Three quarters of a century ago, in 1950, a young Pierre Berton penned a piece for Maclean’s magazine called “Everybody Boos the CBC”.

As Marc Miller, the new Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, contemplates how he will reinforce Canada’s beleaguered public broadcaster, he might have a look at this long-forgotten story.

The tale Berton told three generations ago sounds strangely familiar today.

Berton wrote about the persistent criticism of Canada’s public broadcaster from all quarters:

“CBC has been called bullheaded, autocratic, spineless, weak, pathetic, extravagant, cheap, high-handed, bumbling, nonsensical, dishonest, power crazy, idiotic, and absurd.”

That was 75 years ago, when CBC was exclusively a radio service. (Although the U.S., Britain and France had adopted television by 1950, Canada would not get it for a couple more years.)

One of the big controversies plaguing the CBC in 1950 was the means by which it was financed, via a license fee, which owners of radios were supposed to pay annually.

Berton reported that many Canadians resented the fee and simply refused to pay.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s total budget in 1949 was about $8 million. The Bank of Canada tells us that in today’s dollars that would be about $108 million.

Most of CBC’s revenue back in 1949-50 came from the license fees – $5.5 million, or almost three-quarters.

Almost all of the rest came from advertising, $2.3 million, although Berton points out that the majority of CBC programs back then were free of advertising.

(These days CBC radio is 100 per cent free of advertising, but CBC TV and CBC online have as much advertising as any private network. On CBC TV, in both official languages and for all services, no type of programming is spared, not even news and current affairs.)

The unpaid license fees were a big headache for CBC management in the 1940s and early ‘50s. Berton reports they amounted to $1.77 million in lost revenue. That would have been enough, Berton says, to eliminate the CBC’s deficit seven times over.

In any event, as it turns out, the fees were not long for this world.

The urgent need to make sure Canadians would have their own news and other programs

The federal government created the CBC in part as a result of a Royal Commission it had set up in 1929, the Aird Commission, named after its head, banker John Aird.

At the time, both Liberal and Conservative governments worried about the fact that virtually all over-the-air broadcasting in Canada came from private, U.S. sources.

Federal politicians, spurred by activists such as Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt, worried Canada would lose its national identity if Canadians had nothing to listen to but programs from another country.

Aird recommended the creation of a federally-owned public broadcasting agency, which would also serve as the regulatory body for broadcasting.

In 1932, the Conservative R.B. Bennett government created the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, which, four years later, became, simply, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (Société Radio-Canada in French).

Canadians who lived through World War II and the early post-war years still remember gathering around their console-style radios to hear the CBC news delivered by the “voice of doom”, Lorne Greene, with reports from the front by the likes of pioneering journalist Matthew Halton.

In French, they listened to globe-trotting broadcasts from Judith Jasmin and a young broadcaster from the Gaspé peninsula by the name of René Lévesque.

In 1949, with television on the horizon, the federal Liberal government of Louis St.-Laurent set in motion another Royal Commission to report broadly on the state of the arts and sciences in Canada.

St.-Laurent named a former Higher Commissioner to London and future Governor-General, Vincent Massey, to lead the charge on this effort.

The Massey Commission’s 1951 report led to the federal government getting involved in arts, culture and research, for the first time, in a somewhat coherent way.

As a direct result of the Massey report, the Liberal government of the day created the Canada Council and the National Library of Canada.

The Commission also made recommendations about broadcasting, especially the new medium of television. Those recommendations still resonate today.

On the television programming Canadians could then receive over the border from the U.S., Massey and his colleagues wrote:

“Television in the United States is essentially a commercial enterprise, an advertising industry. Thus sponsors … frequently choose programmes of inferior cultural standards, thinking to attract the greatest number of viewers.”

“Recalling the two chief objects of our national system of broadcasting, national unity and understanding … we do not think that American programmes … will serve our national needs.”

The British had both home-grown radio and television before Canada did, and the Commission had a higher opinion of their offerings:

“British programmes … are consciously educational in nature; indeed, the directors of television in Britain refer to their ‘moral and cultural responsibilities’ … British television is extremely varied, but possesses nonetheless a markedly cultural character. There are no commercial programmes of any sort.”

As for Canada, Massey and his colleagues offered:

“If Canadian radio and films have done so much already to bring Canadians together … it is easy to imagine how much could be done through television … Television also offers intellectual possibilities in adult education and in family entertainment which … must not be ignored.”

