The Paul Wells Show - EMERGENCY EPISODE: Catherine Tait Makes Her Case for the CBC

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

CBC/Radio-Canada announced today that they’re cutting 600 existing jobs and leaving another 200 vacant positions unfilled. Shortly before these cuts were announced, their president and CEO Catherine Tait joined Paul to lay out her case for a public broadcaster, and her vision for its future.

Guess who I found in the tickle trunk? I don't think this is about politics. I don't think this is about the next election. I think this is about adjusting to the new reality. Today, the CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation makes her case. I'm Paul Wells, the Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. We're early this week because there's news. 800 job cuts at the CBC English and French networks, including 600 layoffs.

The public broadcaster's employees got the news on Monday from CEO Catherine Tate. So now at least I know why Catherine Tate wanted to talk to me. Her office wrote to me last month and suggested a podcast episode with the woman who runs Canada's public broadcaster. last month and suggested a podcast episode with the woman who runs Canada's public broadcaster. I am always happy when newsmakers want to talk to this podcast, so I was delighted by the request. Lord knows we were going to have a lot to discuss. But I still couldn't really figure out why she was so eager to talk. Talking hasn't always helped her in the past. At the beginning of this year, she told the Globe and Mail that Conservative leader Pierre Pauliev was stoking a wave of CBC bashing.

I have a lot of friends at the CBC. And when Tate's comments were published, most of my CBC friends freaked out. They thought she was sticking her head into a political debate. Now here she was again, eager to talk some more. We had a good conversation. We found some clear lines of disagreement. And then a funny thing happened. At first I liked the episode so much I wanted to run it a week earlier than we originally planned.

That would have been last week. But Tate's office didn't like that one bit. They asked us to stick to the original schedule. Now I know why. She wanted this interview to come out after the cuts were announced. I'm not thrilled that I'm only finding that out now. But it definitely makes this interview more newsworthy. I should remind listeners that I'm a regular commentator on the CBC and Radio Canada,

and that I get paid for that work. I spoke with Catherine Tate at the National Arts Centre. Catherine Tate, thanks for joining me. Great pleasure to be here, Paul. When you heard you were going to be the CBC president, first of all, who told you, and how did you feel? That's a great question. I remember exactly where I was.

Believe it or not, I had treated myself to a four seasons hotel stay in Los Angeles because the American Express was offering a two-for-one or special. And I got a call, I believe it was from an official in the minister's office, and at that time that was Melanie Jolie. And they told me that they wanted to offer me the job, and I was, quite frankly, gobsmacked. Well, so that's almost not answering the question, because you can be positively or negatively gobsmacked. Listen, for me, I often said that this is kind of the dream job for somebody of my background. I started in public policy.

I was a policy wonk, I guess I would describe myself, an academic, went on to work in the industry in the United States, back into the private sector in Canada, took a company public, and ran my own business for a number of years. So I felt like at this stage in my career to be able to come back and run the single most important cultural institution in the country, just a huge, huge honor. So the gobsmacking was really like, wow, what an incredible honor. And it was terrifying. Okay, finally, we get to the meat of the matter. What were the contours of your terror? Well, first of all, I wasn't just appointed CBC president.

I was appointed president and CEO of CBC Radio-Canada. So as somebody who'd worked in public policy, I understood the complexity of an organization that at its DNA level serves English and French audiences, plus layer on to that serving eight indigenous languages. And then across six time zones, we are the only national media organization that connects this vast geography, coast to coast to coast. Just that alone, then layer on publicly funded, plus a big one third of that budget is based on commercial revenues. So you have all the business challenges of earning revenue,

and at the same time, managing the stakeholder, the primary stakeholder of CBC Radio Canada, is the Canadian public. So that's a very, very complex remit. Since we're on it, let's talk pretty briefly about the different role that Radio Canada plays in French Canada versus the CBC and the rest of the country. I mean, for about a quarter of the population, it gets about 40% of the budget, last time I checked.

