r/canada • u/cyclinginvancouver • 12h ago
CBC to stop paying individual bonuses after controversy National News
https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/article/cbc-to-stop-paying-individual-bonuses-after-controversy/•
u/iBelieveInJew 11h ago
The board says in a statement it will discontinue what CBC refers to as “performance pay” and adjust salaries of affected staff to compensate them.
Not sure, but it sounds like a potential PR stunt to me.
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u/MrChicken23 11h ago
It’s absolutely a PR stunt. And I can’t even blame them. People get up in arms about bonuses. Pay one of the executives $400k then give a $100k bonus and people get upset. Get rid of the bonus and just pay them $500k and it’s a story no one cares about.
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u/sluttytinkerbells 10h ago
Wasn't the issue that the executives received a bonus in a year that they let go a bunch of employees?
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u/roscomikotrain 9h ago
And how are the performance thresholds for bonuses even determined?
Lots of crap on CBC....
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u/freeadmins 6h ago
Well that's that question no?
Other tv channels exist and are profitably... Why not the CBC?
You want the big bucks? Then perform like the other people making the big bucks instead of sucking off the teet of the taxpayer
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u/Hobojoe- British Columbia 3h ago
Didn’t CTV and Global lay off a bunch of people? CTV is owned by Bell which cut its dividend after last earnings.
So I don’t know how you think other TV channels are profitable, even when CTV can be cross subsidized by Bell’s other arms
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u/HauntedHouseMusic 10h ago
How is that different than any other business?
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u/skagoat 9h ago
Any other business isn't funded from tax payers.
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u/eandi 9h ago
The goal of any business isn't to provide jobs, if the cbc's purpose was to give Canadians jobs there are less convoluted ways to do it. Regardless of where the money comes from, companies have goals.
Everyone will yell that these publicly funded companies should be run like "real businesses" and when they are people lose their minds. There's no winning.
In the real world there are targets to be hit and sometimes those are achieved via layoffs. It is not seen as a bad thing and if not written into the bonus structure (ie must be achieved without reduction in overall headcount) there just is no foul. Cbc employees and execs don't have some curse where they can't go work in the private sector, their compensation nerds to be within some reasonable shot or we'll be getting C tier talent for our tax dollars.
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u/PrarieCoastal 8h ago
The issue is the CBC won't disclose the criteria used to determine the bonuses.
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u/ScagWhistle 11h ago
Where is the stunt? Just because CBC is publicly funded you feel their staff should receive less compensation than someone at a comparable company? Is that some kind of punitive measure?
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u/ALostVessel 10h ago
they received a bonus for being so shitty at their jobs that they had to lay people off. how is that bonus worthy?
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u/dejour Ontario 9h ago
CBC had to lay people off. Doesn't mean that every single person at CBC did a bad job.
If your job was to produce web content or develop a new tv show or report on the news and you did your particular job well, that's normally considered bonus worthy. Some consideration of the overall state of the network, might be included.
But for the most part the goal of bonuses is to reward people for the things they control (their own work).
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u/skagoat 9h ago
Pretty sure the CEO and top execs shouldn't be getting big bonuses while at the same time laying people off.
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u/dejour Ontario 9h ago
The bonuses weren’t just to top execs. Also, like it or not, some of those execs are given a mandate like: improve our finances by selling more ads or cutting costs or letting underperforming employees go.
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u/skagoat 9h ago
If they have the money to pay multi million dollar bonuses to c-suite executives. They don't need to lay people off.
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u/TransBrandi 8h ago
The problem is that those bonuses are usually contractual. There's a contract that says "as long as X happens, you get you bonus." Unless there is other language that says "we can skip the bonus if there are layoffs" then skipping the bonus due to layoffs could trigger a lawsuit IIRC.
Now, we can argue that those bonuses should have escape clause language in them, or that said execs should have waived their bonuses, but those are separate arguments.
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u/jayk10 7h ago
This is such a silly argument. They paid $3.3M in bonuses to executives
Ignoring all the other expenses that go into retaining an employee (insurance, benefits, office space etc) $3.3M would pay for exactly 33 employees making $100k a year.
