Peter Menzies: Taking Stock of the Challenges Facing CBC’s New CEO

Marie-Philippe Bouchard is by all accounts a talented, intelligent woman with a great track record within the francophone public television world.
It is sincerely hoped that she experiences every personal success as the newly appointed president and CEO of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and Société Radio-Canada (SRC). Her five-year term begins Jan. 1, 2025, and I really hope she enjoys her first days and weeks in the job because once those are over, it’s going to get really tough.
The challenges are many.
The first of those is that all of Bouchard’s experience is within the francophone television world, primarily at SRC and more recently as CEO of TV. SRC isn’t exactly free of criticism. There are those, for instance, who believe there are far too many folks within its newsrooms with separatist sympathies. Private news organizations aren’t happy that it competes for online and television advertising revenue, and francophones outside and even within Quebec complain about its focus on all things Montreal.
But overall, SRC broadcasts news and entertainment content that is well-received by its target audiences while providing a solid alternative to TVA. TVA is owned by Quebecor’s Pierre-Karl Peladeau who, as a past leader of the Parti Québécois, is unapologetic about his desire for Quebec independence.
No, the big problems are all on the CBC side, where viewership is low and the level of public antipathy is high. The past three Conservative leaders have all won their positions with a wildly popular promise to “defund the CBC” at the core of their platform. The current leader, Pierre Poilievre, appears at this time to have a good chance to form the next government, and there’s a strong likelihood that when it comes to CBC English he’s not bluffing. That could mean that in a little over a year, Bouchard’s job will be to shut down the CBC while saving SRC and CBC North.
Once she starts in January, she will have about eight months—assuming the government survives another year—to find a way to bump that freight train off the track while gaining the trust of CBC employees and trying to rebuild a connection to the millions of anglophone Canadians who have dumped the CBC like a bad habit. Like I said, not an easy task.
Bouchard will also be armed with a new mandate, one which she has helped develop in a rather brief period of time. In May, she was appointed, along with six others, to serve on a panel developing a new mandate for the CBC/SRC. In doing so, it’s understood that her vision and administrative talent made her Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge’s personal pick for the position. She therefore not only has the advantage of alignment with the still-to-be-announced new mandate, she actually played an influential role in shaping it.
That means she is probably already planning how to implement it. If not, she’d better start now because time is running short.
Bouchard’s biggest task is to rebuild the bond that once existed between (certainly not all) Canadians and the CBC. Trust, once broken, is one of the most difficult things in life to recapture. As we all know from our own lives, whether personal, commercial, or professional, once faith in a person or an institution is betrayed, it is most often impossible to salvage.
If she is to do that, it will take a lot more than a plan to implement a mandate that will likely be rich in aspirations. At this stage, a very large number of Canadians have had enough of visions and promises and platitudes. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can speak with as much passion as he can muster, and these days, all three-quarters of Canadians hear is blah, blah, blah. That’s if the polls are to be believed. That is not Bouchard’s fault, of course, but between that and the troubled legacy of her predecessor, Catherine Tait, it is the reality she is faced with.
Talk will be treated as cheap.
If Bouchard wants to win Canadians back—and at this stage it seems to me to be an impossible mission—no amount of words will do the job.
Her only hope is action. If, for instance, she rolls out a massive restructuring right out of the gate, trims at least two layers of managerial fat, announces CBC’s English headquarters are moving to Winnipeg, and Jordan Peterson will be a panellist on Rosemary Barton’s “At Issue” panel and podcasts, people might pay attention. Might.
It’s going to take something that dramatic, that bold—along with a re-elected Liberal government—to make restoration of faith possible. Otherwise, a year from now—or earlier if the government falls—she’ll be implementing a very different mandate than the one she signed up for and shutting down most of CBC’s English services.