The biggest challenge for the new and costly medium of television in Canada was paying for it.

The Massey Commission called for a hybrid financing system for the public broadcaster, soon to include television.

What the Commission called the “capital costs” of national television – presumably such hard assets as studios and cameras – would be financed from the public purse, by “parliamentary grants”.

The costs of putting on programs would be covered by a new, significantly-increased license fee, plus advertising revenues. If needed there could also be supplementary grants from parliament.

The Commission proposed that the CBC Board of Governors recommend to Parliament how much the new license fee should be, with Parliament making the final decision.

A fatal error on CBC funding in the 1950s

The Canadian Liberal government of the day chose to ignore the funding part of the Massey report.

It opted, instead, to finance the public broadcaster through annual grants, a system that has been a bugbear for the Corporation ever since.

In the UK, the folks who run the BBC have a pretty good idea of what their finances will be when they engage in medium- and long-term planning.

CBC and Radio-Canada managers have one hand tied behind their collective back when it comes to planning. They have no way of predicting what next year’s financial allocation will be, which makes planning almost impossible.

Over the years, governments of all stripes have been notoriously fickle when it comes to the CBC, as an institution.

Back in Pierre Trudeau’s time, many Liberals, including their leader, considered the French language services of the corporation to be a hotbed of separatists.

Conservatives, on the other hand, have long been close to and favoured the Canadian private sector in broadcasting. To this day, many Conservatives echo the complaint of Canadian private networks that the CBC gets significant taxpayer dollars yet competes with the private sector for ad revenue.

Over the years, however, very few Conservatives have been as extreme as the current Conservative leader.

Pierre Poilievre does not emphasize his total hostility to public broadcasting much these days. But he has never backed down on his oft-stated pledge to entirely defund the CBC.

On top of the fickle winds of politics, the CBC has had to cope with a consistently low level of funding compared to almost all other public, or, more properly, public-service broadcasters.

One study, a few years ago, put this country third from the bottom of a list of twenty countries for its funding of its public broadcasting system.

Canada, at the time of the study, spent 0.15 per cent of total government spending on public broadcasting. At the top of the list was Germany, which spent 0.54 per cent, followed very closely by Switzerland. Next was the U.K.

At the very bottom was the U.S., whose figure of 0.04 per cent President Trump has now cut to nearly zero.

Switzerland, Spain and Belgium are three of the very small group of countries which, like Canada, have to provide broadcasting services in more than one language.

And few of the 20 countries must operate in more than one time zone – none of them in Canada’s six!

By rights, given our linguistic and geographic challenges, Canada should be spending more than countries such as Norway or Austria, not about half as much.

So far, Carney has at least shown modest support for public broadcasting

In the November 2025 budget, it came as a great relief to supporters of public broadcasting in Canada that the Carney government put an extra $150 million into the CBC, even if only for one year.

The $150 million was a promise many thought Carney would break.

Now, the hard part begins.

In February of this past year, the former Minister of what was then Canadian Heritage, Pascale St.-Onge, gave the government a solid plan for funding the CBC, and renewing its long out-of-date mandate.

The funding part is simple, and would be the next best thing to paying for public broadcasting through license fees, totally at arm’s length from politicians.

St.-Onge recommended the government legislatively enact a provision providing multi-year funding for CBC.

She proposed that the government guarantee to the CBC the average per-capita amount public broadcasting countries spend on their systems, not just for the coming year, but for the foreseeable future.

St.-Onge urged the government to put this commitment into law.

Last year world-wide per-capita average spending on public broadcasting was $62.50.

If the CBC got that amount, it would be nearly twice, per capita, what it now gets– even with the extra one-year’s funding boost.

St.-Onge also said there should be a quid pro quo to this new funding arrangement.

She recommended that CBC get rid of all advertising on certain categories of programming, most notably news and current affairs.

The former minister’s report also warned of the dangers the largely U.S.-based tech giants, and their expansionist and imperialist ally in the White House, pose to Canada’s cultural sovereignty.

The Aird and Massey reports recognized the need to affirm Canada’s cultural sovereignty, in two languages, many decades ago.

These days, to the two official languages, we would have to add the handful of Indigenous languages in which the CBC now provides service.

In short, the fears and warnings of Royal Commissions that go back, in one case, nearly a century, and, in the other, more than three-quarters of a century, are more urgent today than they have ever been.

Good luck, Mark Miller. You have your work cut out for you.

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