Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

• 1. Introduction

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  The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation went on the air on the 2nd of November, 1936, and it has never stopped. Nearly nine decades later, CBC/Radio-Canada remains the only broadcasting network in Canada that has existed continuously since before the Second World War. It reaches Canadians in English, French, and eight indigenous languages. It broadcasts from the Atlantic coast to the high Arctic. And its pension fund alone holds nearly eight billion dollars in assets. But the CBC did not arrive fully formed. It emerged out of a specific anxiety: the fear that American voices were crowding out Canadian ones, and that without intervention, radio waves crossing the border would simply drown Canada's own culture. What happened next involved railway companies, satellite firsts, an exploding pizza, a famous lock-out, a national scandal, and a series of copyright battles with the country's own political parties. This is the story of Canada's public broadcaster.

• 2. Railways and Radio Waves

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  In 1929, the Aird Commission on public broadcasting delivered a stark recommendation: terminate private radio broadcasting in Canada entirely, replace it with a small number of high-power stations run by a Crown corporation. The driving fear was the expanding footprint of American radio networks pushing northward into Canadian homes. Before the government acted, it was actually a railway company that laid the groundwork. Canadian National Railways had built a radio network to entertain passengers and give it a competitive edge over its rival, CP. That network, known as CNR Radio, became the direct forerunner of what would eventually be the CBC.

  Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt lobbied intensely on behalf of the Canadian Radio League, pressing the government of R. B. Bennett to act. In 1932, Bennett's government created the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, the CRBC, which took over the rail company's station network. The CRBC was a state-owned company, but when it was reorganized under its current name on the 2nd of November, 1936, the CBC was structured differently: a Crown corporation modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation, which had itself been reformed from a private company into a statutory corporation in 1927. Leonard Brockington became the CBC's first chairman.

  For the next two decades, the CBC's authority went well beyond broadcasting. Until 1958, it was simultaneously the country's dominant broadcaster and its chief regulator of broadcasting. That dual role allowed it to accumulate most of the clear-channel licences in Canada, an advantage no private competitor could match. It launched a separate French-language radio network in December 1937. It introduced FM radio to Canada in 1946, though a distinct FM service did not come until 1960. And when television began, the CBC built it from scratch.

• 3. Television From the Ground Up

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  Television broadcasts from the CBC began on the 6th of September, 1952, with the opening of a station in Montreal, Quebec. A station in Toronto, Ontario, followed two days later. The CBC's first privately owned affiliate television station, CKSO in Sudbury, Ontario, launched in October 1953. At that time, all private stations were expected to affiliate with the CBC, a condition that only relaxed in 1960-61 with the launch of CTV.

  The first Canadian television program shot in colour was the CBC's own The Forest Rangers, produced in 1963. Colour broadcasts commenced on the 1st of July, 1966, with full-colour service arriving in 1974. Then, in 1978, the CBC became the first broadcaster in the world to use an orbiting satellite for television service, linking Canada, in the corporation's own words, "from east to west to north".

  Reaching the North had been its own engineering challenge. Starting in 1967, the CBC offered a Frontier Coverage Package for remote northern communities. Low-power transmitters carried a four-hour selection of black-and-white videotaped programs each day. The tapes were recorded in Calgary and physically flown from community to community, sometimes transported by the same "bicycle" method used in television syndication. Transportation delays ranged from one week for larger centres to almost a month for small communities. The first stations opened in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories; Lynn Lake, Manitoba; and Havre-Saint-Pierre, Quebec, in 1967. Another station began operating in Whitehorse, Yukon, in November 1968. Most of these northern stations were reconfigured in 1973 to receive CBC Television programming from the Anik satellite in colour. Those serving the largest centres signed on with colour broadcasts on the 5th of February, 1973. Television programs actually originating in the North began in 1979 with the monthly news magazine Our Ways, produced in Yellowknife, and grew to include half-hour weekday newscasts by 1995.

