In the fall of 1964, the producers of a national television newsmagazine called This Hour Has Seven Days started a revolution at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. According to the manifesto with which the program began its first broadcast, the new program would “probe hypocrisy,” right “public wrongs,” “grill . . . prominent guests,” and, in the process, create “journalism of . . . such urgency that it will become mandatory viewing for a large segment of the nation.” The CBC’s top executives in Ottawa were immediately alarmed.

Management, at the time, was mostly made up of radio veterans, who had come of age during the CBC’s long struggle to establish an independent, “arms-length” relationship with the government. This relationship, in their view, was premised on the CBC’s political neutrality, and they feared that the independence the CBC had won on this basis would be compromised by the activism of the young TV generation that was beginning to flex its muscles at Seven Days. “The CBC was not brought into being to instigate or stimulate social change,” said CBC president Alphonse Ouimet. It must, he said, “serve public opinion rather than moulding it,” and allow “people to make up their own minds.”

Confrontation was inevitable, and the new show lasted only two stormy seasons. After three broadcasts, the vice president of programs, Eugene Hallman, set out head office’s position in an unequivocal policy statement: “No program can be permitted to adopt an editorial point-of-view or take a position in matters of public controversy.” But Seven Days had the zeitgeist, an eager audience, and the thrilling new possibilities of television on its side, and its staff were unwilling to back down. In the spring of 1966, the show was cancelled.

A public outcry followed: Ouimet was hanged in effigy by an inflamed crowd outside the Vancouver Courthouse, and in the end, prime minister Lester Pearson had to intervene to ensure the last episode of the show aired. Three million Canadians watched—an astonishing number for a public affairs program at a time when the Canadian population was barely 20 million.

Inside the CBC, this struggle for the corporation’s soul was often called “the Seven Days war.” In his history of these events, Inside Seven Days, former CBC producer and manager Eric Koch says that, during this era, “the CBC had many features of a secular church.” This church-like character was expressed in a strong esprit de corps, a sense of public service, and a certain formal reserve in the corporation’s approach to its publics.

Producer Bernard Trotter, a colleague of Koch’s, characterized this ethos as that of a public utility—a “free forum” on the model of “the Athenian agora,” with the CBC as its active but neutral convener. Seven Days was obviously different, and not just because its manners were brash and its journalism more aggressive than the CBC was used to. Its difference, above all, was in making the approval of its audience its raison d’être and its prime source of legitimacy. The CBC had always wanted to serve its audiences but, in the past, it had done so according to standards that overrode popular acclaim. An example would be Ouimet’s belief that the corporation had no business trying to “instigate social change.” Seven Days wanted to stir the people up. Its motto, in the words of its producer and co-host Patrick Watson, was: “We got to have them watching.”

Within the CBC, this struggle between philosophies was often said to pit populism against elitism. The terms are fairly crude idealizations—the CBC was sometimes “populist” before 1964 and sometimes “elitist” afterward—and the word “populism” has the additional disadvantage of being currently used for a movement on the political right. But it was the word people used at the time, and I know of no better one-word description of the ethos that dominated the CBC in the years after the Seven Days revolution.

I think that Koch was right in seeing the Seven Days war as the boundary between two distinct eras at the CBC. The program’s claim that it could speak for its audience, as its delegate, substitute, and tribune, was a sign that a new era was beginning. The old radio hands who had torpedoed Seven Days soon disappeared from the management suites. The show that replaced Seven Days on Sunday evenings was, if anything, more uninhibited than its successor. Called simply Sunday, it offered what its director, Daryl Duke, called “psychedelic . . . total television” with the atmosphere of “a medieval bearpit or a bullfight arena.”

The same ethos soon spread to CBC Radio, where the so-called radio revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s reproduced all the most significant features of Seven Days’ populism—its sense of mission, its identification with audiences, its pursuit of immediacy.

It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the populist era inaugurated by Seven Days is now coming to an end. The public that populism wanted to serve has shattered. Watson, one of the creators of Seven Days and its co-host in its second season, says in his autobiography that he was taught by his mentor, CBC Television pioneer Ross McLean, to always ask of a program, “How will it serve the audience?” The audience in this conception is singular and homogeneous, as is the public of which it forms a representative fraction.

I don’t mean to imply that McLean, or Watson, or anybody else who took this view, were simpletons, somehow unaware of the many, quite obvious, fissures that then existed in Canadian society. I mean, rather, that they imagined their audience as an ideal community possessing a common interest that the CBC existed to identify and serve. I do not believe that this common character exists any longer, even as an ideal. A dramatic fragmentation has occurred, and Canadians now divide on first principles. Where there was once consensus, there is now dissensus.

If the public has splintered beyond recognition, what’s left for the broadcaster built to speak to it?

That fragmentation became clear to me as I watched the reaction to the “Freedom Convoy” that converged on Ottawa in February 2022 to protest against forced vaccination. When the truckers and their supporters got to Ottawa, they were treated as an invading army and a grave threat to national security. “These people,” prime minister Justin Trudeau said, are “often racists” and “misogynists” who “don’t believe in science” and who hold “unacceptable opinions.”