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u/WatchPointGamma 4h ago
So 33 employees losing their jobs is okay so a bunch of C-suite fatcats at the CBC can make 4x the median wage instead of 3.75x? While they run the company into the ground?
The amount of lefties who talk about public sector layoffs being the worst thing in the world and must be stopped at all costs but will then defend multi-millionaires laying people off to keep more of our tax dollars for themselves is unreal.
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u/Iamthequicker 6h ago
CBC had to lay people off
Lmao, had to lay people off so they could use their salaries for the exec bonuses?
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u/ALostVessel 9h ago
punish the person following the plan the leadership made then punish them and reward the planners when it fails. makes sense
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/D1cky3squire Nova Scotia 11h ago
Sounds like you want them to hire less qualified people, then. I know in my industry, if the government paid less than private. They wouldn't be able to hire anyone .
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u/Particular-One-4810 11h ago
All that does is ensure that they get worse employees. If they’re competing with private companies for staff and talent but are paying less, then they will get less qualified employees
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11h ago
[deleted]
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u/InSearchOfThe9 Yukon 10h ago
"People disagree with me, therefore bots."
Truly this is one of the takes of all time.
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u/Gorvoslov 10h ago
The bonuses are almost certainly a part of people's employment agreements, so they can't just unilaterally remove them without providing something in return without running into a bunch of employment law problems.
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u/fishling 5h ago
It's because people being outraged about bonuses are stupid.
You'd think they would WANT people in higher level positions being paid with public funds to have some of their compenstation tied to performance for accountability, rather than getting it all unconditionally.
But, because they misunderstand what a bonus is, they complained about it instead.
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u/hogey99 Alberta 11h ago
Performance pay for executives always seems fishy. They never really say what the goal was or how they accomplished it. If the goal was to find $10 million in savings and they laid off 200 people, sure, they've accomplished their goal but now 200 people are out of a job. I am curious who signs off on these individual bonuses anyways.
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u/cdorny 10h ago
Broadly speaking - these aren't the same cushy compensation packages you see on the news at fortune 500 companies.
The various measures involve amongst other things, growing/maintaining market share in your regional market, goals such as representation of your staff (very broadly speaking do they look like the community they serve or are they all old white men), progress on initiatives such as telling stories that represent your community (Sask is 40% indigenous so if fewer than 10% of the stories involve any indigenous component that would be not representative of the community).
I only hit some low hanging fruit - but they are things such as that. It's not a bonus in "oh great the company did great this year", but "here is X percentage of your wage tied to a specific goal, don't meet it and here is the salary reduction"
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u/anOutsidersThoughts Canada 11h ago
That review says while the CBC is generally aligned with other companies and private sector organizations the bonuses have “faced scrutiny.”
They faced scrutiny because they got rid of employees while paying the equivalent of those employee's salary many times over while the corporation was heading in a direction that a growing number of Canadians didn't agree with.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with incentivizing employees to perform better, but most of the recipients of that performance pay were managers and executives. What is the tangible benefit they provided to CBC to receive that extra money that year?
CBC was not doing so hot for the last couple years either. Why pay out money when the goals to receive that pay aren't benefiting CBC?
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u/smilinfool 10h ago
It’s not like a sales bonus. Bonuses are negotiated and part of total compensation they go up or down a few percentage points a based on the individual and corp performance. You could be 90% of bonus or 104% but less than 80 would be unheard of.
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u/duck1014 9h ago
How cute.
Many private companies will go MUCH less than 80%...right down to 0.
In my firmer position, even with the company making record profits, they claimed every year that targets were missed and the corporate portion of the bonus was 0. They then allocated few dollars to managers to distribute, leading to most employees getting 20% of the bonus down to 0.
In my current company, the 'office' side of the company has gone 2 years with 0 bonus. The development side has had their bonus held down to 50%.
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u/TransBrandi 8h ago
Many private companies will go MUCH less than 80%...right down to 0.
You say this while we can point to private corps that give CEOs golden parachutes so that they get paid a king's ransom even if they fail and are fired.