• 4. The Gem and the Exploding Pizza

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  The visual identity of the CBC has gone through several distinct lives, each one marking a shift in how the corporation understood itself. The original logo, designed by Ecole des Beaux Arts student Hortense Binette, featured a map of Canada and a thunderbolt design symbolizing broadcasting. It was used between 1940 and 1958. A second logo, designed by scale model artist Jean-Paul Boileau, overlaid the legends "CBC" and "Radio-Canada" on a map of Canada. In 1966, designer Hubert Tison created the Butterfly logo to mark the network's transition from black-and-white to colour television, drawing a conscious parallel with the NBC peacock logo.

  The fourth logo, known internally as "the gem", was designed by graphic artist Burton Kramer in December 1974. It became the most widely recognized symbol of the corporation. The animated on-air version of this logo, which went to air in December 1974, earned itself a nickname among viewers: "The Exploding Pizza". The large shape at the centre is the letter C, standing for Canada; the radiating parts represent broadcasting; and the blue circle the logo sits in represented the world. Kramer described the entire design as representing "Canada broadcasting to the world".

  The original theme music for the 1974 ident was a three-note woodwind orchestral fanfare. It was later replaced by an 11-note woodwind orchestral jingle, which was used until the 31st of December, 1985. An updated one-colour version of the gem was introduced on the 1st of January, 1986, alongside new computer-generated television idents in different background colours corresponding to the time of day. In 1992, a Swiss-Canadian design firm called Gottschalk + Ash redesigned the logo further, reducing the number of geometric sections from 25 to 13 and making the central C a simple red circle. That 1992 logo is now the corporation's longest-used logo, surpassing even the original gem.

• 5. Money, Cuts, and the Fight to Stay On Air

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  For the fiscal year 2006, the CBC received a total of $1.53 billion from all revenue sources. Of that, $946 million came in annual parliamentary funding, plus a further $60 million in supplementary funding that had been renewed each year for some time. English television spending alone came to $616 million that year. French television accounted for $402 million. Radio services in both languages cost a combined $348 million.

  The radio service carried advertising from its inception all the way to 1974, after which its primary networks became commercial-free. In 2013, secondary radio networks CBC Music and Ici Musique introduced limited advertising of up to four minutes an hour, but this was discontinued in 2016. Television networks continued selling advertising, supplementing parliamentary funding that has always been the subject of debate.

  Budget pressure began squeezing the corporation significantly around 2008. According to the Canadian Media Guild, 3,600 jobs were lost at CBC between 2008 and 2014. The 2012 budget launched a $115-million deficit reduction plan that was fully realized by 2014, which the CMG described as one of the biggest layoffs of content creators and journalists in Canadian history. More than 600 jobs were cut in 2014 alone to close a $130-million budget shortfall. At an international public broadcasters' conference in Munich in September 2015, then-president Hubert Lacroix claimed for the first time that public broadcasters were "at risk of extinction". On the 31st of July, 2012, the CBC had already shut down all of its approximately 620 analogue television transmitters, reducing the total number of television transmitters across the country to 27 and saving an estimated $10 million a year. The CBC has received $1.2 billion in annual public funding since fiscal 2018.

• 6. Labour and the 2005 Lock-Out

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  On the 15th of August, 2005, approximately 5,500 CBC employees were locked out by CEO Robert Rabinovitch. The dispute centred on future hiring practices, specifically the rules governing contract workers versus full-time hires. The locked-out employees, who represented about 90% of the workforce, were members of the Canadian Media Guild, covering production, journalistic, and on-air personnel outside Quebec and Moncton.

  While the lockout held, regular CBC services were replaced largely by repeats, BBC News feeds, and newswire content. Major programs including The National and Royal Canadian Air Farce went off the air. Locked-out employees responded by producing their own podcasts and websites, including CBCunplugged.com. British union members pushed back when their material was used: "The NUJ and BECTU will not tolerate their members' work being used against colleagues in Canada," read a joint statement from BBC unions.

