With months left in her tenure, CBC/Radio-Canada CEO says losing the broadcaster would be 'tragic'

Outgoing CBC/Radio-Canada CEO Catherine Tait said this week that dismantling the nearly 90-year-old public broadcaster would be "absolutely tragic" and politicians like Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre should think twice before torpedoing something so closely linked to Canada's "cultural fabric."

But Tait acknowledged the company has work to do to rebuild trust among Canadians who have become leery of the public broadcaster and its programming.

Tait said that, as she approaches the end of her six-years-plus tenure at CBC in January, her biggest source of regret is the erosion of trust in the broadcaster among some people.

Polls suggest Conservative voters are among those most likely to support scrapping the CBC.

Poilievre has vowed to "defund" the company if he's elected, a promise that often gets loud applause and cheers from receptive audiences at his rallies.

Delegates at the Conservative Party's most recent policy convention also moved a proposal to pull CBC's funding because of what its backers described as the broadcaster's "increasingly politicized agendas." It was ultimately defeated by party members.

"If I could rewind the clock, I would have started the conversation around trust earlier," Tait said in an interview Thursday with CBC News on the sidelines of the Public Broadcasters International (PBI) conference in Ottawa.

"We need Canadians to feel ownership of their public media service. People have become dissociated from us and that's the work that lies ahead.

"And it's not just the Conservative leader. I say to all Canadians — we're here to serve. We are an absolutely critical part of the cultural fabric of this country."

A January 2024 poll of 1,300 respondents conducted by the Gandalf Group for Friends of Canadian Media, an advocacy group for Canadian public media, found that about 40 per cent of Conservative voters surveyed want to see the government continue to fund CBC/Radio-Canada.

Roughly 48 per cent said they want to see that funding cut, while 11 per cent were unsure, the poll found.

That means a majority of Conservative respondents want to do away with Ottawa's support for the Crown-owned broadcaster, or aren't sure what to do about it at all.

A strong majority of Bloc Quebecois (68 per cent), Liberal (82 per cent) and NDP (77 per cent) voters, meanwhile, want to see the broadcaster federally funded, the poll found.

Most Canadians want a public broadcaster to tell the country's stories, Tait said, especially as other media outlets wither and die and foreign, largely U.S.-owned companies come to dominate the broadcasting landscape.