CBC has a real conflict of interest in covering Erin O'Toole—will they do Trudeau’s bidding again?

During the 2019 election, CBC interfered in the federal election in an unprecedented way.

Right before the debate, they launched a lawsuit against the Conservative Party. Named in the lawsuit was Rosemary Barton, who was one of the debate moderators.

So, the Conservatives faced a situation in which the State Broadcaster, backed by billions in taxpayer dollars taken from Canadians without giving Canadians a choice, had their electoral fortunes in large part dependent on coverage from an organization that was actively fighting them.

Making matters worse, the Conservatives were being sued for using CBC footage in campaign ads, something that the Liberals have done repeatedly. Further, since CBC is funded by taxpayers and is supposed to work for us, all of their content should be free to use by all Canadians.

And yet, if we thought that was bad, it could be about to get much worse. In the CPC leadership race, Erin O’Toole promised to defund CBC. Here’s what he promised:

"As Conservative leader and Canada’s next Prime Minister, I’ll defund CBC television and save taxpayers billions. Here’s how I’ll get it done:
End all funding to CBC Digital; Cut funding for CBC English TV and News Network by 50%, with the goal to fully privatize CBC by the end of my first mandate; Maintain funding for CBC Radio and Radio-Canada

It’s 2020. Canadians have hundreds of channels to choose from, thousands of online options, and lots of Canadian content.

We don’t need CBC Television. When I’m Prime Minister, they will lose their funding.

None of this will be easy, but it’s long overdue.”

This means that the CBC staff covering O’Toole in the election stand to lose their jobs if O’Toole wins.

And this puts them in a serious conflict of interest.

That conflict already exists since the Trudeau Liberals continually promise CBC more and more money, creating a clear financial incentive for CBC employees to favour the Liberals and seek to have the Liberals win.

And that’s not even considering the overall psychological impact of Trudeau’s $600 million corrupt media bailout, which incentivizes even some "private" companies to favour the Liberals.

Now, CBC has two big reasons to want the Liberals to win: To stop O’Toole from defunding them, and to re-elect Trudeau so he gives them more money.

If we lived in a perfect world, we could say that CBC wouldn’t be influenced by that.

But as we have clearly seen, they were already influenced in 2019, when they sued the Conservatives in the middle of the election.

So, the fact is that CBC’s coverage of Erin O’Toole, and by extension their coverage of all Conservatives and all politics in Canada, simply cannot be trusted. There may be instances where some individual reporters do the right thing and are unbiased, but overall, the organization has too big an incentive to try and destroy the Conservatives.

Therefore, CBC’s potential impact and interference on the election must be mitigated. They should be blocked from any participation in the leaders debates, with nobody from CBC being allowed to be a debate moderator.

And more than that, Canadians must take things into our own hands, and expand our support for Independent Media to counter the malign influence of CBC.