In his provocative new book The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back) — set for release with Sutherland House Books on September 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, Cayley recalls how the broadcaster’s response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy crystallized its inability to engage with Canadians across political divides. 

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.

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.

Many other contemporary questions resemble the issue of vaccine mandates on which the Freedom Convoy disagreed with the government. The defining feature of these issues is that they divide people according to their basic commitments, or cultural stance, and not just on the basis of differing interpretations of some agreed set of facts. Some of these differences have been growing and establishing themselves ever since the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s began to take hold; some reflect the so-called filter bubbles now curated by social media algorithms. The point, in either case, is that worlds are colliding. Worldviews, in modern Western states like Canada, have become incommensurable — they no longer possess any common term, or denominator by which they can be related to one another.

The easy response to this collision, and the one unfolding all around us, is mutual vilification. The prime minister calls the protesters bigots, and the truckers, in turn, wave their ubiquitous F🍁CK Trudeau signs. This is comforting to each party but does nothing to address the widening abyss between them. The group with FREEDOM on their blazons represented Canadian society as a contractual bond between free, self-determining individuals — they were, in short, classic liberals — while the majority, who claimed that failure to get vaccinated was a punishable anti-social act, stood for a view of society as something like an immune system: a single, collective, and mutually responsible being, acting under the sign of life.

Neither of these views can be judged, in some simple sense, as right or wrong. They stand on different grounds and are conditioned throughout by the grounds on which they stand. Their only possible modus vivendi lies in curiosity, mutual respect, and a willingness, as Leonard Cohen once said, to “compare mythologies.” This spirit was not evident in Ottawa in the winter of 2022 — on either side.

This dissensus, as I’ve called it, is something new. Canadians have always disagreed, sometimes violently, but formerly they disagreed within an overarching modern consensus. When public broadcasting was born in the 1930s, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett presented it as an instrument for “the diffusion of national thought and ideals.” The man who led the lobby for public control, Graham Spry, saw the CBC, even more grandly, as a means by which Canada would realize its “destiny.” Both men saw Canada as a society animated by common ideals and bound for a common destination. They saw their country as developing within a broad, transnational consensus, whose pillars were science and democracy, progress and growth.

Now, the common denominator has gone, and consequently, people and positions tend to fall apart into hostile camps. Informed consent and vaccine mandates quickly come to blows. Economic growth faces ecological limits that undermine its legitimacy. Science, expected by its founders to calm the war of opinion, now inflames it instead.

Faced with these fractures, the CBC has chosen reaction rather than renewal. It seeks to shore up old certainties — objectivity refurbished, campaigns against misinformation launched — while ignoring the deeper collapse of consensus. The result is that it converses only with the publics it prefers, abdicating its duty to cultivate a truly pluralistic public forum. This, I argue, is the crisis of the CBC, and unless it learns to open itself again to all Canadians, it has no future as a genuine public broadcaster.

Special to National Post

• Adam Zivo: Charlie Kirk was far more moderate than the left would have you believe
• Terry Newman: On election night, CBC shamelessly cheered on Mark Carney

It’s hard not to be somewhat dissatisfied with the reactions to the assassination of American political commentator Charlie Kirk.

In official circles, the response has been predictable: disgust, horror and condemnation. Politicians across the spectrum insist that no one should be killed simply for expressing a point of view. These are necessary gestures, affirmations of what ought to be normal in a democratic society.

Yet the minute you peek into the online world of TikTok or Reddit, you find a very different mood. There, the algorithms eagerly feed the darker instincts of human tribalism: gleeful posts celebrating Kirk’s death, claims that he is burning in hell, even thanks offered to the bullet that ended his life.

It is important not to get too caught up in the carnage that froths to the surface of our political stew. But it is also important not to confuse thoughts and feelings with something more meaningful. Expressions of sympathy are welcome, but they are not the same as grappling honestly with the underlying issues.

In Canada especially, there is a jarring irony. Many of the same politicians and commentators now denouncing violence have spent years working to marginalize voices like Kirk’s.

If past actions are any guide, the centre and the left in this country will continue to discriminate against the kinds of conservative perspectives to which Kirk gave voice. For at least a decade, the mushy middle — let alone the left — has portrayed Kirk and his Canadian equivalents as too extreme, too dangerous for legitimate political debate.

