Business
Taxpayers Federation: Is Catherine Tait “trying” to bring down the CBC?

News release from Franco Terrrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation
CBC’s fresh batch of bonuses cost you $18 million
Catherine Tait has racked up an impressive list of accomplishments during her tenure as CBC President and CEO.
Trust in the CBC is in freefall, viewership and ad revenue are down, hundreds of jobs were just slashed, and more Canadians than ever want it defunded.
So it’s good to know that in between all that hard work, Tait still found the time to take more of your money to slosh around more bonuses at the state broadcaster.
The CBC rubber stamped another $18.4 million in bonuses in 2024.
You read that right: the CBC just took $18.4 million of your tax dollars and turned it into bonus cheques for 1,194 executives, managers and non-union staff.
Forty-five executives took home $3.3 million in bonuses, for an average of $73,000 each.
To put things in perspective: the average salary for Canadian workers last year was less than $70,000. That means CBC executives took home more of your money as a bonus than the average Canadian makes in a year.
At this point, we’re starting to wonder if Tait is a double agent working to bring down the CBC from the inside. Because these taxpayer-funded bonuses are making a great case for why the CBC should be defunded.
This latest round of bonuses comes less than six months after the CTF reported the CBC dished out $15 million in bonuses last year.
CBC bonuses now total $132 million since 2015.
Members of Parliament on the Heritage Committee are calling for an emergency meeting to drag Tait back to Ottawa to answer for the latest bonus bonanza.
If that happens, Tait will probably claim, yet again, that the CBC doesn’t hand out bonuses, which she prefers to call “performance” or “at-risk” pay.
And then she’ll defend the bonus payments by claiming her hands are tied, as payouts are triggered when CBC staff hit pre-set “key performance indicators.”
But here’s the thing about these KPIs.
The CTF went through every CBC annual report from 2019-20 to 2023-23.
Last year, the CBC only hit 40 per cent of its KPIs. That’s the kind of report card that should get your grounded, not a big bonus.
And it’s not like the CBC just had a bad year. Add up all of those years and the CBC only hit 58 per cent of its KPIs.
Keep in mind, these are performance targets they set for themselves. And they still only hit 58 per cent of them.
So, naturally, in honour of that stellar performance, the CBC showered itself with more than $61 million in taxpayer-funded bonuses during those years.
That’s like creating the test you have to take, still only managing to get a D+ and then rewarding yourself with other people’s money.
At this point, it’s clear Tait isn’t willing to do the right thing and end the taxpayer gravy train at the CBC.
So now it’s time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland or Heritage Minister Pascal St-Onge to step in and put a stop to this nonsense.
Or better yet, just defund the CBC.
Franco’s note: Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news. But it’s not just the bonuses. The number of CBC staffers taking a six-figure base salary has increased by 231 per cent under the Trudeau government. There are now 1,450 CBC staffers with a six-figure annual salary.
We need to keep building the taxpayer army that will push to defund the CBC. You can help build that army by signing and sharing the PETITION to defund the CBC and end media subsidies.
Here’s the link to the taxpayer petition: https://www.taxpayer.com/
Automotive
Federal government should swiftly axe foolish EV mandate

From the Fraser Institute
Two recent events exemplify the fundamental irrationality that is Canada’s electric vehicle (EV) policy.
First, the Carney government re-committed to Justin Trudeau’s EV transition mandate that by 2035 all (that’s 100 per cent) of new car sales in Canada consist of “zero emission vehicles” including battery EVs, plug-in hybrid EVs and fuel-cell powered vehicles (which are virtually non-existent in today’s market). This policy has been a foolish idea since inception. The mass of car-buyers in Canada showed little desire to buy them in 2022, when the government announced the plan, and they still don’t want them.
Second, President Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill has slashed taxpayer subsidies for buying new and used EVs, ended federal support for EV charging stations, and limited the ability of states to use fuel standards to force EVs onto the sales lot. Of course, Canada should not craft policy to simply match U.S. policy, but in light of policy changes south of the border Canadian policymakers would be wise to give their own EV policies a rethink.
And in this case, a rethink—that is, scrapping Ottawa’s mandate—would only benefit most Canadians. Indeed, most Canadians disapprove of the mandate; most do not want to buy EVs; most can’t afford to buy EVs (which are more expensive than traditional internal combustion vehicles and more expensive to insure and repair); and if they do manage to swing the cost of an EV, most will likely find it difficult to find public charging stations.
Also, consider this. Globally, the mining sector likely lacks the ability to keep up with the supply of metals needed to produce EVs and satisfy government mandates like we have in Canada, potentially further driving up production costs and ultimately sticker prices.
Finally, if you’re worried about losing the climate and environmental benefits of an EV transition, you should, well, not worry that much. The benefits of vehicle electrification for climate/environmental risk reduction have been oversold. In some circumstances EVs can help reduce GHG emissions—in others, they can make them worse. It depends on the fuel used to generate electricity used to charge them. And EVs have environmental negatives of their own—their fancy tires cause a lot of fine particulate pollution, one of the more harmful types of air pollution that can affect our health. And when they burst into flames (which they do with disturbing regularity) they spew toxic metals and plastics into the air with abandon.
So, to sum up in point form. Prime Minister Carney’s government has re-upped its commitment to the Trudeau-era 2035 EV mandate even while Canadians have shown for years that most don’t want to buy them. EVs don’t provide meaningful environmental benefits. They represent the worst of public policy (picking winning or losing technologies in mass markets). They are unjust (tax-robbing people who can’t afford them to subsidize those who can). And taxpayer-funded “investments” in EVs and EV-battery technology will likely be wasted in light of the diminishing U.S. market for Canadian EV tech.
If ever there was a policy so justifiably axed on its failed merits, it’s Ottawa’s EV mandate. Hopefully, the pragmatists we’ve heard much about since Carney’s election victory will acknowledge EV reality.
Business
Prime minister can make good on campaign promise by reforming Canada Health Act

