MacDougall: Loss of CBC would hit Ottawa harder than most

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Word on the street is that the CBC is not long for this world. At least, not if Pierre Poilievre gets his way.

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Reports are beginning to surface that the Conservative leader has plans to do away with the English language components of the national broadcaster wthin the first 100 days if his mandate. If you’re a CBC fan, you should begin to make your peace with its dismantling, such is the size of Poilievre’s current lead in the polls.

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There will be no great uprising at the CBC’s demise; it’s not a vote mover, not in this climate. Not even the return of Donald Trump has put wind in Team Trudeau’s sails. Nor have the bucks the prime minister is trying to stuff into your trouser pockets.

While the death of the CBC would hit many communities hard, nowhere would the blow be more acutely felt than in Ottawa.

There is the proximate impact: jobs. The CBC’s Ottawa Production Centre is home to hundreds of well-paid employees. Their employment helps to keep a moribund stretch of Sparks Street somewhat in business, what with swaths of the public servants still resisting the urge to visit their downtown office space.

But forget the headcount. The more important loss will be to the accountability function on both Parliament Hill and at Ottawa City Hall. By my count, the CBC has more than 60 members in the Parliamentary Press Gallery — the people who cover federal politics and produce the television, radio and web-based coverage of what goes on in the national capital. Importantly, it also devotes a fair chunk of journalism to local and municipal matters.

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In some ways, the 2004 opening of the CBC facility was the high-water mark for news production in Canada (if not architecture). The digital age had yet to fully rip the finances — and hence, guts — out of local and national newsrooms, and the fury of algorithmic social media had yet to poison the well of trust in news. The CBC’s bosses at the time probably thought they had built their Ottawa “forever home.” Well, it turns out they were right, if for the wrong reasons.

Would it have been the home the CBC brass would have built if they could have leapt 20 years into the future and peered back? Of course not. The last time broadcast-quality news content was capital-intensive was probably 2004. The rise of low-cost broadband transmission and the birth of the iPhone soon after made us all content creators and distributors.

Critics of the CBC will argue a federally funded national news service has no place in the modern era. They’re correct, in the narrow sense that news-gathering doesn’t have to be so expensive anymore; you don’t need a suite of broadcast-quality television and radio studios to do it well. But you still need the journalists who want to do the hard yards of following the ins and outs of government, locally or nationally. Here, the web-based world has yet to find its feet.

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Will those feet be found once the behemoth that is the CBC is eliminated? Will competition suddenly spring up without those reporting souls dedicated to covering the hundreds of billions spent by the federal and municipal governments in Ottawa? Perhaps, but the evidence is thin. I have no doubt there will be more “content,” but how much of that “content” puts any kind of check on government power is the only question that matters. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to be a question with a good answer.

“The only constant in life is change,” said Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher. The CBC has certainly changed since its inception in 1936, and it has changed Ottawa, as it pinged from the Château Laurier and Booth, National Press and Graham Spry buildings to the Edward Drake Building out of the downtown core.

It was the 1990s-era budget cuts that sent the CBC to its current home nestled between Queen and Sparks streets. What will Ottawa look like when the CBC’s era there comes to an end in the next few years?

We’re about to find out.

Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper.

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