In his provocative new book The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back) — release with Sutherland House Books on Sept. 16, 2025 — veteran producer and broadcaster David Cayley examines the decline of the institution he served for more than four decades. He argues that the CBC has abandoned its duty to speak to and for the whole country, retreating instead into narrow ideological echo chambers. In this excerpt, he examines what happened when Jian Ghomeshi became host of ‘Q’, a pop culture show that signalled a different CBC Radio was emerging.
Today, Ghomeshi is mainly remembered for the accusations of sexual assault that led to the CBC’s dismissing and disowning him in 2014. He has remained a non-person since, despite his acquittal at trial in 2016. But, to me, his sexual habits, whatever they may have been, are overshadowed by the change he represented, and helped bring about, in the broadcast style of CBC Radio. ‘Q’s hallmark was total immersion in popular culture. This preoccupation had many antecedents at CBC Radio, notably Prime Time, which ran from 1987 to 1993 with Ralph Benmergui and Geoff Pevere as the main hosts, and Definitely Not the Opera (DNTO), with Nora Young and Sook-Yin Lee, which lasted from 1994 to 2016. But ‘Q’ still marked a departure.
What struck me first was Jian Ghomeshi’s evident, if unarticulated, assumption that popular culture constituted a kind of second nature for his listeners — a taken-for-granted environment, rather than a suite of commercial products that would be known to some of his audience and not to others. In writing for Ideas, my colleagues and I were generally scrupulous about blind references that might make listeners feel they had strayed into a club to which they did not belong. It might be unnecessarily pedantic, for example, to qualify G.W.F. Hegel as an “early nineteenth-century German philosopher,” but it was preferable to assuming familiarity by a casual reference that might make a listener feel that anyone who had not read Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit might just as well turn off their radio right now. On ‘Q,’ on the other hand, an encyclopedic knowledge of popular television, movies, music, and celebrity gossip was simply taken for granted. For example, I remember one morning being mystified by a reference to “hair bands” — bands of the early 1980s, as I later discovered, whose members typically had big hair — but it could just as easily have been a learned discussion about a TV series I had never seen, or a careful parsing of autobiographical overtones in a song I had never heard. Intellectual culture needed signposts; popular culture was supposed to be a home ground on which every outcropping was known.
But popular culture isn’t quite the right word, coming, as it does, from a time when there was still a distinct high culture, and the remnants of a folk culture, and a working-class culture, with which to contrast it. After the 1960s, these distinctions were progressively erased. In the new departments of “cultural studies” that began to be established in universities, one could as plausibly study Batman comics as Finnegan’s Wake. The latter might be harder to read, but they both belonged to the same flat landscape. When the head of the Ontario Arts Council told philosopher George Grant, in the 1960s, that Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was “just the South Pacific of its age,” Grant was sufficiently shocked and appalled that he recalled the remark in a conversation with me 20 years later. Today, Grant would have a hard time convincing anyone that Mozart stands on a different plane than Richard Rogers. One might express a preference, but Grant’s assumption that Mozart demands and deserves attention of a higher quality than Rodgers and Hammerstein’s hit musicals belongs to the past.
Popular culture had become simply “the culture” — a term I heard repeatedly used on ‘Q’ to signify a cultural ecology that was treated as something as natural as a forest, a meadow, or a wetland. This culture constantly evolved and changed, throwing up new forms, outmoding others. It was conceived as a living organism, which, of course, culture had always been, but this was the first time that commercial culture, as an ensemble of engineered devices, designed to amuse, had ever been naturalized in this way. Aesthetic judgment flourished — one talked endlessly about what was in and what was out, what was generating buzz, and what was becoming a drag — but moral judgment was verboten. The aesthetic of the hit, a taste for the cool, attunement to those little bursts of glory that radiate from what is perfect of the moment — these governed the show’s sensibility. A sense of constant excitement was generated — the awesome, the amazing, the unbelievable were always at hand.
Jian Ghomeshi was a paragon of this sensibility — an impresario of cool — a celebrity among celebrities able to precisely gauge what mixture of deference and presumption each guest, artist, or commentator was due. In its second season ‘Q’ moved from the afternoon to a more conspicuous mid-morning slot and enjoyed immediate success. After Morningside had ended with Peter Gzowski’s retirement in 1997, the CBC had tried in various ways to replace it with similar programs — first, This Morning, and, then, Sounds Like Canada. But both suffered from the attempt to preserve and extend a formula that had depended heavily on Gzowski’s bashful charm, rather than developing a character of their own. ‘Q’ was a new departure, and, in time, it developed ratings that exceeded Gzowski’s, as well as being picked up by over 50 American public radio stations. CBC Radio had rarely had such a success.
