GUNTER: CBC pledge shows Carney government would compound Trudeau Liberals economic damage

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If you want an indication of how little things would change with a Carney government (versus a Trudeau one), just look at a promise new Liberal leader Mark Carney made about CBC funding during a French-language interview in Montreal on Friday.

You may be sitting at home thinking you should vote Liberal on April 28 because they’ve convinced you they are the party most able to stop to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff assault on Canada’s economy and sovereignty. However, when that crisis has passed (and it will pass before the end of the year because the stock markets, Congressional Republicans and the courts will curtail it), you will have elected a federal government that feels empowered to continue the same damaging economic, environmental and cultural policies of its predecessor.

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For instance, Carney promised Friday that, if re-elected, the Liberals would quickly increase the CBC’s budget by more than 10 per cent.

Nothing new in that. The Liberals love the CBC and the CBC loves them right back.

The CBC already receives $1.4 billion annually from taxpayers to fund its one-sided, Liberal-slanted news coverage and woke entertainment productions. A Carney government would add at least $150 million more to the network’s annual grant, and very likely much more than that.

Carney said he wouldn’t stop at $150 million. “We expect that in the coming years, we will continue to increase that funding until it can be compared to that provided (to European) public broadcasters.”

That means Mother Corp’s budget could rise to over $2 billion a year in the next few years.

For what? Already few Canadians are watching CBC English TV. Its prime time audience is only a little more than four per cent of the total TV audience in the country, and declining. It is half the CTV audience and just a little more than a third of Global’s.

If it was ever true that Canada needed the CBC to tell each other our stories, it is no longer. At best, it is the way public-sector “progressives” reassure one another than they are the enlightened ones from whom all the rest of us could learn a thing or two.

The CBC is an echo chamber (or maybe that should be ego chamber?) for Laurentian elite opinion.

It is offensive in the extreme that Canadians who see their views and values constantly disparaged by the CBC should have to fund those attacks out of their tax dollars. And doubly offensive that Mark Carney believes they should cough up even more to give to the CBC.

On top of his funding pledge, Carney told a Radio-Canada (CBC’s French-language service) interviewer that he would make the network’s budget “statutory.” In other words, he would lock in his budget increase in law, so it would be harder for future governments to change.

Of course, the Liberals have frequently argued the CBC is essential for protecting Canadian culture. They have even insisted the state broadcaster is essential to Canadian democracy. And they have claimed it is a bulwark against disinformation.

Frankly, I think the CBC is one of the country’s greatest spreaders of disinformation. But the government’s excused for funding the CBC are proof of just how blindly faithful the Libs are to Mother Corp. The two — the party and the broadcaster — are bound up in one another’s visions of what Canada should be and who should rule it.

It is not at all hard to see this same pledge coming from a Trudeau campaign. Indeed, promises of more CBC funding were part of all three Trudeau campaigns — 2015, 2019 and 2021.

And it will be the same for pipelines (get rid of them), environmental mandates (have more of them) and the economy. What was imposed by Trudeau will be continued by Carney.

If you liked the last 10 Liberals years, you’ll love the next four.