CBC Exposed serves as handy reference

My relationship with the CBC as a listener ended about a decade ago when, during the course of a weekend’s air- time on Radio One, I heard veteran broadcaster Michael Enright make a series of crude anti-Irish jokes that might have provoked a few titters at an Orange Lodge, or been unremarkable banter in polite company almost a century ago, when Toronto was known as the Belfast of Canada. I won’t bother unpacking the casual and time-honoured code that makes an Irish joke, by inference, a Catholic joke. There’s no point, since Enright has been quite forthright in his dislike of the Church, going back before the 1997 Globe and Mail article where he called it “the greatest criminal organization outside the mafia.” There’s probably some tortured back story here, as Enright went to the same private Catholic boys’ school I attended, but that’s also besides the point.

What is important is that there were thirteen million Catholics in Canada when Enright made his comment. One of the fondest refrains of the defenders of the CBC is that the national broadcaster “unites the country.” It’s a phrase used by Elizabeth May and the Green Party and by the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, the interest group whose prime function is to refute attacks on the CBC in the public arena. It’s a strange institution that can “unite” a country by attacking the faith of over a third of its citizens, but I’ve long since come to the conclusion that Canada is a strange country.

Cable news channel SunTV has been leading the charge against the CBC since its launch two years ago, so it’s no surprise that one of its news personalities, journalist Brian Lilley, has put together a catalogue of what he sees as the publicly-funded broadcaster’s sins in a book. CBC Exposed will probably serve as a handy reference for anyone hoping to bolster their case against the CBC in a forum that requires them to take their argument past their intuition that Canada’s national broadcaster doesn’t seem to like many Canadians.

Like many Canadians, I’ve tied myself in knots trying to understand and even defend the CBC, motivated mostly by a nostalgic fondness for its place in our history and national mythology. I’ve made suggestions for how it could survive and even thrive in a transformed media marketplace, with the stubborn sentiment that the CBC has a role to play. But thanks partly to books like Lilley’s, but mostly to the CBC’s own actions, I find it hard not to agree with Lilley that we might have passed the point where a national broadcaster plays anything like a vital, or even healthy, role in Canada’s future.

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