An Inkling of Glory
A decisive moment in my understanding of the sensibility of the new program occurred in the spring of 2009. The occasion was an interview with Leonard Cohen that Ghomeshi recorded at Cohen’s home in Montreal. It was in listening to this interview that I learned to connect the contemporary use of the word icon with its traditional use. The Christian church gave this word its canonical definition at a council held at Nicaea in the year 787. An icon, the council said, is “a window into eternity,” “a threshold at which (an) artist prayerfully leaves some inkling of the glory which he has seen (beyond) that threshold.” Today, the word is ubiquitous and can be applied to whatever has entered the heaven of recognizable brands, whether person, product, or design. The fact that these definitions remain connected became clear to me while reflecting on the way in which Ghomeshi treated Cohen.
During the interview, Cohen made several unsuccessful attempts to introduce the name of Montreal poet Irving Layton. Layton had been a friend and poetic mentor during Cohen’s youth, and it seemed that Cohen’s return to Montreal was bringing those days back to mind. As an interviewer myself, I thought, he’s told you what he’s interested in talking about — follow the lead he’s given you. But Ghomeshi passed over these invitations and kept the conversation on the track that he and his colleagues had presumably planned for it. Cohen was to be frog-marched through the various stages of his ascent to iconicity. Ghomeshi used the term repeatedly, as if to remind Cohen of his status. This was not just an encounter with a writer, singer, and eminent Canadian, I realized — it was an access to divinity.
Today, it’s a rare episode of ‘Q’ in which some icon is not presented, remembered, or expected. It could be argued, of course, that the proximate source of the term is the computer icon — the clickable logo that opens into cyberspace — not the object of religious adoration. If this were so, it would still be evocative enough. The computer’s infinite inside/outside, everywhere/nowhere, is already a kind of immanent heaven, which absorbs many of the former functions of religion. But I think it’s the term’s Christian roots that are more clearly on display in the way in which Jian Ghomeshi approached Leonard Cohen. What I felt I heard, listening to Ghomeshi interview Cohen, was that Cohen was not quite a mortal. He was not just a man in Montreal whimsically recalling an old friend. He was a threshold at which Ghomeshi could gain access to a certain blessedness and, while basking in this supernal light, also share its glow with his listeners.
An icon, of old, was an “inkling” of the divine glory. What now makes Leonard Cohen one? The man himself did not appear avid for such a status, at least on the day in question. He was evidently a bit bored with Ghomeshi’s recitation of the litany of his achievements and eager, if possible, to introduce some more congenial subject. Yet Ghomeshi felt he ought to persist — presumably on the grounds that icons must be treated as icons. The first component of this new dignity, I would say, is sheer celebrity — a word that already puts us on holy ground, if we take seriously its derivation from the old French celebrité for a “solemn rite or ceremony.” The second is the romantic myth of genius in which various ideas of divine possession are compounded. (This, obviously, does not apply to a Coke bottle or a 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air — both undeniably iconic in the sense we are exploring — but is apt for Cohen.) Together they create a compact quality which is present and available in the icon and able to induce a state of grace in those who come in contact with him or her. Ghomeshi, as I came to understand him, was a curator of this quality — and, at times, its priest. To some, he may have seemed vain and self-satisfied — and he was achingly, endlessly cool — but he also possessed the humility this curatorial task demanded — he wasn’t going to treat an icon as just another man — that would threaten the whole carefully graded hierarchy to which he commanded access.
‘Q’ achieved, as I’ve said, unprecedented popularity in its time slot, as well as wide distribution in the United States. Before this time a few American public radio stations had carried Ideas or As It Happens but not on anything like the scale achieved by ‘Q.’ This success made ‘Q’ something of an archetype of the new CBC Radio. It set a tone that was adopted by many CBC Radio programs. The most outstanding feature of this new tone, for me, was the way in which it erased what little remained of the foundational modern distinction between the public and the private.
Special to National Post