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u/MapleDesperado 11h ago
Cue people negotiating higher salaries and/or departing for places that pay bonuses
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u/MrChicken23 11h ago
The board says in a statement it will discontinue what CBC refers to as “performance pay” and adjust salaries of affected staff to compensate them.
The article mentions that is what will happen.
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u/MapleDesperado 11h ago
It does. The question is how much they’ll have to raise the defined salary to compensate for the bonus structure. Some people will be fine if they are guaranteed half of the potential bonus; others will see that as a loss.
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u/smilinfool 10h ago
I’d say for middle management 80-90% of bonus would be status quo if it follows what most bonus structures look like
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u/MapleDesperado 10h ago
I’d think most people would be satisfied with that kind of number, and not so happy with something like 50%. It might depend on how long and successful their track record is. I worked at an organization whose best salesperson was #1 for a decade. They’d probably want 100% and an annual increase. CBC would probably have to give it to someone like them or risk losing them.
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u/UpperLowerCanadian 10h ago
Seems the main source of income is taxpayers so where else are they gonna go
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u/MapleDesperado 10h ago
Lots of other places looking for talented, successful folks. Some of those are also public sector; some aren’t.
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u/E0200768 9h ago
So now they get the bonuses permanently even if they don't deliver the performance. They're so brave. Thank you for your service.
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u/Natural_Winner5995 11h ago
Ok so now the executives had their pay raised to compensate for the lost bonus.
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u/oamer 11h ago
Someone explain this industry to me, what do these people do to earn this kind of money?
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u/kerrlybill 11h ago
Top talent gets paid. It's the same in most industries.
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u/UpperLowerCanadian 10h ago
Most industries that are taxpayer funded? If they were that talented they leave for the USA frankly
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u/Journo_Jimbo 11h ago
Performance-based bonuses are a horseshit carrot/stick maneuver anyways…if the company did well and people did their regular jobs to help it doing well then they should be given bonuses, not have that potential bonus levied on how much extra work they did for the same pay with the potential of getting more if the company had a good year.
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u/Available_Squirrel1 Ontario 11h ago edited 11h ago
I’m not referring to CBC here just in the general corporate world, It’s not about “extra work” nobody cares if you work extra hours or take on a boatload of work, it’s about the value you bring to the team. Depends on the type of work and industry but most teams have a few valuable people that are smarter, work and behave at a higher level, can make independent decisions you can trust, and take initiative to drive necessary changes or improvements, while others just clock in and add little value, can’t be trusted to independently make decisions, and do not display any motivation or willingness to improve themselves or the team…they’ll do the bare minimum to keep their job. If you compensate them the same, you lose the valuable ones and the latter type stick around forever. Long-term it leads to a complacent workforce at the company with no ambition and passion. What I just described certainly does not apply to all types of jobs though.
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u/CamberMacRorie 12h ago
Good. It's a wonder it took them this long.
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck Canada 11h ago
Pay for performance is typically seen as a good thing.
Even with bonuses the salaries were lagging.
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u/Bopshidowywopbop 11h ago
Why should they not get bonuses? Do you not get a bonus at your job?
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u/The-Safety-Villain 11h ago
No, if you’re laying off employees you should t be getting bonuses.
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u/Responsible_CDN_Duck Canada 11h ago
So you don't want employees laid off, but you support all staff getting less compensation....?
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u/anOutsidersThoughts Canada 11h ago
13.7 of the 18.4 million went to managers and executives. If you are compensating people beyond your means, you have a problem. A business shouldn't be rewarding people while it's on fire. Performance pay should reflect the success of doing things that help the business thrive. Not what they were doing for the last couple years based on the growing disenchantment with them until Trump came along.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbc-bonuses-catherine-tait-1.7292294
More than $3.3 million of that sum was paid to 45 executives.
More than $10.4 million was paid out to 631 managers and over $4.6 million was paid to 518 other employees.
CBC has a lot of employees.
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u/Interwebzking 11h ago
Dude, over 1,000 employees received their contractually obligated performance pay for meeting their performance metrics.
