Letters: Conservatives desire to defund the CBC makes little sense

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Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party have vowed to defund the English branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation — but not the French one — even though both services are thoroughly intertwined and interdependent. Their motives are a mystery to me.

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For one thing, the CBC’s mandate requires it to be “predominantly and distinctively Canadian” while contributing “to a shared national consciousness and identity.”

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Given the vastness of our land and the fact that one Canadian in four was born outside our country, the CBC’s programs matter, especially when it comes to the news.

Conservatives should love CBC news, which has to “reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions.”

The Conservatives know how crucial this is because social media has taken the lion’s share of advertising dollars, causing small-town newspapers to close and even the Leader-Post to shrink.

Next, the Conservatives are far too honourable to defund the diligent reporting and rational analysis of the CBC news. They’re definitely unafraid of answering incisive questions, although Mr. Poilievre once munched on an apple rather than doing so.

The CBC hires professional journalists who must follow its journalistic standards and practices. To enforce these, the CBC has an ombudsman to field complaints, and it publishes retractions when it makes mistakes.

Such safeguards contrast with the soulless algorithms and rage ranching of social media.

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Maybe it’s a matter of cost saving and transparency. However, the CBC earns money through advertising and royalties, and publishes quarterly reports. It currently costs each of us about $3 per month. This seems cheap to me, and Conservatives love a good bargain.

If you care about the CBC, too, and want to know why Conservatives are so eager to defund such a valuable national institution, ask your honourable MP.

Bob Davies, Regina

Civic voter turnout bad

I’ve read numerous reports, including in the Nov. 15 issue of this newspaper, that voter turnout in Regina’s civic election in 2024 increased by five per cent from 2020. Not so. Actually, an increase to 26 per cent in 2024 from 21 per cent in 2020 yields a percentage increase of 23.8 per cent, not five.

The math, now corrected to a 24 per cent increase, certainly look better than five per cent, but we should not pat ourselves on the back. Our new mayor was elected with 31.5 per cent of the 52,949 votes cast — a paltry 16,508 out of 204,832 eligible voters (eight per cent).

The city still has “a ways to go,” as returning officer Jim Nicol suggested. Nicol does not suggest what ways he might have in mind to increase voter turnout in 2028, but it will be interesting to see how civic leadership tackles this daunting challenge.

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 Gordon Hubbard, Regina

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