  On the 23rd of September, federal labour minister Joe Fontana called both Rabinovitch and Arnold Amber, president of the CBC branch of the Canadian Media Guild, to his office to restart talks. Late on the 2nd of October, management and staff reached a tentative deal, and CBC returned to normal operations on the 11th of October. Some observers noted that the looming the 8th of October start date for Hockey Night in Canada, the network's most commercially important property, had added urgency to reaching a settlement. The lock-out was not an isolated event: similar technicians' disputes had occurred in early 1999 and again in late 2001, and a spring 2002 lock-out in Quebec left NHL playoff games without French television commentary.

• 7. Controversies and Accountability

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  In 2015, CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi was placed on leave after allegations that he had harassed colleagues. His employment was terminated in October when the CBC stated it had "graphic evidence" that he had injured a female employee. The corporation commissioned an independent investigation, which was conducted by Janice Rubin, a partner at the law firm Rubin Thomlinson LLP. Rubin concluded that CBC management had "failed to take adequate steps" when it became aware of Ghomeshi's "problematic behaviour".

  Ghomeshi was charged with multiple counts of sexual assault and was found not guilty of all but one of these in March 2016. The final charge related to a complainant who had also worked at CBC, later identified as Kathryn Borel. On the 11th of May, 2016, the Crown withdrew that charge after Ghomeshi signed a peace bond and apologized to Borel. Borel was publicly critical of how the CBC had handled her initial complaint. "When I went to the CBC for help, what I received in return was a directive that, yes, he could do this and, yes, it was my job to let him," she told assembled media representatives. The CBC apologized to Borel publicly that same day through a statement by head of public affairs Chuck Thompson. The CBC also severed its relationship with two senior executives: Chris Boyce, the former head of CBC Radio, and Todd Spencer, the head of human resources for English services.

  A separate controversy arose from the CBC's own branded content operation. Since 2016, the CBC had published advertisements designed to closely resemble its own journalism, and in 2020 it formally launched a division called Tandem. Over 500 current and former employees called on CBC management to shut Tandem down, arguing it undermined trust in an era of widespread misinformation and was using taxpayers' money to do it. The CRTC ultimately integrated its investigation of Tandem into the CBC's licence renewal hearings, renewed the licence from 2022 to 2027, and approved the Tandem program subject to conditions. The CBC's copyright disputes with political parties added another dimension: in October 2019, two weeks before the federal election, the CBC sued the Conservative Party of Canada for using excerpts from leaders' debates in campaign advertising. The lawsuit was dismissed on the 13th of May, 2021, when Federal Court Justice Phelan ruled that the CPC's use was fair and allowable, setting a precedent for Canadian copyright law around the use of journalistic material for political purposes.

• 8. What Comes Next

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  The CBC Pension Plan, established in 1961, held $7.9 billion in net assets in 2023, with 10,283 retired members and 7,641 active members. Active members contribute 7.72% of their salary up to the yearly maximum pensionable earnings. The fund made a 7.8% return in 2023, with its assets divided across fixed income, equities, and real assets; within real assets, nearly 79% is in real estate, and 40% of that is in multifamily residential dwellings. In 2024, a refund of $127.1 million from 2021 and 2022 surpluses was dispersed to retirees.

  In February 2023, the CBC indicated for the first time that it had begun preliminary planning toward a future in which all broadcasting might take place entirely on internet streaming platforms rather than traditional radio or television transmissions. No specific target date for any such changeover has been announced. The broadcaster that introduced FM radio to Canada in 1946, launched satellite television service for the first time in the world in 1978, and shut down 620 analogue transmitters in a single day in 2012 is now mapping the transition it has not yet made. In the 2025 federal election, the Liberal party indicated an initial $150 million increase in annual funding as part of its platform.