The CBC clearly concurred. Its nightly television newscast, The National, set the tone for its coverage, on the weekend the trucks arrived in Ottawa, by interviewing a trucker who was not even in Ottawa and who opposed the convoy, rather than talking to one of its participants. At no point, thereafter, did the CBC acknowledge the protest as a political phenomenon that deserved, both by its size and its argument, to be carefully examined and interrogated. Instead, the demonstrators were viewed and discussed entirely as an unfortunate outcropping of misinformation, or as a problem of public safety. What this said to me was that the CBC, as the public broadcaster, now only converses with the publics of which it approves. It also said that the CBC doesn’t recognize the growing polarization of opinion within the country as something which it has an obligation—a statutory obligation, in fact—to address with an even hand and an open mind.

Many other contemporary questions resemble the issue of vaccine mandates on which the Freedom Convoy disagreed with the government. The defining feature of these issues is that they divide people according to their basic commitments, or cultural stance, and not just on the basis of differing interpretations of some agreed set of facts. Some of these differences have been growing and establishing themselves ever since the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s began to take hold; some reflect the so-called filter bubbles now curated by social media algorithms. The point, in either case, is that worlds are colliding. World views, in modern Western states like Canada, have become incommensurable—they no longer possess any common term, or denominator by which they can be related to one another.

The easy response to this collision, and the one unfolding all around us, is mutual vilification. The prime minister calls the protesters bigots, and the truckers, in turn, wave their ubiquitous “Fuck Trudeau” signs. This is comforting to each party but does nothing to address the widening abyss between them. They stand on different grounds and are conditioned throughout by the grounds on which they stand. Their only possible modus vivendi lies in curiosity, mutual respect, and a willingness, as Leonard Cohen once said, to “compare mythologies.”

This spirit was not evident in Ottawa in the winter of 2022—on either side.

This dissensus, as I’ve called it, is something new. Canadians have always disagreed, sometimes violently, but formerly they disagreed within an overarching modern consensus. When public broadcasting was born in the 1930s, then prime minister R. B. Bennett presented it as an instrument for “the diffusion of national thought and ideals.” The man who led the lobby for public control, Graham Spry, saw the CBC, even more grandly, as a means by which Canada would realize its “destiny.”

Both men saw Canada as a society animated by common ideals and bound for a common destination. They saw their country as developing within a broad, transnational consensus, whose pillars were science and democracy, progress and growth. These were certainties—constellations of ideas and practices that people didn’t have to think about because they constituted the very framework within which they were thinking at all. These certainties allowed Canadian society to be conceived, despite all differences, as a shared field of action. Differences could be reduced to a common denominator, goods ranked on a common scale, and preferences plotted on a common grid.

Within this consensus, people might disagree about the pace of progress, the degree of democracy, or the proper weighting of a given scientific statement, but they agreed on the framework within which such disagreements remained contained. Prime minister Louis St. Laurent could plausibly describe the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF, predecessor of today’s New Democratic Party) as no more than “Liberals in a hurry,” and the Progressive Conservative Party could be seen, by the same token, as just Liberals in favour of slowing down.

Libertarians could still talk to social democrats because they saw each other’s preferred policies as different ways of reaching a common destination. There was a common scale on which differences could be weighed, and this allowed media to practise a rough kind of fairness or balance in allocating time and assigning significance to events. This was the context in which service to the audience—to the public—made sense.

Now, the common denominator has gone, and consequently, people and positions tend to fall apart into hostile camps. The modern order has broken down and now faces, in whichever direction it looks, stark contradictions. “A world ends,” says American poet Archibald MacLeish, “when its metaphor has died.” The images and convictions that held Western civilization together, and allowed the commensuration of differences within it, have lost their compelling vitality. Economic growth faces such stringent ecological limits that it can no longer serve as the foundation of social justice. Progress trembles at the boundary of domains, like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, in which humanity itself is in question. Democracy is threatened by media technologies that overwhelm and disable deliberation. Science, expected by its founders to calm the war of opinion, now inflames it instead.

What this suggests to me is the need for a searching reconsideration of where we have been and where we are going. But this is not what the CBC has been offering. Instead, a mood of reaction has taken hold, and the CBC has joined with many others in trying to shore up the foundations of the failing order.

When “a society finds itself in crisis,” Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz once said, “it instinctively turns its eyes toward its origins and looks there for a sign.” That seems to be what’s happening at the moment. Faced with the collapse of modern certainties, it is easier to retrench on the original vision than to seek a new path. Threatened orthodoxies revert to idealized versions of themselves that have been simplified and streamlined almost to the point of caricature.