Former NDP MP Charlie Angus, for example, said he was “

appalled

” at Kirk’s death, but he also spent much of the last year

demonizing conservative voices

in Canada by alleging they are illegitimate Trumpian actors.

The same goes even for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal government. We should probably give Carney the benefit of the doubt in part because he is a new prime minister. But his government is filled with people who tried to criminalize speech in the Trudeau government’s online harms bill — and consistently attack what they call “

misinformation

,” by which they usually means information that conservatives think is helpful but Liberals disagree with.

Part of Kirk’s appeal was personal. He was charismatic, quick-witted, humorous and willing to debate those who disagreed with him. But his popularity also stemmed from the issues he chose to address.

He raised topics that the mainstream media preferred to ignore or frame in only one way. He gave public voice to opinions that are common across society but rarely aired. Whether criticizing immigration policy, questioning the use of puberty blockers for youth or challenging claims of systemic racism, Kirk poked the bear of progressive consensus.

His willingness to smash the Overton window is what made him stand out — and what also made him a target. Kirk challenged the boundaries of what was deemed “polite” political conversation. He insisted on discussing questions that gatekeepers in the media and the political class preferred to declare off-limits. For that, he was vilified.

It should be remembered that many of those now solemnly decrying political violence are the same people who worked to exclude and discredit figures like Kirk. They consistently presented conservative viewpoints as too radical to be considered, casting their advocates as unsafe or illegitimate. In sociological terms, they “othered” them, treating them as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse.

The evidence of this exclusion is not hard to find. Look at how the CBC frames its political discussions, at which voices are invited in and which are left out. Look at the coverage of debates over trans issues, drug policy or so-called safe injection sites.

Articles warn of young men being radicalized by the far-right, but rarely explain what makes the ideas in question so dangerous. Readers are expected to accept the journalist’s judgment without being shown the arguments themselves. Stories about alleged racism or transphobia often omit the actual words supposedly at issue, justified by the claim that quoting them would “revictimize” marginalized groups. The result is that conservative perspectives are swept aside under a cloud of insinuation.

Meanwhile, large segments of the public are effectively written out of the political conversation. Media outlets that give voice to these opinions are dismissed as “alt-right,” and therefore illegitimate. Once labelled, their ideas can be ignored without engagement. It is reputation destruction by association, a form of ad hominem that saves elites from having to reckon with the arguments themselves.

So yes, this is a story about political polarization and extremism. And yes, in the United States you will find violent rhetoric and actions across the political spectrum. But the killing of Charlie Kirk carries a lesson for Canada, as well.

When political and media elites work to exclude certain viewpoints, when they brand voices as too extreme or unsafe to be heard, they help create the conditions for violence. They construct a climate in which an unstable individual can come to believe that silencing an opponent by force is justified.

The real lesson of Kirk’s murder is indeed about extremism. But it is not only about the extremists themselves. It is also about the role of those who, by narrowing the range of acceptable debate, fuel polarization and deepen exclusion. Canada’s media and political gatekeepers must reckon with their part in building a landscape where dissenting voices are marginalized — and where the consequences of that exclusion can be deadly.

National Post

• Conrad Black: I was with Trump when Charlie Kirk died. He grieved like a leader
• Raymond J. de Souza: Political violence in America is cause to weep

An amazing shift has taken place in Ottawa’s diplomatic relations with Israel. For most of the past eight decades of Israel’s existence, Canada has recognized Israel and its right to self-defence.

Canada rejected the absolute refusal of Israel’s Arab neighbours and the Palestinians to recognize its existence as a Jewish state. Canadians such as Lester B. Pearson — whose proposal to form the United Nations Emergency Force in 1956 won him the Nobel Peace Prize — took for granted that Israel had found a place among the world’s nations and ought to be left in peace.

That policy, which was followed by virtually every Liberal government since, has swerved radically under Prime Minister Mark Carney and now puts Canada among the leading anti-Israeli countries in the world, alongside countries such as Ireland, China and Russia.