And it is, I'm a frequent commentator on Radio Canada, and there's a pride and a prominence that doesn't come as automatically in English Canada. And I bet a slightly disproportionate number of your headaches come from the Radio-Canada mandate too. Listen, first off, this very critical and specific role of Radio-Canada in Quebec is among our most precious assets. I say that unequivocally. among our most precious assets. I say that unequivocally. I would also say that the clarity of the mission, when you have that protection of language, is terrific and really important to protect. Because let's be clear, as audiences, younger audiences that are francophone, consume more and more content on English platforms, there is an erosion of the language. And that's why we're having all the debates we're having in Quebec

at this time. So that mandate is incredibly important. And television in the francophone market still plays a very, very prominent role. Let's switch to the English-Canadian scene. very prominent role. Let's switch to the English Canadian scene. That's really where most of my career has been spent and never, certainly in my 30 years, has the English conventional television market ever exceeded 30% of the entire English market. So right out of the gate, English Canadian broadcasters are playing with a 30% deck. The rest is American or specialty channels or other forms of TV. So if you were to compare English to French in terms of the role in Canada, very often is holding a 25 to 28 percent market share. CBC more in the 4 to 5 percent.

But global, maybe 5 percent. CTV, maybe 8 percent, 9 percent. And global and CTV are running their prime time schedule with American hits. CBC, and this is so important for people to understand, we're running our schedule with almost entirely Canadian content, which doesn't have the marketing budgets or the superstars that the American Hollywood system produces. So I think to myself, well, you're right, maybe on the TV side, we've got a challenge. But when you go into radio on the English market, CBC is number one in 16 out of 22 markets. Number one.

You ask any English Canadian, what do you love about the CBC? Chances are they're going to talk about radio as first. And then second, in the last five years, especially coming out of the pandemic, digital. 21 million unique users is what we call them, but 21 million Canadians, individual Canadians, come to CBC Digital on a monthly basis. And what that meant, that went up to 25 million during the pandemic because as a trusted source of news, if you're wondering about, oh, what should I be doing about getting my kids to school? What do I do during the pandemic or during an evacuation? What do I do about getting on the highway to get me out of Yellowknife? Where are you going to go? You go to cbc.ca. And since we're talking about digital, do you have a sense of what the audience is for CBC Gem, which is the sort of Netflix-style portal for dramatic TV content?

Can I correct you on what Gem is? You feel free. So CBC Gem is not primarily an entertainment platform. CBC Gem is where you find The National. It's where you find your local TV news. Oh, I'm sure it's where some people do. It's not where I do, but anyway, yeah. But the reality is that CBC Gem, we came into the market later in the game than IC2.TV, the French streaming service. So we had the advantage of saying, well, wait a minute, are we going to try to compete with Netflix or Crave or any of those other services that were already in the market? And the decision that we took was, no, we're going

to do something different. We want to be distinct and offer something that Canadians aren't getting somewhere else. So the idea was advertiser support is so free to everybody. And that version of CBC Gem gets about 1.6 million unique viewers a month. And then on the subscription version, where you pay $4.99 a month, you get the advertiser-free version. So that will be, you know, depending on the show, that could be another 100 or 200,000 viewers, again, very much driven by the shows that people are looking to watch. So that together changes the ecosystem for television. What I've said often to people when I hear talking, going back to the television market, people say, oh, the National is way down from what it used to be. It used to get 1.2 million nightly viewers, and now it's only at six or 700,000. And my answer to that is,

no, it's still 1.2 million, if not more, but they're not tuning in in front of their TV sets at that appointed hour. A whole bunch do still, and we'll never abandon those traditional TV viewers. But we're getting numbers in connected television, we're getting numbers on YouTube, and we're getting numbers on GEM that add up to more or less 1.2 million. So that's the changing ecosystem. So when we talk about digital first or audience-driven,

that's really what we mean. We're saying where Canadians are watching is different from where they were, you know, 10 years ago. I have an interesting factoid. Can I? I'll take it. When I joined CBC Radio Canada in 2018, the number of Canadians that were watching what we call traditional television was 29%. And the number of Canadians that were watching online first, those are the cord cutters, people who had abandoned TV, was at 22%. Five years later,

2022, 23, the number of people watching traditional television has dropped to 14%. The number of people watching traditional television has dropped to 14%. And the number that have gone to online first is 33%. That's what's happening in the world of entertainment, of news. People's behaviors have changed profoundly. And the pandemic really accelerated that. Okay. Your tenure has been extended by a year to the beginning of 2025? How come? How come what? Why has it been extended? Oh, well, it's government choice, obviously.

