(Montreal) The bleeding of the media is far from over as we can expect significant job reductions at CBC/Radio-Canada.
In front of an audience of some 300 guests invited by the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal on Tuesday, the president and CEO of the state corporation, Catherine Tait, confirmed that there will be a cut of 100 million in the next budget annual public broadcaster and that “there will be difficult decisions to make”.
“It’s a serious situation, but we are at the beginning of a process to examine all of our scenarios. We try to cut and reduce expenses like travel or discretionary spending,” she said.
Although it is obvious that cutting travel and other expenses will not result in $100 million in savings, Catherine Tait refuses to go any further when it comes to threatened jobs.
Pressed with questions following her speech on the distribution of these future cuts between the French and English services and between information and other CBC/SRC services, she was content with a rather generic response, stating that “each component will contribute in a fair and equitable manner.”
She also recalled that the state corporation has stopped filling vacant positions and that management has “several tools to minimize the impact on our employees and, above all, on our services to Canadians.”
However, she added that, in the analysis of multiple scenarios which is underway, “it is absolutely important to protect our information services, essential even”.
We could find out more soon, when senior management will meet with the board of directors “at the end of November and then we will still start the financial year”, which should lead to a slimmed down budget for the financial year next year’s financial year.
Catherine Tait alluded to the job losses at TVA, the closure of Métro and other impoverishments of the information supply in Quebec and elsewhere in Canada, speaking of a trend which continues in the industry and which is systemic.
“It is now clear: deregulated competition from foreign digital giants is suffocating our industry,” she argued.
“In addition to declining subscription and advertising revenues on traditional television, the transition of our media to digital is complicated by the dominance of Meta and Google in this growing advertising market,” explained the CEO of Radio-Canada, while denouncing the blocking of news by Meta which, in addition to adding to the industry’s difficulties, “lets fake news spread on Facebook and Instagram.”
Like all analysts who have looked into the problem, she believes that it is a structural and systemic problem where the digital giants have the advantage of a global market, an absence of regulation and which have a single objective, which is to generate income. “They don’t have a mandate to serve the public. »
In discussion with Ms. Tait, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, Michel Leblanc, recognized that “the entire information system, which is absolutely essential, is weakened and the great paradox of the situation is that perhaps for decades this is the time when we most need to have an independent information system, based on facts”.
He insisted on the importance, for the business community, “of having an extremely rigorous system, a well-supported system, a system that has its place” in terms of information.
Ms. Tait also dwelled at length on the importance of having a public broadcaster and on her fears of seeing the existence of these services eroded, an erosion already underway in certain countries, a situation which she attributes to populism. According to her, the presence of a public broadcaster reduces polarization through the production of independent information.
Ironically, his speech was interrupted three times by pro-Palestinian protesters who accused the state corporation of contributing to the Palestinian genocide by refusing to name him as such in its coverage of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ms. Tait replied that she had received exactly the opposite criticism over the coverage of the conflict from members of the Jewish community while she appeared before a parliamentary committee, an illustration, according to her, of this polarization resulting from social networks.
