The Liberal Party of Canada is urging Canadians to sign a petition that will tell Stephen Harper to lay off the CBC's budget; that “the Conservatives are using the CBC as a scapegoat for their budget deficits and are breaking their election promise to continue their funding.”
Fans/employees of the CBC may be excused for raising an eyebrow to see the Liberals criticizing any government eyeballing CBC budget cuts as part of a government-wide austerity plan for in 1996, as Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien and his finance minister Paul Martin were trying to dig Canada out from under its biggest debt load (measured relative to GDP), the Liberals imposed drastic cuts on the Crown corporation, chopping $414 million from a budget of what, at that time, was $1.4 billion a year. That's a haircut of close to 30 per cent.
The current Conservative government has asked all government departments, including the CBC, for a plan that would shave 5 per cent of funding and a plan that would cut 10 per cent. The CBC's federal subsidy for this current fiscal year is $1.07 billion. A 10 per cent haircut would amount to little over $100 million, a far cry from what the Liberals did the last time a government was trying to dig itself out of a defict hole.
And if you think the Conservatives are worse than the Libs because the Liberals have an “ideological” bias — ask CBC reporter Terry Milewski how enlightened the Chretien government was about his reporting on Sgt. Pepper at APEC.
Others say the Conservatives promised to maintain or increase CBC's funding during the May 2nd election. If you voted for the Tories based partly on that promise, presumably you hope they'll stick to that promise.
Here's the Liberal Red Book of 1993:
“Funding cuts to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation … illustrate the Tories failure to appreciate the importance of cultural and industrial development … A Liberal government will be committed to stable multi-year financing for national cultural institutions such as .. the CBC.” (p. 88)
Then the Liberals went out and whacked 2,400 jobs at CBC and cut funding by over $400 million.
Here, incidentally, are four years of Liberal governments (Fiscal 1996 through fiscal 1999) that came after the big whack of cuts, an example, presumably of a Liberal government “protecting” the CBC's funding (this from the CBC's own annual report in 1999):
I'm still trying to obtain an apples-to-apples series that would show how much the CBC received from taxpayers for the years 1993 through to now. But, based on CBC's own annual reports and the Main Estimates published by Treasury Board, here's what I've got so far:
In Fiscal 1996 (a reminder that a fiscal year is denominated by the year in which the financial reporting ends. So, as the Government of Canada's financial year ends on March 31, FY 96 refers to the the last nine months of 1995 and the first three months of 1996), Parliament apportioned $1.07 billion to the CBC. That was drastically slashed in FY 97 and FY 98, stayed at that low mark in FY 99 of abotu $760 million and then began a tentative creep up again. By the time the Liberals, then led by Paul Martin, left office in the last fiscal for which they are responsible for (FY 06), the CBC's subsidy totalled just over $1 billion.
So despite: an apology in the 1997 Liberal Red Book for the CBC cuts and a promise to restore funding and several budgetary surpluses in the last years of the Liberal reign that allowed them to book as much as $3 billion in “contingency” money, the Liberals never made good on that 1997 promise to restore funding. And so, after 13 years of Liberal rule, the CBC had less money in absolute terms and a lot less if you pegged it to GDP or some other relative measure.
So how's the Conservative measure? Despite frequent sabre-rattling by Conservative MPs, the Conservatives have not taken the axe to CBC with the same gusto the Liberals did a decade earlier. CBC funding was trimmed by $32 million (3.2%) in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's first fiscal year (FY 07). But then — and there's where I want to double check that a comparison using Treasury Board Estimates against CBC Annual Reports yields accurate results — funding under the Tories jumped in FY 09 nearly 20 per cent to $1.19 billion. But in each fiscal year since then, there has been less and less for the CBC from the Conservatives. Cuts of 3.6% (FY10) , 4.5%(FY11), and, projected for this year, 1.52% will leave it in FY 12 (year end March 31 2012) with a subsidy of $1.07 billion — almost exactly where the CBC was in 1996!
Update: Freelance journalist Justin Ling points me to this: Friends of Canadian Broadcasting has crunched the numbers and adjusted them for inflation and published the following chart which, if you're a fan of CBC, would seem to indicate that it would be tough to trust Liberals or Conservatives to protect CBC funding …