And I'm delighted. We've got a whole pile of extremely important files on the go. So I was pleased to have that extra time to deliver on those files. And probably the most pressing is the launch of CBC Radio Canada's first ever Indigenous strategy. And I can talk a little bit more about that. But also, we're in the middle of conversations around Bill C-18 or the implementation of the law and the same with Bill C-11. So I think the idea is that I'm given the opportunity to deliver on those key files before I float off into the horizon. Okay. Because my first hunch was that this takes us closer to a federal election, which could be pivotal for the future of the CBC. Indeed.

And so I thought, keep you there until that decision is made. Does that make any sense? No? No. I mean, honestly, I think, I mean, I can't opine upon what drives the decision makers on the government side, but I can surely tell you it was really very much to look at what's left to do for me. And in principle, I assume we wouldn't be looking at election before well into 2025. Okay. So we've taken a bit of a tour around the world of the CBC and around your mandate. I never have much of a plan. I didn't have any plan for how we were going to start this conversation,

but it has the effect of reminding people that the CBC is plural and vast and a many-headed monster and that your mandate, too, has a lot of aspects to it. There's a general assumption the CBC is rolling in money because it gets a billion dollars. I'm sure you can correct me on the real number. And also that the parliamentary appropriation was increased as soon as the current government came to power. Everybody I know at the CBC knows it isn't so, but can you explain why resources are a constant concern at the CBC? Well, thank you for the question. It's complicated, and a billion dollars is a lot.

It doesn't just sound like a lot. It is a lot of money. But I'm just going to step back, if I may, and talk about the world of public broadcasting just to kind of situate where Canada fits in. So when you look at how public broadcasters around the world are funded, you might want to start with Germany. $8 billion, U.S. dollars, in funding for ZDF and ARD. You might want to look at the BBC, $5 billion. You might want to look at France Television, 4 billion euros. And then you come down all the way down the list, number 17 in the list of public broadcasters in Western democracies, and you'll find CBC Radio Canada. And we're delivering

in two languages across six time zones, plus eight indigenous languages. So that's point number one. Our cost to Canadians is $33 per capita per year. That's less than a dime a day. When you think about that, it's incredibly great value for the money. And I would say, whereas 30 years ago, we were delivering traditional television and traditional radio, linear television and radio only. Today we're delivering those two things plus all the online services, streaming video, streaming audio, plus the digital platform. So we have enormously transformed the business,

not because we were just interested in transforming for its sake, but because that's where our audiences were going, and we're working with the same budget that we had in real dollars. It's actually less dollars from 30 years ago. So that's why you hear about that. I mean, we are a much smaller organization than we were 30 years ago. There was a time when there were 10,000 employees.

We're down to 7,000. It seems like a lot, and it is a lot of people, but it's given what we deliver. And when you look at other companies, the average of all public broadcasters tends to be around $88. So at least twice, if not three times what CBC Radio Canada receives. So that's why you hear that, oh, it doesn't seem like enough. How have we managed that shrinking budget? Earned revenue. And I'm sure you're going to ask me a question about earned revenue.

Because all Canadians do. By the way, I travel the country. I talk to people across the country. And people always ask that question. Why commercials? Why advertising? I'll let you ask that question. Why commercials? Why advertising? I'll let you ask the question. Well, damn it, that was going to be my next question.

You boxed me in. Yeah, I mean, I have to assume that the ad market is as tough for you folks as it is for a guy looking for a podcast sponsor. And I know this because I've had conversations with CBC people and they're not cheerful about revenue. Am I right? It would be disingenuous and it would be completely inaccurate to say somehow that we are immune to the forces, these massive forces that are going on in the industry today. And I'm not just

talking in Canada. We are living, first of all, in an incredibly turbulent time for the media, number one, but not just for the media, for Western democracies and civil society. We are living in the most extreme polarization that we've ever experienced since before the Second World War. We have 20% of the planet only living in what we would call a democratic system that supports a free press. That means 80% of the planet is living under authoritarian regimes. Add to that, I mean, I'm talking about a perfect storm here. Add to that the proliferation of a few digital giants who are dominating, not just, again, the Canadian market, but the global market, and they have one sole purpose, one defining purpose, profit. We don't actually have that

as our defining purpose, au contraire. So put all that together. Oh, and oh, sorry, one other thing, social media, poison, toxic, venal, you know, hate. You put all that together and you have a media industry in Canada and in other Western democracies that is under huge pressure. The business model has been entirely disintermediated, if not destroyed. people to reinvest in domestic media has gone down, not because if you actually walk people through why local media matters, they get it. But then their trust has declined because of all those other factors I mentioned. So that perfect storm is really, in my mind, that is the biggest issue that our country faces today. It's got nothing to do with just the public broadcaster. It has to do with our entire media infrastructure.

