CBC must be protected at all costs

Posted on 24 June 2024 by Ryan Dahlman

Editor:

While watching the ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landing of Canadian troops on Juno Beach, France, I was reminded how important the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is to Canadian’s sense of who we are as a country. CBC reporter Matthew Halton was on the beach with our troops on June 6th, 1944, and followed them during the remaining battles of WWII.

As a member of the Royal Canadian Legion, I appreciate that this June 6th, CBC was again at Juno Beach covering the commemoration, and talking to the thirteen surviving veterans able to attend. 

Besides radio and television news coverage leading up to June 6th, CBC television broadcast a two-hour special of the commemorative ceremony and events on the day that included historical film footage and interviews with some of the attending elderly veterans and their families. Fox News and talk/shock-jock radio did not, and never will, do the CBC type of in-the-field reporting that ties our country together by documenting the ongoing story of Canada.

Just as importantly, the light that CBC professional reporting often shines into the dark corners may sometimes make politicians of all stripes squirm but serves a critical function in the health of our Canadian democracy. 

Pierre Poilievre has pledged to defund the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation if he forms the next government. I urge his supporters to ask him to reconsider this destructive promise. If the CBC is defunded, a generations-old tie that binds our nation and one of the fundamental pillars of Canadian democracy will be broken.

Doug Bone, Elrose