Israel’s relations with the Republic of Ireland, for example, have deteriorated to the point where Israel recalled its ambassador in the spring. Standing side-by-side with Ireland have been South Africa and Spain, whose constant attacks on Israel’s response to the October 7 massacre have leaned heavily into outright Jew-hatred.

And now, Canada has joined the anti-Israel club with a vengeance. Consider the actions Ottawa has taken since Carney became prime minister.

In May, Israel Defence Forces soldiers apparently fired warning shots at a delegation of United Nationss officials inside a war zone in Gaza. Carney and his foreign minister, Anita Anand, responded with harsh accusations. Yet the truth is that wars are messy and deadly. Going into an active war zone is irresponsible. Canada’s reaction was unbalanced.

In July, Carney accused Israel of violating international law and deliberately starving the population of Gaza in its admittedly inept handling of food and medical aid flowing into the Strip. Israel did bungle aid to Gaza, and some extreme right-wing Israeli leaders applauded the attempted blockade.

But Israel did not start the war — Hamas did. This is an important distinction. As the Second World War drew to a close, Canada and other Allied nations did little for the desperate population of Germany. All followed the attitude that Hitler launched the war and all Germans were at fault.

Canada also loudly objected to continuing Israel military operations in Gaza last month. The now trite insistence that Hamas — a murdering band of killers — release its hostages and disband was tacked onto the condemnation. Did anyone in Ottawa really believe that Hamas would agree to such terms?

Finally, Canada reacted to Israel bombing Qatar last week with a threat that Canada would soon evaluate its relations with Israel over the affair. The bombing was stupid, given the tense situation over the release of the hostages, but no one can hold Qatar innocent over its role in harbouring Hamas’s top brass and its financial support for Hamas over the years.

All these condemnations, tacked onto the now obligatory insistence that the hostages be released and Hamas should disappear, were couched in harsh, threatening language, which clearly shows that Canada stands in disapproval of Israel’s actions in a defensive war that it did not start.

Compare Canada’s rhetoric now to its rhetoric in 1956 when Israel colluded with France and the United Kingdom to attack Egypt. At that time, Canada objected, but did so in diplomatic terms.

Now, Canada is siding with such champions of democracy as Iran, China, Russia, North Korea and other dictatorships that recognize Palestine as a state. All because Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told Carney that the PA will reform itself and hold elections. Yet the chances of it ever actually doing anything to reform itself are as good as a mafia promise to go straight.

So why has all this happened? There are four possibilities: first, Carney is just not a fan of the Jewish state; second, there are more than four times the number of Muslim voters as Jewish voters in Canada; third, Carney wants to outdo the NDP in excoriating Israel; or, fourth, Carney wants to show the world that Canada takes stances in international affairs that are distant from those taken by the United States.

There are those who believe that morality and friendship have no place in international affairs. Mark Carney seems to be going to great pains to place Canada among those who believe this.

National Post

David J. Bercuson is a senior fellow at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy and director emeritus of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

• David J. Bercuson: By recognizing ‘Palestine,” Carney upends 80 years of Canadian foreign policy
• NP View: Carney Liberals again side with Israel’s enemies, fail to protect Canadian Jews

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been trying to frame his October budget without inducing panic.

In a rare slip earlier this month,

he said that it would be “an austerity and investment”

budget.

As pollster David Coletto at Abacus Data

suggested in a subsequent poll

, the “austerity” has negative connotations for nearly twice as many people in Quebec as positive impressions. (Across Canada, the response was less stark: 23 per cent positive; 57 per cent neutral/mixed; 20 per cent negative.)

It is a communications challenge. You want to alert people that this is not going to be a family-friendly, giveaway budget, perhaps even startle them a little. But the shock should be more the mild horror of Gremlins than the heart-attack inducing terror of The Exorcist.

On Sunday, Carney tempered his approach by saying the deficit in October will be “substantial,” which he defined as bigger than last year. As a reminder, the deficit of $39.8 billion for 2024/25 was revised upward in the fall fiscal update to $46 billion.

Carney explained why Canadians should brace for impact: the tariff war; support for affected workers; increased defence spending; and new initiatives like the

Canada Homes announcement he made in Ottawa

on Sunday.

The prime minister has already ring-fenced transfers to people and provinces from cuts, as well as policies like child care, pharmacare and dental care.