It has to do with you as a sub-stacker. One last thing on revenue. We've got a federal government that is lately more preoccupied than it had been with containing costs. And there's a program review exercise that is causing all sorts of departments to seek cost savings. Is that going to affect the CBC? And will it lead to job losses of the kind that we've seen so often in the private sector? Yes and yes. And the 3.3% cut across all federal agencies, including Crowns, absolutely impacts us.

And we have those numbers, and they are over three years, so we're managing that piece. But a much bigger piece of our challenge, and I've been public about it, we're looking at a deficit at least of $100 million per year for each of the next three years. So yes, there will be job losses. Are we trying to find other ways to mitigate through cost reduction, through elimination of vacant posts, through any kind of discretionary funding? Absolutely. Those are the first things we do. We were one of the privileged not to have to lay off people during the pandemic. And we were very, very mindful of trying to protect our workforce. But I would say that we were kind of at the end of that rope

and with rising costs due to the pandemic, but also due to the presence of these digital giants who have caused pricing to go up for production, inflation, and all the other elements, declining ad revenue, as I mentioned earlier, all those factors, again, yet another, I hate the term perfect storm because it's actually a horrendous storm, is hitting us just as it is all the other media companies. I'll come back to my conversation with Catherine Tate in a minute.

In Canada, everyone is supposed to get equal access to health care. The new podcast, The Health Care Divide, looks at how the treatment you receive depends on who you are and what you look like. One episode tells the story of how race is a factor in whether doctors will give you a living kidney transplant. Another looks at how Inuit communities in the north ended up with 300 times the tuberculosis rates of the rest of Canada, and goes back to a time when Inuit TB patients were forcibly removed from their homes and sent

south for health care, many never to be heard from again. The show is hosted by Dr. Alika LaFontaine, an anesthesiologist who was the first Indigenous president of the Canadian Medical Association. He speaks to patients, doctors, and the people working to create a more equitable system. The Healthcare Divide is a podcast from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. The first episodes are available now. I see we've used close to half of my time, so let's get into the fun stuff. The leader of the opposition has said he will defund the CBC.

You're on the record as having noticed. First of all, do you wish you hadn't used Pierre Polyev's name when discussing the potential future of the CBC? Because I know some people who work for you really wish you hadn't. Listen, I understand that my remarks may have caused trouble for some of the journalists who have been struggling to get access to that leader and others in the party. And I regret that, of course, because I'm here to serve and I'm here to serve the journalists first and foremost. And they know that I had regrets around that. Do I regret calling out the wrong of this defund the public broadcaster campaign? Absolutely not. The first line in my job description is advocate for a

strong public podcaster. So it doesn't really matter who said it. If my mother said it, I would object. If you say it, I will object. Because I so deeply believe that the most important thing for democracy, for cultural sovereignty, for all the things that I've spent my career working for, to have a vibrant, Canadian-owned and controlled cultural industry depends in large measure, not only, but in large measure on a healthy CBC Radio Canada. Okay. Have you had a conversation with Pierre Poiliev or with a member of his caucus or staff? No. Have you sought one?

Yes. Okay. Did you get any answer about why they're not picking up the phone? No. Okay. Are you confident that you understand what the word defund means? Because starting in 2020, there was a continental debate about defunding the police, and most police forces still have funding.

So I'm wondering whether there might be some complex meaning of the word defund that means something more than take the money away or something different. Well, let's hope that it means something else. I very much hope that. I guess it could have been shut down. That would have been clearer. Defund sounds like I'm going to save you all this money, so I get the appeal of that. But when I unpack what I've heard, because I've heard other lines that are associated with defund,

which is we'll save you a billion dollars, but we won't touch Radio-Canada. Well, wait a minute. Our parliamentary appropriation is $1.3 billion, so we're going to run Radio-Canada on 0.3? Because, by the way, a whole pile of that earned revenue disappears if CBC disappears. So to me, it's a confused message, and it's just simply wrongheaded. believe that in a world where polarization, where disconnection, where people are not convening in the public square anymore and having civil discourse, that this would even be an option. And by the way, let me remind you, 75% of Canadians, that would be a very strong majority, percent of Canadians, that would be a very strong majority, still consider CBC Radio Canada the most trusted source of credible news in the country. Now, that's down from 85 percent 10 years ago,

