EDITORIAL: Tone deaf time for CBC largesse

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As if to underscore just how out of touch they are, CBC doled out more than $30 million in retention bonuses throughout the pandemic.

According to access to information documents recently obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, while many Canadians struggled to put food on the table, the national public broadcaster handed out cash to encourage employees not to quit.

In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, CBC spent $15 million on bonuses to 1,034 full-time employees, averaging around $14,500 per employee. As the pandemic worsened through 2021, those figures rose to $15.3 million to 1,033 employees, for an average of about $14,800. It’s estimated 80% of the corporation’s employees were working from home at the time.

The bonuses are part of an employee retention strategy, a CBC spokesman told the National Post.

“Despite the many challenges brought on by the pandemic, our employees have been able to find creative solutions to continue producing our content and maintain the quality of programming,” Leon Mar said in response to questions from the newspaper.

Here’s where reality kicks in. It’s highly unlikely any competing media outlets would snap up fatcat CBC execs. Thousands of businesses, including many media organizations, have struggled throughout the past three years, yet our complacent taxpayer-funded broadcaster was paying bonuses in the mistaken belief other news outlets were actually hiring.

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Businesses were shuttered, restaurants closed and private sector employees were scrambling to be innovative and to pivot to find different ways to operate.

Those CBC types who like to cluck and harrumph about the lack of funding for things like healthcare should perhaps look in the mirror and ask themselves how that $30 million lavished on their bonuses could have been spent more productively. How many nurses could it have hired? What research could it have funded into infectious diseases?

In 2020, CBC slashed 130 jobs across the country in order to “resize,” according to spokesperson Barbara Williams. She said the CBC began the fiscal year with a $21 million budget deficit due to declines in advertising, subscriptions and other revenues.

And yet they dug into taxpayers’ pockets and found $30 million over two years to encourage others not to quit.

We’re paying top dollar for mediocre results at CBC. Forget their bonuses. Trim their funding and force them to do better.