The Trudeau Liberals signed off Thursday on a $96.1 million increase on funding for state media broadcaster the CBC, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.The decision comes in response to CBC CEO Catherine Tait’s earlier claim that the corporation “faces chronic underfunding” and threatened to lay off hundreds of employees.Budget documents put forward by Cabinet called Main Estimates show the parliamentary grant for the CBC will increase this fiscal year from $1.287 billion to $1.383 billion.“We are upholding our support for the CBC,” said Treasury Board President Anita Anand. “We have decided the CBC faces many problems in the communications sector.”“We know it is a difficult for them right now,” said Anand. “CBC like all broadcasters is facing financial challenges primarily due to drops in advertising revenue.”Talk of layoffs was “premature,” she added.Last week Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on a talk show lamenting the days when there was only mainstream media such as CBC and CTV to contend with. Now there are "conspiracy theorists" and people criticizing government on social media. "There is out there a deliberate undermining of mainstream media," said Trudeau. "There are the conspiracy theorists, there are the social media drivers who are trying to do everything they can to keep people in their little filter bubbles to keep people from actually agreeing on a common set of facts, the way CBC and CTV, when they were our only source of news, Global, they used to project across the country at least a common understanding of things." .Tait is paid $497,000 a year with an additional 21% bonus. Access To Information records earlier disclosed Tait billed $119,309 in expenses over the past two years including business-class flights to Brussels, Geneva, Hollywood, London, Prague and Tokyo.The same records also indicated 1,142 of the 6,262 employees at the CBC received bonuses last year. Payouts totaled $16,052,148, the equivalent of $14,000 each.“We must continue to manage with what we have and do our best to stretch limited resources to meet our mandate,” Tait testified January 30 testimony at the Commons Heritage Committee“We alerted the government to our financial challenge last summer,” said Tait. “We notified our employees in October and in December we announced that if our financial situation doesn’t improve we will need to cut approximately 800 positions along with $40 million in independent production spending,” said Tait. Some 200 of the 800 positions are currently vacant.Tait told the committee CBC “revenues plummeted” in television advertising, requiring annual top-ups in parliamentary grants. “We face rising costs of operations and production and declines in revenue especially in the Québec market,” said Tait.
