National Post- Defunding CBC would be ‘devastating’ to news in rural Canada: Catherine Tait
Thomas asked her if the CBC would continue to provide Canadians with news if it was “given the opportunity to be truly independent, and set free from the shackles of government money”, as the Conservative party has been promising to do if they form government.
Tait said it would be “extremely difficult” to provide news to many of the underserved communities across Canada, such as rural and northern communities as well as francophones living in minority communities, which do not benefit from commercial private news.
“Defunding CBC would be ‘devastating’ to news in rural Canada:”
It would be a hell of allot cheaper to give “rural Canada” some free Elon Musk Starlink so they can watch Tucker Carlson, and maybe some Rebel News.
Living in rural Canada without the CBC would be like a fish living without a bicycle.
Nonsense. They trot out that old trope whenever they feel threatened… as if Canadians still have rabbit ears on their TV’s. Just stop it.
And Holy Hell that picture of Tait… *Shudder*. Reminded me of Robert Blake’s role in Lost Highway.
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/tT9S43F4QIWvMdQNhPLdljTHUam.jpg
cry , bitch , complain network . would not be missed.
this version with Eric Idle. and makes fun of trannies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6URZJ31bwv4
Rural Canada is as connected as the rest of the planet.
@VOWG
When CBC say’s Rural Canada is it code for “rural Canada”, if you catch their drift.
Because no one from the Freedom Convoy lived in rural Canada.
Funding CBC has devastated urban Canada.
Defund the CRTC.
Amusing. Left unanswered by this American Tait is why rural Canada would be devastated when CBC has made it abundantly clear that its news coverage despises rural Canadians who tend to be conservative in outlook.
It remains unanswed by Tait as to why anyone would be devastated by a reduction of CBC news when it has been the lowest watched or listened news service everywhere for decades.
It remains unaswered by Tait as to why as an American she pretends to know more about rural Canadians than their elected Member of Parliament.
Tait’s problem is that if the CBC were dismantled and demolished tomorrow, most Canadians would not care in the slightest. The days when CBC was providing useful rural news like farm reports disappeared in the early 1970s.
“… if the CBC were dismantled and demolished tomorrow, most Canadians would not care in the slightest…”
Have to disagree. I think most would cheer.
That argument was lost during the cable and satellite era 40 years ago. That’s when it should have been permanently defunded.
If they are so concerned about providing “news” to rural canadians, maybe they could close the front st puzzle palace and redeploy them to yukon, nwt, and small communities, instead of demanding more money…
That is an excellent idea. Base it in Yellowknife.
Alert Nunavut would be my first choice, since it’s already pretty much government run…
and if that’s not big enough for them, they can use Pond Inlet on Baffin Island
I have zero faith that PP will defund the CBC.
He may REDUCE their funding, but completely defund, ie shut them down?
Ain’t never going to happen, unfortunately.
The funding of the CBC didn’t happen overnight and it won’t disappear overnight. But it can be reduced sufficiently that it will die on its own.
It won’t be.
Liberals always overreach, and “Conservatives” always under-deliver.
That line is t-shirt worthy.
Agreed. The carbon tax won’t disappear, the CBC won’t get shutdown, plastic straws won’t be made legal again, etc. Conservatives never try to back the train up. All they do is slow it down a tiny bit for an election or two before they get punted and the lefties regain control and immediately make up for the lost time.
Did the federal #Libranos tell The National Post that their annual tax credits from the federal gov’t is dependent upon the continued funding of the CBC?
Because, the inbred nonsense going on between the entirety of the left makes this believable without any
actual facts to support it. It’s only that I couldn’t think lower of the #Libranos …
As expected, she’s completely out of touch.
What does a New York American know about anyone living in Rosemont, Halfway River, BC, or anywhere in Rural Canada?
She’s just reading from an outdated script of excuses that are 50 years old.
As noted by others, residents are getting Starlink, or, have had Bell/Telus/Shaw Sat dishes for years. They aren’t the RUBES that elitists have stereotyped them to be. The rural people will NEVER vote LIEberal despite the protestations of the apparatchiks. The propaganda continues to fail.
