During a campaign rally on March 28, Conservative leadership frontrunner Pierre Poilievre led a chant with supporters calling for the CBC to be defunded.
“Defund the CBC,” Poilievre started as supporters joined in.
“Sometimes, I wonder if that shouldn’t be my entire speech.”
This isn’t an entirely new position for Poilievre. During a recent interview with Rebel News, Poilievre called the federally-funded news organization a “great waste” of money and promised to, at the very least, slash their budget.
“It’s true that I will cut the CBC’s budget since it’s a great waste — they waste an enormous amount of money,” said Poilievre. “Nearly everything the CBC does in English is already available on the market. Governments should only do what the market cannot do.”
“But nearly everything we see from the CBC — on TV, on the internet — is already available from other sources… there is a lot of waste for the CBC. I will cut the budget, we will save money, and we’ll allow people to choose their own media sources.”
And such a budget cut may be warranted, given the mainstream media outlet’s history over the last year.
As The Counter Signal reported last Friday, the CBC is forced to print a correction nearly every single week to combat their own misinformation.
“Based on the CBC’s ‘Corrections and clarifications’ page, the federally-funded news outlet has issued 33 corrections or clarifications between March 20, 2021, and March 24, 2022. This means that the CBC is more likely to have lied on any given week than to have consistently told the truth — and that’s based on their own self-reporting,” The Counter Signal wrote.
An example of such a clarification is from October 14, when the CBC, after a great deal of public scrutiny, was forced to concede that they used a mannequin in place of an actual ICU patient to make the pandemic look worse than it actually was — the scene wasn’t even from a hospital.
“Earlier in October, we aired two stories on what patients can expect in a hospital ICU during the COVID crisis and the strain on nursing staff. We shot footage for these stories at two Edmonton training facilities that showed mannequins in beds and a realistic-looking hospital setting due to restrictions,” admits CBC Edmonton.
“Unfortunately, some of that same footage was then used in a different story about COVID projections and modelling last week. Using those images outside the context of the training facilities was inappropriate, and we apologize for the error in judgement. The story has been corrected.”
Last week, the CBC claimed that PM Justin Trudeau received a standing ovation following a speech at the EU, failing to tell readers that Trudeau was denounced multiple times and nine-tenths of EU MEPs left in protest before he began his speech.
The CBC later wrote an article conceding that Trudeau was denounced — again, after much public scrutiny over their lacklustre reporting.
Additionally, the CBC has now drawn the attention of Tucker Carlson Tonight producer Gregg Re, who called into question nearly every aspect of a story the CBC reported in a lengthy Twitter thread. The CBC eventually responded, saying they “stand by [their] story.”