From the Fraser Institute
While running for the job of leading the country, Prime Minister Carney promised to defend the Canada Health Act (CHA) and build a health-care system Canadians can be proud of. Unfortunately, to have any hope of accomplishing the latter promise, he must break the former and reform the CHA.
As long as Ottawa upholds and maintains the CHA in its current form, Canadians will not have a timely, accessible and high-quality universal health-care system they can be proud of.
Consider for a moment the remarkably poor state of health care in Canada today. According to international comparisons of universal health-care systems, Canadians endure some of the lowest access to physicians, medical technologies and hospital beds in the developed world, and wait in queues for health care that routinely rank among the longest in the developed world. This is all happening despite Canadians paying for one of the developed world’s most expensive universal-access health-care systems.
None of this is new. Canada’s poor ranking in the availability of services—despite high spending—reaches back at least two decades. And wait times for health care have nearly tripled since the early 1990s. Back then, in 1993, Canadians could expect to wait 9.3 weeks for medical treatment after GP referral compared to 30 weeks in 2024.
But fortunately, we can find the solutions to our health-care woes in other countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Australia, which all provide more timely access to quality universal care. Every one of these countries requires patient cost-sharing for physician and hospital services, and allows private competition in the delivery of universally accessible services with money following patients to hospitals and surgical clinics. And all these countries allow private purchases of health care, as this reduces the burden on the publicly-funded system and creates a valuable pressure valve for it.
And this brings us back to the CHA, which contains the federal government’s requirements for provincial policymaking. To receive their full federal cash transfers for health care from Ottawa (totalling nearly $55 billion in 2025/26) provinces must abide by CHA rules and regulations.
And therein lies the rub—the CHA expressly disallows requiring patients to share the cost of treatment while the CHA’s often vaguely defined terms and conditions have been used by federal governments to discourage a larger role for the private sector in the delivery of health-care services.
Clearly, it’s time for Ottawa’s approach to reflect a more contemporary understanding of how to structure a truly world-class universal health-care system.
Prime Minister Carney can begin by learning from the federal government’s own welfare reforms in the 1990s, which reduced federal transfers and allowed provinces more flexibility with policymaking. The resulting period of provincial policy innovation reduced welfare dependency and government spending on social assistance (i.e. savings for taxpayers). When Ottawa stepped back and allowed the provinces to vary policy to their unique circumstances, Canadians got improved outcomes for fewer dollars.
We need that same approach for health care today, and it begins with the federal government reforming the CHA to expressly allow provinces the ability to explore alternate policy approaches, while maintaining the foundational principles of universality.
Next, the Carney government should either hold cash transfers for health care constant (in nominal terms), reduce them or eliminate them entirely with a concordant reduction in federal taxes. By reducing (or eliminating) the pool of cash tied to the strings of the CHA, provinces would have greater freedom to pursue reform policies they consider to be in the best interests of their residents without federal intervention.
After more than four decades of effectively mandating failing health policy, it’s high time to remove ambiguity and minimize uncertainty—and the potential for politically motivated interpretations—in the CHA. If Prime Minister Carney wants Canadians to finally have a world-class health-care system then can be proud of, he should allow the provinces to choose their own set of universal health-care policies. The first step is to fix, rather than defend, the 40-year-old legislation holding the provinces back.
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