as the whole media industry has been dragged down by social media and public institutions in general. So it's a worrisome trend, and it's something we have to address, the whole issue around trust. But honestly, 75% of Canadians also still believe that CBC Hydro Canada is good value for the investment. Who are some of the most interesting conservative commentators on CBC News, in your opinion, news and public affairs? I don't think I need to comment on commentators on CBC News, in your opinion, News and Public Affairs?

I don't think I need to comment on commentators. I think our teams do a wonderful job selecting and bringing people in for good conversations. I just wish there was more representation from more corners of the country. Let's put it that way. So arguments that are sometimes made about the CBC. One is that it was absolutely necessary to have a public broadcaster in the early days of broadcasting when it was essentially there's something or there's going to be nothing. And when a dynamic American market was producing radio and then television. Pouring into our, over the border into our country, kind of like what's happening right now. Okay. That the state had to step up.

But that now when cost of entry is much lower, when there's just a bewildering diversity of signals and sources, that the state can stand down and that there are going to be Canadian voices in this domain as there are in so many others. Well, I hope you're right. But as one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Zimborska, said, we inherited hope, the art of forgetting. So let's think about what we've forgotten. The reason CBC Radio-Canada was created was as a, what's the word? Bulwark.

Bulwark, right. To the American signal. To allow us to have our own industry, to have our own conversations, and to own our identity or our identities. And I would say that in today's world, where you have Google, Facebook, and Netflix, and Amazon, and any number of large globally funded, and I'm not talking about the individual voices, because I think they're fantastic. I was a digital producer myself. I want that. But when you talk about globally funded, real monoliths, we're in exactly the same place where the stakes, I would say today, are equally, if not more worrisome. And I go back to polarization. There was an interesting study done by the European Broadcasting Union, and they looked at the correlation between countries with well-funded

public broadcasters and civic engagement and people's satisfaction with democracy. And there was a direct correlation. The better funded the public broadcaster, the happier and more satisfied the public was with the state of their democracy. And I think the United States is a great example. They are at number 18 on the list of funding because PBS and NPR are woefully underfunded. And you have probably the highest level of polarization in a Western democracy. Do you have an opinion on the various measures that are being used to increase government support for news organizations that aren't the CBC? to Bill C-18, to all sorts of measures to help my old colleagues at Post Media and the Star and the Globe by ensuring that they get more and more government revenue to replace advertising revenue.

I'm not sure you've entirely captured the equation there, if I may. I'm not sure you've entirely captured the equation there, if I may. The idea is, with the case of Bill C-18, is not to replace ad revenue. It's to make the streamers pay, or Google in this, Google and Facebook, pay for the content they use. So it's called a license fee. Everywhere else in the industry, if you use somebody's content, if I take Paul Well's podcast and start broadcasting it on my network, I'm going to pay you for it. I should if I'm making revenue against it. So Google takes our content, whether it's the Globe and Mail or the Post or CBCs, and they populate their world, their ecosystem, and sell advertising

against it. So our point is, happy to have you promote us and use our content, but we want some investment in the journalism, because journalists are expensive. Investigative journalism is really expensive. So yeah, I mean, to some extent, I'm not sure you want to get me started on Bill C-18. No, okay. The news organizations have been desperate to be findable and featured in Google searches and on Facebook. Armies of editing staff to search optimize your headlines so that it shows up higher on Google. So isn't it a bit disingenuous to then say they're taking our content? You're pushing your content at them as hard as you can. Listen, we have to be

where our audience is. And I get it. And it's a complicated dynamic. I would say the art of forgetting. Roll the camera back. I wish that when Facebook entered the Canadian market, I wish that when Facebook entered the Canadian market, that perhaps we had not been so quick, all of us, to embrace basically giving our audience to a third party. Because by the way, Facebook doesn't share the email addresses of the people that they now own. We gave them our content. We were happy to have them push it to all of their users. But what we didn't