Is the leftist cow that still lives in NYC while sucking down our tax dollars ?
You forget, she flew to work every week during the covid fake pandemic, never was stopped at the border, never question and enjoyed a limousine ride back and forth every day. Oh yah we paid for her Hotel Suite while she was here.
I live in rural Sask and I could not give a rat’s rear if the CBC completely disappeared. In fact Hooray.
Agree, Claude.
How can it be “devastating” when almost no one in rural Canada watches or listens?
And for the few who do it is available online.
(Ok….I sometimes tune in to the classical or jazz music on CBC 2, but shut it off for the “news” blech…snort….but I can do that online. Yes, we have internet, and on occasion running water and indoor toilets)
Does she even know what her own numbers are in rural Canada?
Here is an experiment – turn it off for 3 days, and see how many complaints you get from rural Canada. Will anyone out here even notice?
I don’t believe I have watched a single minute of CBC, even accidently since Don Cherry got fired. As a Leafs fan, it was the only thing worth watching on HNIC. Other than HNIC, I may have sat in the livingroom while my folks watched Front Page Challenge back in the 60s, and 70s. No other CBC in my lifetime.
I laughed at the “concern” for rural Canada. She has no clue what she is talking about and probably hasn’t been outside of any city limits in years. Obviously thinks us “rednecks” don’t know what the internet is. Or Starlink.
CBC has been irrelevant to rural Canada (and the rest of it for that matter) for years.
I live in a smallish BC town, and haven’t watched anything on CBC for at least a decade. First it was because nothing they spewed was of interest to me, then upon finally awakening to the realities of the world, I then deliberately refused, and will continue to refuse, to watch CBC.
A close friend watches them occasionally, as he says he wants to know what his enemies are doing and planning. I no longer care enough about the remnants of this once great country, to even consider watching CBC or any MSM garbage and lies.
Although I cancelled my sub for FOX recently over the loss of Tucker Carlson, I do admit that it was comparing their Canadian reporting, to Canada MSM reporting, that I realized I was being manipulated and lied to by the Canadian MSM. I do thank them for that, but that was also before they purged the likes of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Rielly and Tucker!
I get news about Canada when the Portugese grocery store clerk asks “What do you think of your prime minister?”
Q. How could such a mundane story be so infuriating? A. Pretense.
Tate undoubtedly views “rural Canada” as a wide spread group of trappers living in total isolation for months on end with only the Blessed CBC as a source of news and entertainment.
If the CBC disappeared tomorrow, 99% of us wouldn’t miss it . If we want to partake of progressive propaganda,there are two other Canadian networks to choose from, and legions of the same on the internet.
And Polievre won’t shut the national icon down and neither would Bernier if he was elected PM, ( though the chances of him even winning a seat in parliament are remote) the boondoggle is here to stay.
99.17% wouldn’t miss it, the other 300k would caterwaul uncontrollably…
could a cbc reporter find rural canada?
How so?
The very first thing Harper should have done is privatize the CBC. That he did not let directly to his downfall.
If elected PM, Poilevre better defund all of the media, or he’s two downs and out.
“The very first thing Harper should have done is privatize the CBC. That he did not let directly to his downfall.”
Harper and the Conservatives had a built in enemy from day one. I hope Poilievre realizes this, and keeps his promise to scrap it.
I will be happy when those at the former CBC are living in tents downtown and squeegeeing windshields for change!
Next up those so-called journalists at Globull and ctv.
Harper had the chance back in the day!
Who now??
In January? Please?
Hey Ceeb: As a rural dweller, I can tell you this: The last time I watched was back in the 2000s, the last era of the rabbit ears.
Your programming sucks, you act like an overpriced Pravda and internet is here to stay. The rabbit ears are as obsolete as buggy whips, and no one wants to go back to them, ever.
Move with the times, or be subsumed by history.