The Liberal platform anticipated $35 billion in new spending this fiscal year, to which can be added $9 billion in defence spending.

The platform also forecasted $20 billion in tariff revenue. That’s likely to come up short after the cancellation of retaliatory duties on imports from the U.S.

Other revenues are likely to come in lower than expected in last year’s budget, in part because of the Liberals’ $4-billion income tax cut and the rescinding of the consumer carbon tax and higher capital gains tax inclusion rate.

When revealed in all its gory glory, the deficit may be not only substantial but substantially more than last year. The C.D. Howe Institute suggests

it might even be double

 the $46 billion for 2024/25.

How could the politics of that play out? As the House of Commons returns, Carney is in a strong position. Most polling shows the Liberals with a healthy lead. Ipsos suggests 

six in 10

 voters approve of the government’s performance, which is a nine-year high.

Further, it suggested one in three Conservative voters approve.

The Toronto Star has more columns than the Parthenon suggesting Carney has 

forsaken the left

 and is not 

who he said he is

.

But with the NDP in chaos, progressive voters have few viable alternatives.

Meanwhile, Carney is polling ahead of his party with centrist voters.

Spark Advocacy recorded an 

eight-point gap

 between the parties, but noted that when respondents were asked if they would prefer a Carney government or a Conservative government led by Pierre Poilievre, the gap spread to 22 points in favour of the incumbent.

The Conservative leader appeared to recognize that even some of his supporters are willing to give the prime minister the benefit of the doubt. In his address to his caucus on Sunday, Poilievre said Conservatives want the country to succeed. That is a very different tone to the “Canada is broken” rhetoric he employed previously.

He said Conservatives voted in favour of the government’s middle-class tax cut and One Canadian Economy act in the spring, but said the focus going forward would be on comparing Carney’s promises to the results. “Do the words match the deeds?” he asked.

The mood in the House of Commons, as it returned for the fall session on Monday, was almost convivial.

Poilievre thanked Carney for calling a prompt by-election in Battle River-Crowfoot that allowed his return to Parliament. “I wonder if he might regret that decision one day,” he joked.

The Opposition leader asked the prime minister when he plans to match his promises with real change.

Carney has been prime minister for only 21 days when the House has been sitting but he rarely seems flustered. “If we are going to build the strongest economy in the G7, we need to be clear on the scale of the crisis we are in,” he said.

Polls suggest that Canadians accept that the country is facing more intense political challenges than it has for many years.

Poilievre is not likely to persuade even his most fervent loyalists that Carney has failed because growth, employment levels, housing starts and the number of major projects haven’t surged just five months after he was elected.

But if Carney fails to provide Canadians with regular progress reports, the criticism that he has overpromised and underdelivered will start to stick.

Having been at the helm of the Bank of Canada after the Great Recession, the prime minister knows well that economic growth will not simply happen because his government cuts public spending.

As the author Mark Blyth noted in his 2012 book: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, cutting can be self-defeating, with the adverse impact on growth exceeding direct benefits from reduced borrowing.

But, as former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers

noted in his review of Blyth’s book

in the Financial Times, asserting that austerity is never the right policy ignores the example of Canada in the 1990s, where reduced government demand was offset by growing exports, which then crowded in investment and created more confidence.

“The central irony in a financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much lending and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more lending and more spending,” Summers wrote.

Carney has the borrowing and spending parts covered. Whether that generates more confidence remains to be seen.

National Post

jivison@criffel.ca

• John Ivison: The NDP’s rapidly declining sanity affects us all
• John Ivison: Carney gets caught between China and the U.S. over cars and canola

Progressive commentators have spent the past week misrepresenting the views of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, in an apparent attempt to demonize him and justify

his murder

. This behaviour is deplorable and provides a case study of the toxicity that leads to political violence.

Kirk was famous for his embrace of debate and cross-partisan dialogue. He regularly visited college campuses and invited progressive students to rebut his beliefs, often exposing their intellectual vacuity. Videos from these engagements, along with other content produced through Kirk’s organization,

Turning Point USA

, proved highly effective at attracting youth to conservative politics.