understand is that we lost the audience. We're in the business of public broadcasting. Our single most important advantage is the proximity that we have with the public. That's why the power of CBC is actually in the local communities where we reside or where we do our work. But online, we've lost that connection because we outsourced it to Facebook or to whomever, whatever social media platform. The job we have to do now is to repatriate that audience and give them a reason to come back to our platforms. And that's going to be really hard because, as you well know, you look at, and I didn't mention earlier, I should have when you talked about the state funding of the public broadcaster,

there's a whole pile of things that we do at CBC Haidu Kanada, and I know you know this stuff, but just for your listeners, that isn't commercially viable. We run service in the north. We are the lifeline to thousands of indigenous people serving them in their language. There's no commercial broadcaster that would go into that market. Similarly, the French language outside of Quebec. There are certain communities where there's no money to be made. So I think that's an important piece of this too.

And we saw that, you reminded me of it when you talk about Facebook or these platforms, when Facebook or Meta blocked news, CBC News and other Canadian news on their platform, the impact was very worrisome. I mean, and we're feeling it continues. There's another impact, which I continue to see as a working journalist,

which is that more and more people assume that we're all in the pocket of the government because the government is covering a larger and larger share of revenues. When people subscribe to my newsletter, paulwells.substack.com, they get to send me a little message and a large proportion of my subscribers say, I like you because you're independent. And a lot of them look askance at the fact that I am a regular commentator on the CBC and Radio Canada. You talk about a polarized world. Doesn't government involvement in the production and dissemination of journalism contribute to that polarization

and that decline in trust? I think that's a spurious correlation. I think we have a general issue of decline in trust? I think that's a spurious correlation. I think we have a general issue of decline in trust that has polluted public institutions, government, political life, grocery store brands. We have become a society that is much more distrustful

and suspicious of people's purpose and intent and the job of the public broadcast and I and I would say we don't do a good enough job at explaining to Canadians how is it that they should trust us what are the mechanisms to protect that independence when somebody says oh I like your podcast, Paul, because you're independent. I say, like CBC, Radio-Canada, because we have all these safeguards. And to the point that you made earlier about my comments on a political environment, I don't touch news. The BBC president or director general is the managing editor of news as well. Same with the ABC at Australia. They're the head of news. I'm not. I'm a business functionary, as it were.

I'm separate from government, protected by the Broadcasting Act. They cannot tell us what to program. They cannot tell us what to cover. And then you go through the layers where we have an ombudsman, that if somebody has a problem with their news or with the way we've treated a subject matter, we have an individual in English and in French that responds to it. And they don't report to me, they report to the public. So these safeguards, I believe, should reassure Canadians if they really understood, first took the time to understand the governance, understood, first took the time to understand the governance, and if we took the time to explain the governance better, I believe their confidence

would go up. I assume you're not a fan of a voluntary levy for citizen contribution to public broadcasting? A tick box on a tax return? Absolutely not. How come? We know from other examples that it causes a massive decline. People are, you know, honestly, if somebody puts on my tax form, would you like to give some money to improve, you know, your health care? Probably I'm not going to check that box if I assume I'm getting reasonable health care. So it's not in human nature to take that positive option approach. We've seen how PBS has been hobbled by a membership fundraising model. I mean, really hobbled. model, I mean, really hobbled. And so I believe that because of the nature of Canada, because of our geography, because of our history, because of the nature of the makeup of our populations, that we have really a unique and precious asset that, in my mind, Canadians would be horrified

In my mind, Canadians would be horrified to live without. Now, do I go around and say, imagine a life without Radio-Canada? Well, actually, I was doing that last week in Montreal at the Chambre de Commerce. Because I don't think people have really gone to that place and said, what would life be like if I turned on the radio in the morning and I didn't have my morning CBC? And yet a lot of people have the sense that the CBC's idea map doesn't entirely correspond to the Canada that they know. The effort here, the belief is, in order to remain relevant, you have to reflect your audience. That's just the matter. Whether you agree with that or not, that's our defining program filter.