I live in a rural remote area. We had a devastating snow storm Thanksgiving 2019 and electricity was out for days. I turned on CBC to get support for what was going on. I heard NOTHING about the devastation in our area. I did get to hear how hard it was to eat dinner by candlelight in an upperclass Winnipeg neighbourhood where their power was off for three hours. I also heard on the bottom of the hour news cycle that X number of Manitobans were still without power and X number of people on reserves had been moved into city hotel rooms. That was it! No news about when or who or what was going on or one thing that was helpful while we struggled to do without electricity, while looters were busy in our community and we were running out of gas for our generators and it was cold.
CBC did diddley squat for us rural folks and I expect they will continue to do so.
Here’s a CBC story today, on the foreign (read: Chinese) interference inquiry:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/foreign-interference-inquiry-hogue-1.7016148
Note that the comments were closed after only 314 of them (not 3400 or 5000, as usual). Note also that when the thread went Horribly Wrong after several posters starting demanding to know the identities of the 11 MPs who were ‘aided’ by this interference, people began to actually *predict* the early closing of the thread.
More and more the CBC is trying to silence dissenting voices by disallowing comments. There is another story today with the comments ‘broken’ (not closed, they simply don’t work). I have contacted them about this in the past, only to receive a generic email explaining their comment policies.
Defund them ASAP. They are nothing but Liberal mouthpieces.
Was a time when this was correct.. Its not 1965 anymore and rural communities have better internet than we do..
The fact is, most Canadians don’t subject themselves to the CBC.. Its a walled garden of leftist excess.. Cut the purse strings and move the F out..
and in other News , so called conservative politicians celebrate 40 years of advocating for defunding the CBC, but never seem to do it when they occasionally get in to power.
The Uniparty is alive and well.
And in other News , so called conservative politicians celebrate 40 years of advocating for defunding the CBC, but never seem to do it when they occasionally get in to power.
The Uniparty is alive and well.
One suspects the free money that gets thrown out the window of the CBC must be pretty good.
“Tait said it would be “extremely difficult” to provide news to many of the underserved communities across Canada, such as rural and northern communities as well as francophones living in minority communities, which do not benefit from commercial private news.”
Absolutely. So we should cough up two billion a year so that a couple hundred guys in Northern Ontario can listen to Liberal Party propaganda about what’s going on in Toronto, in French. Right? Because that’s their audience. Couple hundred guys.
I predict that rural communities across Canada would not even -notice- if the CBC vanished one day.
We’re rural, and my wife is part of the francophone minority. And we’ve been devastated for decades by the lack of news in CBC News.
No news is better than fake news. The End.
My uncle would disagree. He kept the CBC blaring in the barn and insisted that it kept the coyotes away. He figures he would have lost a lot more animals without that radio because the rhymths of music weren’t as repellent to the critters as the CBC1 broadcasts.
I haven’t had tv for over 30 years. I don’t know anything about the cbc.
Increasingly local news is more difficult to obtain. Community newspapers are essentially a thing of the past. Local newsrooms have disappeared.
The future is in subscriptions. If Rebel is for you, get your wallet out. Same thing for most newspapers, blogs or podcasts. It’s expensive.
I listen to radio. Streaming is worldwide.
I don’t want the CBC… Can I have a free federal heat pump instead?
Does CBC even broadcast to rural Canada? My local CBC rebroadcast was shut down about 10? years ago when the signal switched to digital. All CTV rebroadcasts in Canada continued as analog but shut down a few years ago. The only CBC I watch on the internet is Oiler’s hockey as I won’t subscribe to a sports network for maybe 8 regular season games and an apparent maximum of 4 playoff games.
Exactly. If this is that old rhetoric of them trying to claim they are a voice to the entire nation then they fail. Even their CBC Radio with some powerful AM transmitters and some limited FM repeaters in some very select areas doesn’t cover every area and there is zero CBC television coverage in rural Canada once you’re an hour away from a large center. All the small affiliates that used to cover those blind spots are gone or switched to carry Global, CTV or something else. (BTW the affiliates didn’t go by choice either — CBC pushed LLoydminister’s CKSA to switch and CHAT in Medicine Hat saw the direction things were heading and went on their own. Source: I worked in television and was there when one affiliate did make the switch.)
Defunding the CBC will impact the 4% of Canadians who watch it, and several thousand CBC executives who make six-figure salaries. I hope I live to see these evil lying vampires unemployed.