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CBC staff with six figure salaries balloons under Trudeau government

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

Author: Ryan Thorpe

The number of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation staff taking home a six-figure annual salary has soared by 231 per cent under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Last year, 1,450 CBC staff took home more than $100,000 in base salary, according to access-to-information records obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

That’s a 231 per cent increase over 2015, when just 438 CBC employees took home a six-figure annual salary.

Six-figure salaries at the state broadcaster cost taxpayers more than $181 million last year, for an average of $125,000 for those employees.

“The CBC has been raking in big paycheques and bonuses while the taxpayers footing the bills have been struggling,” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Is anyone in government going to step in, stick up for taxpayers and put an end to the CBC gravy train?”

The CBC also dished out more than $11.5 million in pay raises last year to 87 per cent of its workforce, according to separate access-to-information records.

No CBC employee received a pay cut in 2023.

All told, raises at the CBC total $97 million since 2015.

This week, the Canadian Press reported the CBC paid out $18.4 million in bonuses in 2024, after it eliminated hundreds of jobs.

That included $3.3 million in bonuses for 45 executives, for an average of $73,000 each – more than the average salary for Canadian workers, according to Statistics Canada.

The bonuses also included $10.4 million paid out to 631 managers and $4.6 million for 518 other employees.

Bonuses at the CBC now total $132 million since 2015. Combined, raises and bonuses at the CBC total more than $229 million and counting since 2015.

“It’s time to end these taxpayer-funded bonuses and defund the CBC,” Terrazzano said.

Year

Raise

Bonus

Combined Cost

2015

$7,958,060

$8,254,599

$16,212,569

2016

$8,187,668

$8,097,155

$16,284,823

2017

$10,134,964

$8,903,882

$19,038,846

2018

$14,544,563

$13,337,262

$27,881,825

2019

$11,048,543

$14,257,933

$25,306,476

2020

$11,989,307

$15,013,838

$27,003,145

2021

$9,218,379

$15,398,101

$24,616,480

2022

$12,505,938

$16,052,148

$28,558,086

2023

$11,528,793

$14,902,755

$26,431,548

2024

N/A

$18,400,000

$18,400,000

Total

$97,116,215

$132,617,673

$229,733,888

The CBC News Network’s share of the national prime-time viewing audience is 2.1 per cent, according to its latest third-quarter report.

Put another way, 97.9 per cent of TV-viewing Canadians choose not to watch CBC’s English language prime-time news program.

Nevertheless, the state broadcaster considers this a success, claiming CBC News Network “continues to track above” its target of 1.7 per cent, “driven by major news stories drawing large audiences.”

In 2018, the CBC’s share of the national prime-time viewing audience was 7.6 per cent. That means in six years, CBC News Network’s share has plummeted by 72 per cent.

The CBC will take more than $1.4 billion from taxpayers in 2024-25.

That’s enough money to pay the annual grocery bill for roughly 86,000 Canadian families of four.

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Business

Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

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From the Fraser Institute

By Matthew Lau

In the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, government regulation has grown over the years and it’s hurting Canada’s economy. The report, which uses a regulatory burden measure devised by KPMG and Transport Canada, shows government regulatory requirements increased 2.1 per cent annually from 2006 to 2021, with the effect of reducing the business sector’s GDP, employment, labour productivity and investment.

Specifically, the growth in regulation over these years cut business-sector investment by an estimated nine per cent and “reduced business start-ups and business dynamism,” cut GDP in the business sector by 1.7 percentage points, cut employment growth by 1.3 percentage points, and labour productivity by 0.4 percentage points.

While the report only covered regulatory growth through 2021, in the past four years an avalanche of new regulations has made the already existing problem of overregulation worse.

The Trudeau government in particular has intensified its regulatory assault on the extraction sector with a greenhouse gas emissions cap, new fuel regulations and new methane emissions regulations. In the last few years, federal diktats and expansions of bureaucratic control have swept the auto industrychild caresupermarkets and many other sectors.

Again, the negative results are evident. Over the past nine years, Canada’s cumulative real growth in per-person GDP (an indicator of incomes and living standards) has been a paltry 1.7 per cent and trending downward, compared to 18.6 per cent and trending upward in the United States. Put differently, if the Canadian economy had tracked with the U.S. economy over the past nine years, average incomes in Canada would be much higher today.

