Remember the classic sci-fi movie The Blob, where the creature keeps getting bigger, oozing over everything, oblivious to the screams? That’s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Instead of feeding on townspeople, however, the CBC feeds on public money. In 2023, it announced layoffs and budget cuts.
According to a CBC/Radio-Canada press release in December 2023, “The Corporation will also be reducing its English and French programming budgets for the next fiscal year, including approximately $40 million in independent production commissions and program acquisitions.”
Yet taxpayer costs still went up—from $1.3 billion in 2022-23 to $1.4 billion in 2023-24. Despite claims of tightening its belt, the blob keeps expanding.
Documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a non-profit watchdog advocating for lower taxes and government accountability, show CBC replaced its much-criticized bonuses with something even costlier: record-high raises.
Last year, CBC drew fire for paying $18.4 million in bonuses, including $3.3 million to 45 executives. Former CEO Catherine Tait was grilled about it in committee and on CBC’s own airwaves.
Even Friends of Canadian Media, a CBC supporter, weighed in. In an email to its supporters, the group said, “This decision is deeply out of touch and unbefitting of our national public broadcaster.”
The corporation scrapped the bonuses and earned favourable headlines—then quietly approved $38 million in pay raises for 2024-25. The hikes went to 6,295 employees at an average of $6,000 each, with no pay cuts. In comparison, raises cost $11.5 million the year before.
Those raises are only part of the story: the bigger issue is how much of the payroll is now concentrated at the top.
This year, 1,831 employees earn six-figure salaries—$100,000 or more—costing about $240 million, an average of $131,060 each. In 2015, there were 438 six-figure earners costing $60 million. That’s a 318 per cent increase in less than a decade.
And it’s not just the paycheques—it’s what those paycheques are buying.
The newsroom joke that CBC has a dozen managers for every reporter isn’t far off. Judging by the CTF’s data, that old line holds up.
Access-to-information records show more than 250 directors, 450 managers and 780 producers earning six figures. Add 130 advisors, 81 analysts, 120 hosts, 80 project leads, 30 lead architects and 25 supervisors, plus over 200 undisclosed roles. The six-figure salary list runs 65 pages.
Here’s the tally:
- More than $1.4 billion in annual taxpayer funding.
- A CEO paid about $500,000 a year.
- Bonuses cancelled, then replaced with bigger raises.
- Six-figure earners up 318 per cent since 2015.
- Spending details heavily redacted, including advertising costs.
For all this spending, Canadians aren’t tuning in. CBC News Network’s prime-time share—the percentage of TV viewers watching during evening hours—is just 1.8 per cent, meaning 98 per cent of Canadians choose something else. No CBC entertainment show ranks in the national top 10. Its top draw, Murdoch Mysteries—not even a CBC production—attracts about 734,000 viewers, roughly 1.7 per cent of the population.
In the movie, the blob was frozen and dumped in the Arctic.
The CBC blob can be stopped from consuming more taxpayer dollars the same way: by cutting it off.
Because in the end, this isn’t just about one broadcaster. It’s about whether Ottawa will hold a taxpayer-funded institution accountable when it grows beyond its purpose and loses much of the audience it was meant to serve.
Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
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