Journalists lament the golden days before disinformation—when truth was their polestar. Defenders of science bemoan the lost era when a dutiful public attended faithfully to what science says. Heresies proliferate, as orthodoxies narrow and positions polarize. The loss of an overarching framework that all share makes any non-approved difference threatening. This creates a paradox: a social order that sanctifies diversity and encourages the elaboration and embellishment of new identities grows, at the same time, increasingly narrow and intolerant of any dissent from its first principles.

Reaction of this kind is not an adequate response, nor a proper exercise of the CBC’s mandate. Canada is threatened. We have suffered the disorienting loss of our history, which makes us, as a country without a usable past, a country without a usable future. We are facing growing political polarization. And we are threatened above all by our intellectual helplessness in the face of the new forces—political, ecological, and technological—that are remaking our world. We are trying, in the words of the New Testament parable, to pour new wine into old wineskins, with the result the parable predicts—the skins keep bursting. Our ways of speaking and thinking are not adequate to the circumstances they are called on to address. The old gods—the old certainties—cannot save us.

Populism, CBC-style, is one of the old gods. A singular audience, presumed to share the same interests, the same tastes, and the same habits of mind, no longer exists. And yet the CBC continues to appeal to this lost ideal, addressing its listeners as one happy family who agree on all important questions. The result is that populism has turned, at last, into a new elitism, although an elitism of quite a different cast than the stuffiness, artiness, and neglect of popular culture that populists denounced in the 1960s and 1970s.

The new elitism is essentially service to a single shade of opinion. Call it progressive, hip, woke, or what you will. The point is that discourse is taking place within the confines of a single club and seems very often intended to enhance solidarity within that club rather than to raise potentially divisive questions. Basic issues of definition and orientation are taken off the table as a like-minded we confers about what is to be done. Issues are foreclosed rather than opened.

It is time, it seems to me, for a new era—a third era—as distinct from the populist era as the populist era was from Koch’s first era. Successive broadcasting acts have required the CBC to inform and enlighten, as well as to entertain its audiences. Latterly, they have also instructed the corporation to contribute to “Canadian unity.” This is currently the law of the land. But how, at the present hour, is Canada to be enlightened and brought together? I think the CBC’s first task, as an instrument of public purpose, should be the reconstruction of the country’s public forum.

From its earliest days, the CBC has had an insecure and uncertain place in Canadian life, and any scheme of renewal ought to begin by recognizing this tenuous hold on public affections and political loyalties. I could easily make a separate book of the newspaper and magazine stories, written throughout the corporation’s nearly ninety-year history, that have routinely found the CBC to be “in crisis,” “under attack,” or “in search of its soul.” The godfather of public broadcasting in Canada, Spry, was already announcing the CBC’s terminal “decline” in 1961. In 1993, Wayne Skene, a former director of television in British Columbia, went so far as to offer a “requiem.”

The Conservative Party has been actively hostile to the CBC since the 1940s, and its most recent “Policy Declaration” promises to “rationalize”—that is, eliminate—“any programming that overlaps or competes with private sector equivalents,” as well as to “reduce . . . reliance upon government funding and subsidy.” (Canada is already nearly lowest among Western countries in its funding of public broadcasting—only the United States and New Zealand do less, with the most generous countries, like Norway, Switzerland, and Germany, providing five times as much funding as the CBC receives.)

These historic difficulties need to be borne in mind when contemplating the future of the CBC—not as a counsel of despair but rather as an indication that the case for public broadcasting has yet to be decisively made in Canada and now needs to be made afresh in radically new circumstances. At the moment, unhappily, the CBC seems to have largely forgotten its past and, accordingly, allows past experience no scope in the imagination of its future. It does little to make its rich archive known and available to the public; it rarely consults older programs in shaping new work; and it fails to ask how past incarnations of its mandate can inform new accounts of its purpose. The result is disorientation—the effect one would expect from amnesia.

But it is also the position of the Conservative Party, enunciated in its most recent Policy Declaration, that the CBC, insofar as it acts as a “a true public service broadcaster,” has “an important place in the Canadian broadcasting system.” With the Conservatives campaigning to form Canada’s next government, and perhaps ready, as promised, to “defund the CBC,” it is a good time to ask the question that the party does not address in its Policy Declaration: What exactly is a true public service broadcaster?

My contention will be that it will have to become an organization that is concerned with the curation of Canada’s public conversation. In order to carry out this function, it will have to become, first of all, a peacemaker, interested in finding common ground among currently warring opinions. It will have to become much more radically pluralist than it currently is, hospitable to all publics, rather than identified with its preferred public. And it will have to open itself to new ideas rather than trying to refresh old certainties, learning how to think, and to question, and to talk in new ways.

Journalist Robert Fulford, speaking of the CBC’s first era, has said that the CBC was then “very close to the centre of Canadian intellectual life.” This is the position I think it needs to resume, in order to become, as the Conservative policy statement says, “relevant to Canadians.”

Adapted from The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (and How it Can Get it Back).* Copyright © 2025 David Cayley. Reprinted by permission of Sutherland House Books.*

David Cayley is a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. His work has been broadcast on CBC Radio One’s programme Ideas.