the latter for the sake of the former is not a strategy for protecting the Francophone community—it is a strategy for institutionalizing the Francophone community that ultimately reduces its very diversity and vitality.

The Disappearing Francophone Regional News Outlets

In Francophone communities outside Quebec—in Ontario, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia—the situation is even more precarious. These communities rely disproportionately on public broadcasting for access to information in French, precisely because the local advertising market is too small to support viable private Francophone media outlets. But this very dependence creates structural fragility: when Radio-Canada reduces its regional coverage—which it has done—there is often nothing left. No private safety net, no alternative. Canada’s Francophone minority communities are thus the most invisible victims of the public broadcaster’s dual failings: too present where it competes with the private sector, too absent where it should be irreplaceable.

Canada’s Francophone community deserves better than a public institution that fights for its own share of the digital market while entire communities lose their access to information in French. The true defense of the language is not measured in clicks—it is measured by a tangible presence in real communities that need to be informed in their own language.

European Models That Work

Canada is not the first country to navigate the murky waters of the coexistence between public service broadcasting and private media in the digital age. Several countries have developed regulatory frameworks that seek to clearly define the limits of what public broadcasters can do so as not to distort the private market. In the United Kingdom, the BBC is subject to public value tests—any new service or digital development must demonstrate that it provides a specific value that the market cannot provide, and that it does not disproportionately harm commercial players. These tests are not perfect and are the subject of ongoing debate, but they at least represent a serious attempt to answer the fundamental question: where does public service end and unfair competition begin? In Canada, there is no clear institutional answer to this question. And this void is no accident—it is a political choice.

In Germany, the public broadcasters ARD and ZDF are subject to strict regulations governing their online activities, particularly regarding how long their content can remain available for free on the internet—precisely to avoid competing with private media in the online content market. In Finland, Sweden, and the Nordic countries—which are generally recognized for the quality of their media democracies—the mandates of public broadcasters are defined with a precision that protects both public service AND the private sector. These countries have understood that a healthy media democracy is not synonymous with a dominant public broadcaster—it is synonymous with genuine diversity, which requires a level playing field for all stakeholders.

The Australian Model and the Lesson of Transparency

Australia may offer the most relevant example for Canada, given that the two countries share certain structural similarities: large land area, populations concentrated in a few major urban centers, remote regional and rural communities, and a strong cultural attachment to public service broadcasting. Australia’s ABC has also faced criticism for its tendency to encroach on digital markets at the expense of the private sector. The Australian response was imperfect, but it at least had the merit of taking place: open discussions, parliamentary inquiries, and attempts to define guardrails for the public broadcaster’s digital activities. In Canada, these discussions have been too low-key, too technical, and too removed from the public debate. It is time for them to take place openly, with the intensity that the issue demands.

Canada prides itself on having a world-class media system. But a world-class system is regulated with intelligence and rigor—not with blank checks handed out unconditionally to a public giant that has lost sight of its raison d’être. Examples abound. The political will to learn from them, however, is sorely lacking.

What Media Executives Say Behind Closed Doors

Behind the scenes in the Canadian media world, conversations about CBC/Radio-Canada are marked by a candor that stands in stark contrast to the caution of public statements. Private media executives know full well—and say so quite openly in private—that the public broadcaster represents a major distortion of the market. But they hesitate to say so too loudly in public, for several reasons. First, because attacking Radio-Canada immediately exposes them to accusations of being the enemy of French culture or Canadian cultural sovereignty—an accusation no media executive wants to face. Second, because many of these same executives themselves benefit from public subsidies and funding, which puts them in an awkward position to criticize funding granted to others. Finally, because relations with the federal government are too important to risk in a head-on battle that could go wrong.