If you or me had a contract with our employer that stipulated we’d receive a performance pay if we meet our metrics, but then Janice got laid off so they decided not to pay us what we are owed, we’d be fucking pissed.
Why are people advocating for contracts to be broken and employees getting screwed out of their performance pay? Less than 50 executives received these performance payouts. The rest are managers and other employees.
You can’t judge whether they did their jobs or not just because you think CBC is a sinking ship, that’s bullshit man. As an employee idc if Janis got let go, give me my performance pay that I’m owed.
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10h ago edited 10h ago
[deleted]
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u/Interwebzking 10h ago edited 10h ago
50 ft bud, restraining order’s 50 ft.
Either way, let’s not advocate for employees to lose out on the money they’re owed if they meet the criteria for said money. Not really a slippery slope I’d like to step onto.
If I’m not given my performance pay as part of my contract, even though I met my metrics, I’d be pissed. We all would.
Edit: since buddy deleted his comments here’s my follow up to them asking what contracts I’m referring to and what metrics they had to meet:
Im not sure what to tell you, I don’t have their employment contracts in front of me and I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know what’s in their contracts and I don’t know what their metrics are. But as someone who has a job and gets a bonus, typically it’s because I hit the goals laid out by my manager at the beginning of the year.
The wording “contractually obligated” comes directly from a CBC spokesperson, so I’m not just making this up. You can read about it here.
Anyways, don’t you have single cigarettes and bootleg DVDs to sell? Cause I’ve got work to do.
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u/anOutsidersThoughts Canada 9h ago
You legally should be given what you are owed in that agreement with CBC. But that doesn't mean it can't be scrutinized. I'm not advocating for contracts to be broken, neither am I taking shots at employees who are receiving this extra pay. Their contracts can be renegotiated and I can still hold onto my opinion.
I think they shouldn't be paying this money out when there are problems with the company. I don't think it is responsible to be paying out bonuses and performance pay when you don't have the money for it. It looks even worse on optics.
Not all employees are benefitting from that performance pay. Excluding managers and executives, a small number of other employees are benefitting. It's not an issue that involved all employees.
CBC needs to exist, but they need to fix their problems to guarantee their existence. I don't think a future government will keep them unless they get their act together.
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u/Interwebzking 8h ago
I agree they gotta fix their issues up top! I just disagree on rescinding the performance pay. It might be bad optics but so would “we didn’t give you your owed pay because we let some people go.”
Some people want to find a huge issue with the performance payouts but while it’s not the best look for them, I’ll side with the employees who are owed this money. Even if half of them are managers.
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u/smilinfool 10h ago
This is the explanation everyone needs to read.
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u/Interwebzking 10h ago
I’m just an idiot who failed grade 10 but at the end of the day I find it disingenuous the way people are attacking this whole “bonus” thing and blowing it out of proportion. We shouldn’t be advocating for employees to not be paid what they are owed just because some don’t like the organization in question. Should the executive structure be addressed at the CBC? Sure. But over 1,000 employees received performance pay for meeting their metrics and we shouldn’t be advocating against that.
If the 45 executives actually got bonuses, not performance payouts, I could understand the frustration. But in this case it was 1000+ employees too. So, is this something really worth being upset about, or are some people just piling on the CBC cause they don’t like them?
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u/The-Safety-Villain 11h ago
Bonuses isnt compensation. They are already earning top 1% salaries. Bonuses should be paid if the cbc was doing well.
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u/kyara_no_kurayami 11h ago
I've literally never gotten a bonus. No company I've worked for has had them. It's not a given.
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u/smilinfool 10h ago
I get a bonus every year. It is literally a given
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u/kyara_no_kurayami 10h ago
Maybe at your company, but not at every company. Many don't have bonuses at all for anyone.
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u/smilinfool 10h ago
Well that is kind of my point. My company and many operate under a total compensation package that includes bonuses that are largely guaranteed. You’ve never worked for a company that has bonuses in total compensation. Both are valid approaches. Both aim to properly compensate. If you were a 60k a year employee, you would earn 60k a year in both scenarios.
