A People’s Party government will defund CBC/Radio-Canada and abolish Trudeau’s media bailout programme in order to guarantee that Canada has a free and independent press. That promise was made by party leader Maxime Bernier today at a campaign stop in Saint Stephen, New Brunswick.

Statement by Maxime Bernier:

“A free press that reports objectively on current events and offers a variety of ideological perspectives is a fundamental pillar of a democratic society. Unfortunately, in Canada today, the media have stopped doing their job. A lot of newsrooms have been taken over by the woke far left. Leftist activists masquerading as journalists don’t even try to report the news objectively.

This problem is made worse by the fact that the mainstream media in Canada are more and more dependent on government funding.

Although its audience has been declining for decades, the CBC dominates the media landscape, thanks to an annual $1.2-billion grant from the government. The public broadcaster is a leftist propaganda organization that never gives a fair hearing to conservative, small-government voices on their news and public affairs programs.

In 2020, the Trudeau government announced a $595-million, five-year package to bail out Canada’s media. Instead of adapting their business model to today’s digital world, media organizations are surviving with government money. This cannot but influence the way they report on this Liberal government’s decisions, as well as on state intervention in general.

What we need are free and independent media, not media that are dependent on the government for their survival and profitability. A PPC government will defund CBC/Radio-Canada and privatize it, or transition it toward a funding model similar to that of PBS and NPR in the U.S. And it will abolish the Trudeau government’s media bailout programme.”