This relative silence of private actors in the public sphere is itself revealing of the power dynamics that shape the Canadian media landscape. When the actors who suffer most from a situation dare not denounce it publicly for fear of reprisals or accusations of bad faith, it is because the existing power structure is intimidating enough to stifle legitimate criticism. By publishing this direct assessment, Le Journal de Québec is doing something that many think but few say with such clarity: calling betrayal what it is. It is an act of significance that far exceeds the interests of Québecor alone—it is a service rendered to the collective clarity that this debate demands.

The columnists and reporters who have lost everything

Beyond the executives and strategists are the ordinary workers in the Canadian media industry—reporters, columnists, photographers, editors, and producers—who have seen their jobs disappear in the successive waves of cutbacks that have hit the private sector. These men and women have dedicated their careers to informing Canadians. They have done this work with passion, rigor, and dedication. They deserve a system that recognizes the value of what they do—not a system that, on the one hand, replaces them with algorithms and underpaid freelancers, and on the other, maintains alongside them a subsidized giant whose very existence renders their business model unsustainable. The Canadian media crisis has a human face. Tens of thousands of faces. And CBC/Radio-Canada’s funding policy, which lacks clear requirements for private-sector participation, is one of the structural factors driving this human crisis.

I’ve met reporters who had been covering city councils for twenty years—who knew every elected official, every issue, every local concern—and who found themselves out of work overnight because their newspaper could no longer stay afloat. Meanwhile, the local Radio-Canada bureau carried on, funded by Ottawa. There’s an injustice in that that still outrages me today.

A New Contract Between the Public and Private Sectors

The solution to this situation is not the dismantling of CBC/Radio-Canada. Anyone who proposes the outright abolition of the public broadcaster either ignores or pretends to ignore the reality of the need for public service media in a country as vast and complex as Canada. The solution is a rigorous redefinition of CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate and practices, accompanied by binding mechanisms that prevent the public broadcaster from encroaching on the private sector’s market segments. In practical terms, this means: precisely defining the types of digital content that CBC/Radio-Canada may produce and distribute for free online; introducing mandatory public value assessments for all new digital initiatives; limiting or regulating digital advertising sold by the public broadcaster; and creating an independent oversight mechanism that regularly evaluates the impact of CBC/Radio-Canada’s activities on the economic health of the private sector.

These reforms are not radical. They exist elsewhere. They are technically and politically feasible. What they lack is the political will to implement them—a will that successive governments have refused to demonstrate, whether out of institutional complacency, political calculation, or an ideological vision of public service that refuses to question its own contradictions. The time has come to break free from this comfortable denial. The Canadian media ecosystem no longer has the luxury of waiting for decision-makers to find the courage to ask the right questions.

What the Federal Government Must Do Now

There is no shortage of concrete actions. The federal government could, starting immediately, mandate the CRTC to conduct a comprehensive review of CBC/Radio-Canada’s digital practices in light of their impact on competition in the private media sector. It could explicitly link public funding for the broadcaster to measurable commitments regarding complementarity with the private sector—rather than competition. It could introduce a provision in the Broadcasting Act requiring the public broadcaster to demonstrate, for each new digital service or platform it develops, that it meets a need not fulfilled by the private market. Finally, it could create a permanent forum for structured dialogue between the public broadcaster and representatives of the private sector to identify and resolve areas of friction before they escalate into crises. None of these measures is revolutionary. All are necessary. And all require the federal government to stop looking the other way.

Reforming CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate is not an attack on public service broadcasting—on the contrary, it is the only way to save public service broadcasting by refocusing it on what only it is capable of doing. A public broadcaster that tries to do everything ends up doing poorly what it was truly created to do. A clear mandate serves the mission, not undermines it.

What kind of media landscape do we want in Canada by 2030?