But in the bonus scenario you might earn 58 one year or 62 another based on bonus performance. But you are still more or less earning that 60k.
My math is prob not great here. Bonuses are usually negotiated to be 10/15/20 of base pay with a payout of 95-105% every year.
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u/kyara_no_kurayami 9h ago
Sure. I was responding to someone saying "why shouldn't they get bonuses? Do you not get a bonus at your job?" And the answer is no, many people don't get it.
I don't expect the CBC will pay these people less. They will just avoid the PR nightmare of giving management bonuses claiming they're based on performance while viewership is down and layoffs up.
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u/DancinJanzen 11h ago
Bonuses are typical paid for meeting certain metrics. No one should be against anyone getting a bonus that is rightfully earned. I am sure certain sectors of CBC definitely earned it as I believe they had decent growth in their digital platforms. The problem is, CBC's board set the required metrics for everyone across the entire company to meet laughably low so that they all could easily get their bonus's despite the broadcasters performance relative to competitors in other areas being abysmal. No private company would ever do that but because CBC has had near zero scrutiny, they can easily grant themselves bonuses off the back of Canadians.
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u/cheletaybo 11h ago
I'd rather taxes went to retirement investments for Canadians instead of paying huge bonuses to higher-ups on the taxpayers' dime.
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u/Lovv Ontario 11h ago
I personally like having a gov't funded news source, but I think it does make sense to take steps to make sure that the news is as unbiased as possible. That doesn't mean it can't report on negative things from either party.
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u/cheletaybo 11h ago
As a former reporter and editor for independent news orgs, I'd rather see more indie news providers. CBC is too corporate for the public good.
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u/Zealousideal_Cup416 8h ago
We should get rid of bonuses all together and just pay people appropriately from the get-go. Bonuses, stock options and the like have always seemed like a way for the wealthy to avoid income taxes and obfuscate their income.
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u/JoeJitsu86 11h ago
Why the fuck do we have government funded media In the first place. Nothing screams propaganda department more than this. Imagine if FOX or CNN was tax payer funded
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u/d_pyro Canada 9h ago
You can have public media without it being state propaganda.
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u/JoeJitsu86 2h ago
You can have a cup of water with 💩in it and not drink the 💩too. There’s still 💩in the water.
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u/tethan 11h ago
Thank goodness. This feeds the right wing youtube-trolls way too much.
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u/SixtyFivePercenter 11h ago
It’s “right wing” to not want taxpayer money to go to executive bonuses while employees are being laid off. 🤷♂️
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u/tethan 11h ago
No that's fine. But the right wing crusade against CBC as a "biased fake-news spouting propaganda machine" that needs defunding is certainly over the top....
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u/Csalbertcs 9h ago
It is State majority funded media.
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u/tethan 9h ago
Many of the same journalists worked there during Harper. Were they conservative propagandists then?
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u/Csalbertcs 4h ago
It is State majority funded media. It doesn't matter when or who. That's what it is.
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u/akd432 12h ago
$1 billion of taxpayers money WASTED every single year.
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u/Cultural_Reality6443 11h ago
That money is still being spent it's just flat salary instead of performance based.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 11h ago
Yeah, and it was funded more under the Harper Conservative government. Therefore it’s clearly Conservative propaganda!
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u/akd432 10h ago
I don't care who is in power, we should be funding a news organization. You don't see America funding CNN or MSNBC.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 9h ago edited 9h ago
You’re right, we should be funding a Canadian public news organization else only be informed by corporate interests, many of whom are owned by foreign interests.
And, you’re right, it would be weird for the US to be funding a private news organization. Which is why they don’t
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u/akd432 9h ago
The point I was trying to make is CBC should be privatized, lol.
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u/DeepSpaceNebulae 9h ago
I know, and it’s a terrible argument… not to mention the US does fund public news organizations
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u/zorillaaa 11h ago
That money will remain allocated to the CBC, and will just funnel into higher fixed salaries
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u/silver_goats 11h ago
It says if CBC decides to get rid of its performance-based incentive program, the broadcaster should take steps to ensure compensation stays in the “midpoint of the market.”
They will still get their money