CBC Won't Abandon TV, Radio Audiences As It Charts Digital Path

The CBC will continue to provide Canadians with traditional radio and television broadcasts and will delay its move to digital-only service until adequate high-speed Internet is available to all Canadians, said the head of CBC.

Accoring to a posting on the CBC website, Catherine Tait, president and CEO of the CBC, was responding to a report based on an interview she gave to the Globe and Mail newspaper. That article said she plans to move CBC to a digital-only format and abandon radio and TV, but the move isn't likely to happen over the next 10 years. 

"Let's be clear. We are not abandoning anyone who's watching on traditional television or listening on traditional radio," she said Tuesday. 

"We are looking at a two-decade horizon. The BBC president announced a month ago that BBC would be going to digital-only by 2030. That is not the case for CBC. We are a vast country and until we have ubiquity in broadband delivery in this country, we will leave no one behind."

Catherine Tait

Tait said that while the CBC will not abandon traditional audiences, it will use its "limited resources" to ensure that the public broadcaster is "serving and capturing the hearts and minds of those younger audiences too."

Gregory Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Calgary's department of communication, media and film, said he's frustrated by CBC's push toward an all-digital format when traditional media services still have strong audiences and a digital-only future could be decades away.

Taylor said that while audiences for older broadcast media may be declining, they still make up a significant share of the market. And while those audiences may represent an older demographic, he said, "they've not gone away, and the CBC has been stating that they're going away for ten years right now."

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said that if he becomes prime minister, he will defund the CBC. He has accused the public broadcaster of being anti-Conservative and pro-Liberal. He also has said he could save taxpayers $1 billion by defunding the public broadcaster.