The question raised by CBC/Radio-Canada’s betrayal is, ultimately, a question of societal choice. What kind of media ecosystem do Canadians want for their democracy? A system dominated by a single, subsidized public broadcaster that drains resources from private players until they gradually disappear? A system dominated by American digital giants that are accountable to no one in Canada? Or a diversified system, where a clearly mandated public service coexists with a dynamic private sector, where the two feed off each other rather than destroy one another? The answer to this question will determine the quality of Canadian news for decades to come—and with it, the very quality of democratic deliberation in this country. This is not a niche topic reserved for media professionals. It is an issue that concerns every Canadian citizen who wants to be informed in a reliable, diverse, and independent manner.

The year 2030 is not far off. In less than five years, today’s decisions—or inaction—will have fully taken effect on Canada’s media ecosystem. If current trends continue unchecked, the Canadian media landscape of 2030 will be even more concentrated, even more fragile, and even more dependent on public funding than it is today—with even more depleted regional news coverage, even smaller newsrooms, and local democracy even more poorly served. Avoiding this scenario is possible. But we must start now, with bold decisions that no one has yet been willing to make.

The rising generation that can no longer count on anything

Finally, there is a generational dimension to this crisis that is not discussed often enough. Young media professionals entering the field today—graduates in journalism, communications, and media production—face a job market where stable positions in the private sector have become a rarity, where precarious freelance work has become the norm, and where salaries have stagnated while productivity demands have skyrocketed. These young professionals are making career choices that signal something important: many are abandoning news journalism for jobs in public relations, corporate communications, and content marketing—sectors that pay better and offer a stability that private newsrooms can no longer guarantee. This drain of talent from journalism is an irreparable loss for the quality of Canadian news. And it is fueled, in part, by the structural conditions that unfair competition from CBC/Radio-Canada helps to perpetuate.

When the brightest minds of a generation choose not to pursue journalism because the economic conditions of the profession have become untenable—in part due to unfair competition fueled by public funding—it is society as a whole that loses out. Not just the media. Society as a whole. Because without vigorous journalism, those in power do as they please. And they’re already doing so enough as it is.

Clarity as the First Act of Resistance

Calling things by their proper names is the first act of any serious resistance. Le Journal de Québec had the courage to call this betrayal out directly—and that courage deserves recognition, even though Quebecor has its own interests in this debate, just like any media player. Because the fact that Quebecor has interests in this matter does not make the observation false—it simply makes it biased, which is different. The facts remain the facts: CBC/Radio-Canada is using public funding to compete with private media outlets in commercial niches, at a time when those private media outlets are struggling for their economic survival. This is a well-documented reality. It is a betrayal of the fundamental mission of public service broadcasting. And it is a situation that demands a serious political response, not public relations statements or promises of reform that never materialize.

Canadian democracy deserves an honest public debate on the future of the national public broadcaster—a debate that is not hijacked by the institutional interests of CBC/Radio-Canada or the commercial interests of large private corporations, but one conducted in the interest of Canadians and the communities that need quality information. This debate must include all voices: private stakeholders, public stakeholders, media workers, citizens in the regions, Francophone minority communities, and independent cultural creators. It must lead to clear, binding, and measurable decisions—not to new studies that will gather dust in a drawer.

The Time for Bold Decisions

The time for calculated caution and reassuring half-measures is over. The Canadian media ecosystem is undergoing a structural crisis from which it will not emerge by magic or through the benevolent inaction of a government that prefers to turn a blind eye. It will emerge through courageous political choices, a rigorous reform of CBC/Radio-Canada’s mandate, and a clear vision of what public service media in Canada should be in the digital age. This vision exists. The tools to achieve it exist. What is missing is the will to use them. And that will only come if citizens, industry stakeholders, and commentators observing this situation continue to address it with the clarity it demands. The betrayal is complete. The response remains to be forged.

I conclude this editorial with a conviction I have held for a long time—one that current events only reinforce: societies that lose their ability to obtain information independently and from diverse sources lose something irreplaceable—not a luxury, not a convenience, but the very capacity to govern themselves with clear-eyed judgment. Canada has not yet reached that tipping point. But it is approaching it. And every month of political inaction brings us a little closer.

Signed, Jacques Pj Provost