While his messaging could occasionally be strident, he generally came across as moderate and understanding. He was, at his worst, no more aggressive than most other political commentators; and, at his best, he was refreshingly conciliatory compared to many of them.

Similarly, his beliefs, though stalwartly conservative and Christian, were not particularly extreme and generally fell

within the bounds

of mainstream American discourse.

His more hard-line views included

opposition

to all abortions, even in cases of rape. In one debate, for example, he argued that, if he had a hypothetical 10-year-old daughter who was impregnated involuntarily, he would still want the child to be born. He was also a relentless critic of transgender activism and

Ukraine

, and maintained, on the basis of his Christianity, an opposition to gay marriage.

As contentious as these beliefs may have been, many people agreed with them. Polling data suggests that around

13 per cent

of Americans want abortion banned in all circumstances, and a third

oppose same-sex marriage

, for example.

There is nothing wrong with disagreeing with Kirk’s ideology. I certainly found myself irritated by some of the things he said, and thought they were indirectly harmful to people I care deeply about. Yet, substantive political disagreements are inherent to a democratic society.

You would have to be insane to think that millions of Americans (or Canadians) deserve to be killed, as Kirk was, because their political opinions differ greatly from your own.

Many people recognize this, which helps explain why Kirk’s assassination has fuelled

such indignation

. Yet, some progressives are uncomfortable with this and have responded by misrepresenting Kirk as being far more radical than he actually was.

Left-leaning influencers have spent a great

deal of energy

over the past few days sharing the following

quote

from Kirk: “I can’t stand the word ’empathy,’ actually. I think ’empathy’ is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage.” Those words, by themselves, certainly sound callous, right?

Well, it turns out that, immediately after that sentence,

Kirk clarified

that he preferred the word “sympathy” to “empathy.” In other words: he was advocating for different semantics, not heartlessness. Yet, on countless progressive social media posts, which have collectively accrued millions of views, this section is left out, completely misrepresenting Kirk’s message.

Similarly, progressives have

widely claimed

that Kirk supports killing gays. Their evidence is that, in a 2024 episode of his podcast, he said that the Bible states that men who sleep with men should be stoned to death. An edited clip of that quote is now

widely circulating online

, and was even amplified by horror author Stephen King to his 6.8-million followers on X.

Shortly after, though, it was shown that Kirk had only mentioned the Bible’s anti-gay passages while making a broader argument on how people selectively quote scripture to support their political views. While

King quickly apologized

for his mistake, other progressives have continued to promote the false “Kirk wants to kill the gays” narrative.

In response to these smears, Kirk’s fans began sharing videos, quotes and stories illustrating his

long track record

of gay tolerance. Some of these supporters are gay men themselves who

knew him personally

. In

one clip

, taken from an event in 2019, an audience member asks Kirk whether he supports including gays in the conservative movement and makes a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In response, Kirk calls the pedophilia connection a “slippery slop fallacy” and asserts that, if you are sickened by gay men, “then you are not a Trump supporter.” He emphasized that, although he believes in biblical marriage, the United States is not a theocracy and Jesus preached being loving and kind while talking to all people.

And what about Kirk’s supposed racism? Progressives have long smeared Turning Point as a “white supremacist” organization — a claim that was

rejected

in 2022 by Politifact, a prominent non-partisan fact-checking organization.

Mirroring this, many have, in recent days, used cherry-picked quotes to suggest that Kirk hates Black people. Yet videos of his

debates

on racial justice, along with the

testimony

of his of

Black fans

, tells a different story.

In truth, Kirk’s racial views were fairly milquetoast and, drawing from Black conservative thinkers, such as

Thomas Sowell

, focused on encouraging the formation of Black nuclear families to overcome cycles of poverty. He further criticized affirmative action as encouraging mediocrity.

On the whole, Kirk was a man who abhorred violence and believed in navigating differences through sincere conversation. He did not deserve to die. Yet partisan extremists — in this case on the left — are more than happy to overwrite the truth with dehumanizing caricatures if doing so excuses political violence against their foes.

National Post

• Conrad Black: I was with Trump when Charlie Kirk died. He grieved like a leader
• Geoff Russ: It sure looks like Charlie Kirk was murdered for his conservative views