You're Paying $1.4 Billion for the CBC

On February 23, 2026, a Federal Court sided with the CBC in a legal challenge brought by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The court ruled that the CBC is permitted to withhold information about how it spends taxpayer money¹ — specifically, records detailing how much the corporation has spent on advertising over the past five years. The CBC's argument, accepted by the court, was that releasing this information could lead to what it called "political interference."²

Read that again slowly. A Crown corporation receiving $1.4 billion (2021 financials)³ annually from Canadian taxpayers successfully argued in federal court that telling taxpayers where that money goes constitutes a threat to its independence.

That is not a fringe interpretation of the ruling. That is, literally, what happened.

The CTF (Canadian Taxpayers Federation) had filed an access-to-information request through its investigative journalist Ryan Thorpe, who has spent months filing dozens of such requests in an attempt to document CBC spending. The broadcaster refused to release the information despite receiving $1.4 billion from taxpayers last year, prompting the CTF to file a legal challenge in Federal Court to compel disclosure. The court has now said no. The CBC keeps its books closed. You keep paying the bills.

This would be a story worth telling on its own. It becomes a significantly different story when you look at what access-to-information requests have managed to surface before the doors closed.

What We Know, Because the CTF Dug for It

The CBC told Canadians in December 2023 that it was cutting costs, reducing programming budgets, and streamlining.⁴ Its taxpayer costs went up anyway — from $1.3 billion in 2022-23 to $1.4 billion in 2023-24.⁵

While that was happening, CBC paid $18.4 million in bonuses, including $3.3 million to 45 executives for 2023-24 fiscal year.⁶ Former CBC CEO Catherine Tait was questioned about those bonuses both in parliamentary committee and on CBC's own news programming. The backlash was significant. Even the CBC's own supporter groups called the bonuses "deeply out of touch."⁷

So the CBC cancelled the bonuses.⁸ That earned it sympathetic headlines. Then, quietly, after cancelling bonuses, CBC handed out record high pay raises of $38 million in 2024-25 — going to 6,295 employees at an average raise of about $6,000 each.⁹ For comparison, the CBC spent $11.5 million on raises the year prior.

The six-figure salary list is its own document. Currently, 1,831 CBC employees take a six-figure salary, costing taxpayers about $240 million, for an average of $131,060 among those employees.¹⁰ In 2015, 438 CBC employees took home six-figure salaries, costing about $60 million.¹¹ That is a quadrupling of the top-salary payroll in a decade, at a corporation that has publicly claimed to be cutting costs throughout that same period.

And the management structure funding those salaries? CBC has more than 250 directors, 450 managers and 780 producers paid more than $100,000 per year.¹² The CBC also redacted the roles for more than 200 employees from the records it did release — meaning even the partial picture we have is incomplete by design.¹³

The Audience That Isn't There

Here is the part that should end any serious debate about whether the CBC is worth what Canadians are paying for it: CBC News Network's share of prime-time viewing is 1.8%,¹⁴ meaning 98 percent of TV-viewing Canadians choose not to watch it. No CBC entertainment show has even made the top 10 in the latest Canadian ratings.¹⁵

The CBC's largest audience belongs to Murdoch Mysteries, a show the CBC did not produce. The corporation's own programming drew roughly 734,000 viewers at its peak.¹⁶ That's approximately 1.7 percent of the Canadian population, tuning in to the channel that costs every one of them $33 a year whether they watch it or not.

The Number They Want to Make Bigger

Former Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge recommended the government nearly double CBC's annual taxpayer allocation. She said, "The average funding for public broadcasters in G7 countries is $62 per person, per year," and suggested Canada aim for that figure. Applied to Canada's population of about 41.5 million, that would put the CBC's cost at approximately $2.5 billion per year.

St-Onge also recommended that the annual funding be moved out of the federal budget entirely and into statutory appropriations — meaning it would no longer require annual parliamentary approval. The CBC's budget would, in effect, become automatic. Untouchable. And as of yesterday's court ruling, largely unauditable by the public paying for it.

That $2.5 billion annual figure would cover the grocery bill of approximately 152,854 Canadian families.

The Conservative Position Is Simple

This is not a complicated file. A Crown corporation is taking $1.4 billion a year from Canadians, paying its executives and managers at rates that have quadrupled over a decade, drawing fewer than 3 percent of Canadian viewers (and that is being generous) in primetime, and has now secured a court ruling that lets it hide the details of where the money goes. A government was preparing to double that budget and make it permanent and unreviewable.

The answer is not reform. Reform has been promised before. The answer is defunding, starting with the English-language television operation that serves almost no one, and redirecting those resources toward something that might.

Canadians deserve a media environment. They do not deserve to be forced to fund one that neither serves them nor answers to them.

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