by David Cayley
National Post (Sept. 16, 2025)
"The CBC once imagined its audience as a single community, bound by shared interests and a common national purpose. In the 1960s, producers like Patrick Watson were taught to ask of every program: “How will it serve the audience?” That question presupposed a public that was coherent, if not always unanimous — a public that might quarrel over facts and policies, but still inhabited the same civic space.
That assumption no longer holds. The ideal of a singular Canadian audience has shattered. A dramatic fragmentation has occurred, and Canadians now divide on first principles. Where there was once consensus, there is now dissensus.
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This became clear to me as I watched the reaction to the “Freedom Convoy” that converged on Ottawa in February 2022 to protest against forced vaccination. In my eyes, the convoy clearly manifested a large and vibrant new public. Its vibrancy was reflected in the effort, and the risk to livelihood, that was involved in getting all those big rigs rolling toward our capital city in the dead of winter; its considerable size was shown in the crowds that gathered on bridges and in parking lots along the route to cheer this spontaneous cavalcade on. But, when the truckers and their supporters got to Ottawa, they were not treated as an emergent public with something important to say. Instead, they were treated as an invading army, and, finally, as a grave threat to national security. “These people,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, are “often racists” and “misogynists” who “don’t believe in science” and who hold “unacceptable opinions.”
The CBC clearly concurred. Its nightly television newscast, The National, set the tone for its coverage, on the weekend the trucks arrived in Ottawa, by interviewing a trucker who was not even in Ottawa and who opposed the convoy, rather than talking to one of its participants. At no point, thereafter, did the CBC acknowledge the protest as a political phenomenon that deserved, both by its size and its argument, to be carefully examined and interrogated. Nor did the CBC recognize the protesters as an incipient public to which the public broadcaster owed, by that fact, a certain obligation. Instead, the demonstrators were viewed and discussed entirely as an unfortunate outcropping of misinformation, or as a problem of public safety.
What this said to me was that the CBC, as the public broadcaster, now only converses with the publics of which it approves. It also said that the CBC doesn’t recognize the growing polarization of opinion within the country as something which it has an obligation — a statutory obligation, in fact — to address with an even hand and an open mind...."
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