Peter Menzies is a former vice-chair of telecommunications at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission and a noted advocate for digital policy reform in Canada. He is also the former editor-in-chief of the Calgary Herald and has written extensively on Canadian telecommunications policy.
FD: You have previously argued that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation should focus on being a public broadcaster and commercial-free online platform. How would that work?
PM: The important thing is to get the CBC out of the commercial advertising business completely. I think that is required for the Canadian news industry to be healthy and sustainable. But that would also allow the CBC to focus on what you would call a “public good” mandate, which would be the provision of news from across the country.
Being a commercial operator means it needs to focus more on audiences that are of high-value to advertisers. And that means there is a real bias to the greater Toronto and Montreal areas.
FD: Poilievre has indicated he would cut $1 billion in federal subsidies from the CBC, while maintaining French and Indigenous programming. What do you make of this plan?
PM: I think [the plan] needs a lot of work. It depends how they want to define “defunding.” Right now, the CBC operates with a little under $2 billion in total revenue [and] $1.4 billion of that comes from the federal government. If you cut $1 billion [in federal funding], that leaves about $400 million. Currently, it costs about $500 million to run the French programming. So the math doesn’t work. You can’t cut a billion dollars and have much left over for French or English.
You could [however] trim down its operations. So instead of having two radio networks in each language, you would just have one. You could get rid of what’s left of Radio Canada International, which is essentially an ethnic radio station. You could get rid of sports, etc. But [the Conservatives] need a far more precise plan.
FD: What do you think the Tories will actually do on this file if they win the next election?
PM: I don’t really know what they are thinking, and I don’t think [Poilievre] has tied himself down to a billion dollar [spending cut]. I expect it was used more as a rallying cry. They appear determined to do something, and the CBC should be very nervous about that.
If you want to build something that is serving the interests of Canadians, keep the services that citizens are interested in, get rid of the things that they aren’t, and see if you can come up with a more modernized public broadcasting model.
FD: We are writing an editorial about CBC reform, and one of our main arguments is that the CBC plays an essential role as a news provider in small communities, where the market cannot provide those same services. What do you think?
MD: I think there’s a very good case for that. I tend to look at things through a sort of Jeffersonian point of view: government should do what only government can do, and it should work on doing it well.
I think that in the most remote parts of the country, you cannot defer to market forces because, frankly, there are no market forces. If you combined Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon combined, you’ve got a landmass larger than all of Europe, but with 110,000 people. You can’t call that a market.
Mini markets may exist in Iqaluit and Yellowknife and Whitehorse, where there are commercial radio stations for instance, but if these [regions] are going to be served and remain connected to the rest of the country, there’s a very good case [for the CBC to have a strong presence there].
FD: In the Conservative’s latest Policy Declaration, the party says it is committed to amending the Broadcasting Act. Doing so would allow the Tories to change the CBC’s mandate, and create distinct budgets and functions for the CBC’s internet, radio and TV functions. What are your views on this proposal?
PM: Well that’s a good start. The CBC doesn’t have a mandate under the Broadcasting Act to provide internet services at all. And publishers going back to 2016 have strongly argued against the CBC getting into that area, because that was an area that Canada’s newspapers thought they had to move in to gain some commercial stability. Having the CBC there was disruptive.
So in terms of this part of their plan … I think it’s a good start to being specific about telling the CBC what it should and shouldn’t be doing.
FD: In your opinion, what are the services that the CBC should be providing? And which of its current functions should be pared down?
The CBC has the country’s most popular news-carrying website. So it’s doing that well.
CBC Radio One is a market leader — often in first place and no worse than second — in every major population centre in the country from Halifax to Vancouver.
I think other [functions] like ICI Musique and its English equivalent are unnecessary. Private sector players like Apple Music and Spotify are already serving people with music.
You could take a good long look at merging CBC News Network and CBC over-the-air.
But leave the French services alone, because the French market is entirely different from the English market. The [French] content is quite popular in Quebec.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
