Media
CBC bonuses total $15 million in 2023
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2023/10/tvrd-ctf-cbc-building-image-2023-10-10.jpg)
News release from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation gave out $14.9 million in bonuses in 2023, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
This comes on the heels of a CBC announcement in December 2023, just weeks before Christmas, that the public broadcaster was planning to lay off hundreds of employees.
Since 2015, the CBC has issued $114 million in bonuses.
“CBC President Catherine Tait is wrong to hand out bonuses while announcing hundreds of job losses and begging the government for more taxpayer cash,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Tait won’t do the right thing, so Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge needs to step in and shut down these bonuses.”
All told, 1,143 CBC staffers took a bonus in 2023, costing taxpayers $14,902,755. That number could climb even higher as the records indicate the data is up to date “as of Oct. 26, 2023.”
“[Bonus] pay… is a key part of the total compensation of our non-union staff, about 1,140 employees,” Tait recently told a parliamentary committee.
Tait was called to testify at the committee in January 2024 on executive bonuses and planned layoffs at the public broadcaster.
The CBC also dished out $11.5 million in raises (to date) for the 2023-24 fiscal year, with 6,575 employees taking a pay bump, representing 87 per cent of its workforce, according to separate access-to-information records obtained by the CTF. There were no pay cuts.
The CBC has rubberstamped $97 million in pay raises since 2015.
There are now 1,450 CBC staffers taking home a six-figure salary, according to access-to-information records obtained by the CTF.
Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015, the number of CBC employees taking a six-figure annual salary has spiked by 231 per cent.
Following Tait’s committee appearance, during which she claimed the public broadcaster was subject to “chronic underfunding,” the federal government announced it was increasing funding to the CBC by 96.1 million.
The CBC will receive $1.4 billion in taxpayer funding for the 2024-25 fiscal year.
Tait’s annual pay is between $472,900 and $623,900, which includes salary, bonus and other benefits, according to the CBC’s senior management compensation summary.
In 2014, Tait’s predecessor, Hubert Lacroix, told a Senate committee his annual bonus was “around 20 per cent.”
“Tait should be taking a pay cut and ending bonuses,” Terrazzano said. “It’s time for the government to end the taxpayer-funded bonuses at the CBC.”
Brownstone Institute
The Curious Case of Mark Zuckerberg
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/tvrd-brownstone-facebook-image-2024-09-07.jpg)
From the Brownstone Institute
By
On August 27, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement confirming what the Twitter Files, Murthy vs. Missouri, and many others had long claimed – that the Biden administration aggressively pushed to censor First Amendment-protected speech on social media, in particular relating to Covid-19 and the Hunter Biden laptop.
In the case of Covid, Zuckerberg writes that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain Covid-19 content, including “humor and satire.”
Zuckerberg also notes that the “FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma,” a Ukrainian energy company that Hunter Biden sat on the board of. The laptop was not “disinformation”, it was real and Twitter and Facebook wrongly suppressed the New York Post story that exposed it.
But Zuckerberg’s statement missed a key detail – at least three Facebook staff members participated in the Aspen Institute’s Hunter Biden table-top exercise that game-planned how to suppress the story two months in advance of the New York Post story.
The Aspen Institute “table-top” brought together a host of media and Big Tech including Facebook, the New York Times, Twitter, the Washington Post, and “anti-disinformation” NGO First Draft, to create their very own disinformation operation, literally planning day-by-day how they would respond to the leak.
![](https://i2.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-21-800x503.png?resize=740%2C465&ssl=1)
![](https://i1.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-22-800x675.png?resize=740%2C624&ssl=1)
Zuckerberg, however, writes, “That fall, when we saw a New York Post story reporting on corruption allegations involving then-Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s family, we sent that story to fact-checkers for review and temporarily demoted it while waiting for a reply.”
You can almost see the fall maple leaves feathering their way innocently to the forest floor.
“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we should not have demoted the story.”
But there was no surprise, as Facebook had participated in the Aspen exercise two months before the story broke.