Are we reflecting the audience? And then we say, well, there's a whole pile of audiences out there. out there. And I believe profoundly that a show like Schitt's Creek, for example, that made television history, won every single comedy award at the Emmys, no other American or other series has ever achieved that. That show was uniquely Canadian because of the values of tolerance, the depiction of an openness towards queer life that I don't think any other country could have made. And that's what we seek in all the programming decisions that we make. How are we authentically reflecting not just the Toronto crowd or in the case of Montreal, the Montreal crowd, but every corner of the country. We're doing a comedy in Iqaluit with an Inuit team. We're doing a police series in Vancouver, Allegiance, about a police officer who's

from the Sikh community. So is everything going to be, you know, hit out of the park like Schitt's Creek? No, obviously not. Not given that for every, let's say, 10 shows that are pitched, and by the way, it's more like 100 now because the privates have pulled down a lot of their Canadian commitments. We're getting all the pitches, and we're picking very, very few. And it's a tough, tough game. And we don't have the system that the U.S. has where we pilot, we pilot, we pilot, and then we pick one. So that's the reality of the production scene. Do you think the extent to which Pierre Poiliev is not shy about saying he wants to defund the CBC. He wants to move hundreds of families into their shining new home in the former CBC headquarters.

Is to some extent a decoy from the fact that hard choices are going to have to be made in the next five years, even if he's bluffing or even if he doesn't get elected. You're simply in a tougher environment than you used to be and some priority decisions have to get made. I don't think this is about politics, to your point. I don't think this is about the next election. I think this is about adjusting to the new reality and for sure we're going to have to transform the way we do things.

We're going to have to probably, like most broadcasters, move away from huge studios where you only shoot television in one and then you do radio in another. No, there's a thing called the universal production platform where you all work in smaller studios. People are working from home as well. The world is changing. And of course, we have to change with it.

And and so, you know, do we need all the space that we have? We've been adjusting the new van maison at in Montreal is half the size of what the old tower was. Really? My God, it's still it's still a gigantic building. It's a gigantic atriumrium we go up to the middle floors and people will say they feel kind of cramped okay there you go it is a large atrium i've only been there once so far but yeah and by the way we don't own that building and i think

that's a really important thing to people to understand they think we're we own all the real estate we have no over the last 20 last 20 years, well before I got there, the federal government and all sorts, all the agencies have been getting out of the real estate business because guess what? Maintaining those assets is extraordinarily expensive. So better to be out of the business of real estate and in the business of broadcasting, which is our core business. So you're essentially designers and tenants of that building more than, is our core business. So you're essentially designers and tenants of that building more than not rather than the proprietors? Correct. Okay. I wonder who the hell would want it if you moved out. It's a very specialized facility. I've had meetings with CBC people over the last few years and there is a sense of, there's a bit of a siege mentality and a bit of a

sense of loss and risk rather than a possibility. But you're still the largest employer of journalists in the country. You're still, do you see possibilities for new ambitious work or is it just batten down the hatches and write out this storm oh I so hope so I really really do I mean you know one of the things that when we talk about how is the public broadcaster different from other media entities we're doing a project and there's a little sidebar here, but a couple years ago, I got together with the leaders of ZDF, the Germans, RTBF, the French-Belgian broadcaster, and SRG, the Swiss. The four of us came together and said, what's the biggest problem we have? Back to your Facebook conversation. We don't own our audience anymore. They're on Facebook.

How do we get them back? And so we embarked on what we call the public space incubator. And in the work we've been doing is we've said, wait a minute, what's going on in social media? We're the public broadcaster. The public's over here. And they're having a really lousy time and experience in that space, whether it's Twitter or X or whatever you call it. So how do we create a safe place online to have conversations? And we've been incubating a whole bunch of, we have 83 prototypes, and we're, it's a simple concept as right now, if you're in the social media space,

you have two options to comment. Thumbs up, thumbs down. I hate you, or I agree with you. What if there were more choices? What if I could say, oh, I learned something when it was a button to press, or thank you, or I respectfully disagree? How do we change the choices that people have in that social media space? And when I say 83 prototypes, it includes audio. It includes try to create the tone of a show like Cross Country Checkup without all the producers pre-curating who's going to get on the phone with Ian Hannemancing. So that's the kind of thing that the public broadcasters should be doing. If we had more resources to start solving some of these big problems,

like how do we make the Internet safe again? Because it's not safe, except for, of course, your podcast. Knowing what you know now, if you had gotten that call five years ago and asked to lead the CBC, would you have accepted? Absolutely, yes. Unequivocally. That's probably as good a place as any to close. Catherine Tate, thanks so much for giving us this time. And thank you for your probing questions. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show. This episode was recorded in studio at the National Arts Centre. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica in partnership with the University of

Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox. Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter you'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content we'll be back next wednesday you