Cutting government spending is almost always beneficial but new Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s proposal to eliminate the CBC’s public funding is doubly so. Many other government-run institutions are so blatantly inefficient and do so badly that there is at least the silver lining that they sow public skepticism about further government expansion. The CBC is also inefficient and does badly but it is in the business of pushing stories and promoting ideas, and the ideas it promotes are those favouring government expansion. As Milton Friedman wrote, “Any institution will tend to express its own values and its own ideas … A socialist institution will teach socialist values.”
How many times have we heard conservative politicians rally the faithful with cries of “Defund The CBC?” Yet it never comes to pass. Why is that?
The CBC was once vital to maintaining the façade of democracy that kept we proles in check.
CBC became part of the permanent political class that governs us.
But few watch it anymore if the ratings are to be believed.
Trudeau’s handlers understood the CBC’s diminished reach and brought the rest of Canada’s media on board with subsidies’.
Will Poilievre defund or even cut back the CBC? We’ll see but I wouldn’t bet on it.
And I will want to know why he changed his mind.