Also in the past nine years, business investment in Canada has fallen while increasing more than 30 per cent in the U.S. on a real per-person basis. Workers in Canada now receive barely half as much new capital per worker than in the U.S., and only about two-thirds as much new capital (on average) as workers in other developed countries.

Consequently, Canada is mired in an economic growth crisis—a fact that even the Trudeau government does not deny. “We have more work to do,” said Anita Anand, then-president of the Treasury Board, last August, “to examine the causes of low productivity levels.” The Statistics Canada report, if nothing else, confirms what economists and the business community already knew—the regulatory burden is much of the problem.

Of course, regulation is not the only factor hurting Canada’s economy. Higher federal carbon taxes, higher payroll taxes and higher top marginal income tax rates are also weakening Canada’s productivity, GDP, business investment and entrepreneurship.

Finally, while the Statistics Canada report shows significant economic costs of regulation, the authors note that their estimate of the effect of regulatory accumulation on GDP is “much smaller” than the effect estimated in an American study published several years ago in the Review of Economic Dynamics. In other words, the negative effects of regulation in Canada may be even higher than StatsCan suggests.

Whether Statistics Canada has underestimated the economic costs of regulation or not, one thing is clear: reducing regulation and reversing the policy course of recent years would help get Canada out of its current economic rut. The country is effectively in a recession even if, as a result of rapid population growth fuelled by record levels of immigration, the GDP statistics do not meet the technical definition of a recession.

With dismal GDP and business investment numbers, a turnaround—both in policy and outcomes—can’t come quickly enough for Canadians.

Matthew Lau

Adjunct Scholar, Fraser Institute
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‘Out and out fraud’: DOGE questions $2 billion Biden grant to left-wing ‘green energy’ nonprofit`

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

The EPA under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a ‘green energy’ group that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Biden administration awarded $2 billion to a “green energy” nonprofit that appears to have been little more than a means to enrich left-wing activists such as former Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams.

Founded in 2023 as a coalition of nonprofits, corporations, unions, municipalities, and other groups, Power Forward Communities (PFC) bills itself as “the first national program to finance home energy efficiency upgrades at scale, saving Americans thousands of dollars on their utility bills every year.” It says it “will help homeowners, developers, and renters swap outdated, inefficient appliances with more efficient and modernized options, saving money for years ahead and ensuring our kids can grow up with cleaner, pollutant-free air.”

The organization’s website boasts more than 300 member organizations across 46 states but does not detail actual activities. It does have job postings for three open positions and a form for people to sign up for more information.

The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, along with new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, are raising questions about the $2 billion grant PFC received from the Biden EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund (NCIF), ostensibly for the “affordable decarbonization of homes and apartments throughout the country, with a particular focus on low-income and disadvantaged communities.”

PFC’s announcement of the grant is the organization’s only press release to date and is alarming given that the organization had somehow reported only $100 in revenue at the end of 2023.

“I made a commitment to members of Congress and to the American people to be a good steward of tax dollars and I’ve wasted no time in keeping my word,” Zeldin said. “When we learned about the Biden administration’s scheme to quickly park $20 billion outside the agency, we suspected that some organizations were created out of thin air just to take advantage of this.” Zeldin previously announced the Biden EPA had deposited the $20 billion in a Citibank account, apparently to make it harder for the next administration to retrieve and review it.

“As we continue to learn more about where some of this money went, it is even more apparent how far-reaching and widely accepted this waste and abuse has been,” he added. “It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion. That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

Daniel Turner, executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, told the Beacon that in his opinion “for an organization that has no experience in this, that was literally just established, and had $100 in the bank to receive a $2 billion grant — it doesn’t just fly in the face of common sense, it’s out and out fraud.”

Prominent among PFC’s insiders is Abrams, the former Georgia House minority leader best known for persistent false claims about having the state’s gubernatorial election stolen from her in 2018. Abrams founded two of PFC’s partner organizations (Southern Economic Advancement Project and Fair Count) and serves as lead counsel for a third group (Rewiring America) in the coalition. A longtime advocate of left-wing environmental policies, Abrams is also a member of the national advisory board for advocacy group Climate Power.

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