Radio Canada in sight of the Conservatives

The favorite in the Conservative leadership race, Pierre Boulevard, has repeatedly spoken out to cut off the live broadcast. A recurring speech within the Canadian right believed to be the victim of biased press coverage on Radio Canada and CBC.

Former Secretary of State Stephen Harper has repeatedly criticized Crown’s alleged lack of objectivity in recent months on social media, often using the hashtag #defundCBC. , including in his coverage of the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. He also joined CBC/Radio-Canada in suing the Conservative Party for copyright infringement.

Conservatives dedicated certain parts of the programming to making Justin Trudeau look bad in ads that were aired during the 2019 election campaign. The court finally ruled that this was not an infringement of intellectual property.

CBC was protecting the prime minister, not the copyright. Today CBC lost the case. They should disclose the legal fees they have charged taxpayers with and apologize for their bias. Do you agree that it is time to stop funding CBC? Pierre Boulevard wrote on his Facebook page on May 13 after this ruling.

duty I called the leadership candidate’s campaign team on Thursday to see if that proposal was now part of their program, but our request went unheeded.

The position of his main opponent, Jean Charest, is also not known at the moment, but he will not fail to reveal it in the coming weeks, as specified by the delegation accompanying the former Prime Minister of Quebec.

Easier said than done

One thing is for sure, and the future of Radio Canada and CBC has been debated for many years in the Conservative clan. Newly elected leader Erin O’Toole said he was considering the possibility of privatizing television and public radio digital services, before toning down his rhetoric during the recent election.

“There is a certain faction of individuals, including Pierre Boulevard, who keeps saying that CBC/Radio-Canada funding should be defunded. Needless to say, these rhetoric will be amplified during the race for the leadership of the Conservative Party. However, this view is far from being On consensus among conservatives, or among their constituents,” Marla Bultman, director of Friends, an organization that campaigns to give public broadcasting more means.

However, many believe that the editing room was hacked by the left. CBC reporter Tara Henley pulled out last January accusing her former employer of overemphasizing issues of gender and race, at the expense of coverage that would reflect a diversity of viewpoints.

But according to Alain Solnier, former director of information at Radio Canada, the idea that the state company is pushing a left-wing political program is more than a myth. “It is true to say that journalists come from roughly the same background, because they all have a certain level of education, and they all went to university… But it is wrong to think that they all have the same political views. We just have to think of Bernard Drenville who went to PQ , or to Christine St-Pierre with the Liberals or to Louis Lemieux, today in CAQ.

The former journalist is convinced that the privatization of CBC/Radio-Canada would be disastrous, if only because it is the only media outlet capable of garnering international coverage worthy of the name. Alain Saulnier also notes that the major private media groups – Bell, Rogers and Quebecor – have more and more financial interests in other sectors, which can interfere with the quality of journalism.

Canada is not the only country where funding for public broadcasting has become a political issue. At the beginning of the year, immersed in the “party door” scandal, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson opened the door to a major overhaul of BBC funding. Also happened this week for French President Emmanuel Macron, something the local press saw as an attempt by the centrist to seduce right-wing voters a month before the first round of the presidential election.

However, CBC/Radio-Canada monopolizes a much smaller budget envelope compared to the BBC or the French public service. Management confirmed in an email sent to Homework Thursday.

Let’s see in the video