Article content

OTTAWA —The Liberal government on Tuesday named a Quebec television executive to become the new president and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada.

Marie-Philippe Bouchard will assume this role in January 2025 and will be the first French-speaking woman to lead the public broadcaster. She is currently president of V5 Québec Canada.

“She is an excellent candidate who has really worked her entire career in public service media,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge told reporters after her office announced the nomination.

Article content

Bouchard succeeds outgoing President and CEO Catherine Tait, who was the first woman to be appointed to the position in 2018. She was reappointed in 2023.

Tait came to the position as a seasoned film and television executive. Bouchard, for his part, comes from a public broadcasting background. The government says she previously worked at CBC/Radio-Canada in senior management positions in legal and regulatory affairs.

The outgoing president praised Bouchard, saying in a LinkedIn post “it’s wonderful to see at the helm a leader with such deep industry expertise and a strong connection to our organization.”

Bouchard has been one of the minister’s advisers on what the broadcaster’s future mandate should look like. The Liberals hope to table their plan this fall, and the minister hopes the changes will be adopted by the next federal election. Voters are due to go to the polls by October 2025, but elections could be held sooner in a minority Parliament.

“She knows the reality of CBC/Radio-Canada, having worked there for almost 30 years,” St-Onge said of Bouchard. “For me, this is the first larger piece of work we need to do to ensure the sustainability and future of CBC/Radio-Canada. »

Article content

Article content

Bouchard will begin his five-year mandate after a bruising year for the public broadcaster. In addition to managing a difficult media environment, he found himself in the crosshairs of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s pledge to “defund” him. The broadcaster receives around $1 billion from Parliament each year, allocated through the federal budget.

Tait was at the center of much of this controversy. In a 2023 interview, she accused Poilievre of fueling the “CBC bashing” she was witnessing across the country, saying he was doing it to raise money. Poilievre fired back, accusing Tait of launching a partisan attack.

The Conservatives reiterated this commitment on Tuesday.

“A new CEO won’t change CBC’s bias and falling viewership,” Alberta MP Rachel Thomas, the party’s heritage critic in Parliament, said in a statement.

Peter Menzies, former vice-president of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, said that while Bouchard’s resume is impressive, it appears much of his experience is in French-language broadcasting, while problems “existentials” faced by the broadcaster reside almost exclusively in its English-language broadcasts. services.

Article content

“I think she has a huge task ahead of her in trying to restore public confidence in the CBC’s English products,” he said, adding that time is not on her side.

“A year is a long time in politics, but if the polls stay the way they are, within a year his job could be to dismantle the English-language CBC,” he said.

Poilievre’s office has committed to maintaining funding for French-language news services, but has yet to outline a plan for how it would achieve this, given that CBC/Radio-Canada operates as a crown corporation unique and its legal mandate stipulates that it must provide programming in both languages. official languages.

He said the challenge for the Liberals is not to propose a new mandate, but to ensure it is respected.

“This will be, I think, the big challenge for Ms. Bouchard: to demonstrate that she has the strength to be able to achieve this in the face of a management culture at Radio-Canada, which has proven rather insensitive to change for several decades. »

“She might have the advantage of saying, ‘You can either do what I say or wait until the conservatives fire you all.’ As the old saying goes, nothing motivates like a hanging.’”

Article content

For months, lawmakers across the political spectrum have also criticized the broadcaster’s decision to cut more than 100 jobs and eliminate 200 other vacant positions while continuing to pay millions of dollars in bonuses to its executives and senior executives.

Tait testified to that decision Monday, saying the compensation should be more accurately described as “incentive” or “performance” pay written into the contracts of its non-union employees, including its top executives who received about $3 million. dollars after the decision. last financial year.

She told the committee that pressure to cut funding has been “very demoralizing” for CBC journalists and has made it difficult to attract new talent given the uncertainty over the broadcaster’s future.

“The sooner this narrative is… stopped, the better,” Tait testified. “It really, really hurts the reputation of the organization, certainly more than pay for performance.”

NDP MP Niki Ashton said the broadcaster “must undertake important work to strengthen local and regional journalism” and commit to ending bonuses.

Article content

“At a time when CBC has cut jobs and other private broadcasters have closed their local and regional news bureaus, it is clear that their mandate to deliver the news to all Canadians in their regions is more important than ever.” , said Ashton, who is the party’s spokesperson in Parliament on Canadian heritage.

National Post
[email protected]

Get more National Post political coverage and analysis delivered to your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin find out what’s going on actually goes behind the scenes on Parliament Hill, every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Register here.

Our website is the place for breaking news, exclusive scoops, long reads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark nationalpost.com and sign up for our politics newsletter, First Reading, here.

Article content