Even for Aspen’s Garret Graff, who coordinated the exercise, things went even better than planned:
![](https://i1.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-23-796x800.png?resize=740%2C744&ssl=1)
Regarding Covid-19, Zuckerberg says the government “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor.” Regarding the Hunter Biden laptop, he only mentions they were “warned” “about a potential Russian disinformation operation.” There is no mention of pressure to censor. Did the federal government push Facebook to attend the Aspen Institute exercise? It seems they attended of their own volition.
Attending the Aspen suppression planning for Facebook was Nathaniel Gleicher, “head security policy at Meta,” who continues in his position to this day. The Twitter Files show Gleicher also met regularly with the Department of Defense (DoD) and FBI, and participated in a Harvard-led pre-election tabletop with the DoD whilst the Hunter Biden story was being suppressed on Facebook.
![](https://i2.wp.com/brownstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/image-24-800x528.png?resize=740%2C488&ssl=1)
Surely someone as senior as Gleicher, tasked as he was with such sensitive and high-level contacts, would have told his boss about his attendance? After all, the laptop story could have a real impact on the outcome of a presidential election.
Twitter’s Yoel Roth also attended the Aspen exercise and played a critical role in suppressing the Hunter Biden story on that platform. Did Gleicher play the same role at Facebook? Gleicher’s participation has been known publicly since Michael Shellenberger first broke that story, 18 months and more than 100 million impressions ago.
If Zuckerberg believes suppressing the story was wrong, why has he kept Gleicher in such a senior role? If he knew of Gleicher’s participation in the Aspen exercise, why didn’t he blow the whistle at the time? Instead, he places all the blame at the foot of the federal government. No doubt they exerted pressure, but that does not appear to be the whole story.
Is Zuckerberg attempting to absolve himself of responsibility?
Republished from the author’s Substack
International
Telegram founder Pavel Durov criticizes French authorities in first statement after his arrest
![](https://www.todayville.com/calgary/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/tvrd-ls-telegram-pavel-durov-image-2024-09-06.jpg)
From LifeSiteNews
The Telegram CEO implied that French authorities had not tried to reach out to him before his arrest and stressed that if a government was dissatisfied with how an internet service operates, it should start legal action against the company instead of arresting its owner.
Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov criticized French authorities for his surprising arrest in Paris.
In his first public statement after being released from jail on bail, Durov said that he was questioned by French police for four days and he “was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.”
The Telegram founder said that his arrest was “surprising for several reasons” because Telegram employs a representative that replies to legal requests from the EU and French authorities “had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance,” implying that they had not tried to reach out to him before his arrest.
Moreover, he stressed that if a government was dissatisfied with how an internet service like Telegram operates in its country, it should start legal action against the company instead of arresting its owner.
“Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a simplistic approach,” Durov wrote. “Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.”
The Telegram CEO said that “the right balance between privacy and security is not easy” and revealed that Telegram had often been at odds with governments and that if they were not able to find this balance between security and privacy, “we are ready to leave that country.”
“We’ve done it many times,” he recalled. “When Russia demanded we hand over ‘encryption keys’ to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia.”
“When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran.”
“We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.”
Durov said that Telegram is “not some sort of anarchic paradise” like some media outlets claim, rather it does regularly take down channels and post that are “harmful.”
“However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough,” he said regarding censorship on the platform. “Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard.”
Durov was arrested on August 24 after his private jet landed at Le Bourget airport just outside of Paris. The billionaire entrepreneur had been under an arrest warrant as part of a police investigation in France into alleged lack of moderation and “criminal activity” on Telegram.
French President Emmanuel Macron denied the charges of Durov’s arrest being politically motivated. However, many have called that into question.
READ: Does anyone believe Emmanuel Macron’s claim that Pavel Durov’s arrest was not political?
While most large social media companies, specifically Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Google (YouTube) and Twitter before Elon Musk’s takeover, censored true information regarding COVID-19, vaccines, LGBT, and other issues in the past years, Telegram remained a mostly censorship-free area for dissidents all over the world.
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