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Canadian Taxpayers Federation looking into value of CBC properties

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From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

CBC amasses half a billion in real estate

Author: Ryan Thorpe

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has amassed nearly half-a-billion dollars in real estate holdings, according to documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

The CBC’s real estate portfolio, comprised of 12 properties scattered across Canada, is assessed at more than $444 million. The CBC leases another 72 properties, including five in foreign countries, that it refuses to disclose costs for.

“It sure seems the CBC is spending way more on its buildings than competitors spend, but what value do taxpayers get for all these properties?” said Franco Terrazzano, CTF Federal Director. “Taxpayers have every right to question why we’re paying for all these CBC buildings in Canada and in other countries.”

Records detailing the CBC’s real estate portfolio were released in response to a written order paper question from Conservative MP Adam Chambers (Simcoe North).

CBC’s most expensive is its Toronto headquarters, which is assessed at nearly $314 million.

For context, when TorStar – the parent company that publishes the Toronto Star – was sold in 2020, the price tag for the entire newspaper chain was $52 million. And when the Calgary Herald sold its building earlier this year, it went for $17.25 million. In 2012, the Globe and Mail sold its head offices in downtown Toronto for $136 million. The National Post sold its headquarters in Toronto for $24 million in 2012.

Table: CBC-owned property, assessed municipal value

Location

Value

Toronto, Ont.

$313,866,000

Vancouver, B.C.

$99,061,000

Winnipeg, Man.

$11,718,000

St. Johns, N.L.

$4,439,000

Yellowknife, NWT

$3,181,720

Fredericton, N.B.

$2,791,000

Charlottetown, P.E.I.

$2,631,800

Saguenay, Que.

$2,485,939

Whitehorse, Yuk.

$1,847,410

Winnipeg, Man.

$1,541,000

Thunder Bay, Ont.

$537,000

Rankin Inlet, Nun.

$314,600

Total

$444,414,469

The CBC is refusing to disclose what it spends on the 72 other properties it currently leases in Canada and abroad, citing it as “commercially sensitive information.”

Outside of Canada, the CBC leases property in London, U.K., Mumbai, India, Paris, France, and New York City and Washington, U.S.A.

In Paris, France, the CBC leases offices in “a corner building on one of the prestigious avenues leading off the Arc de Triomphe,” located in the city’s 17th Arrondissement, on the right bank of the River Seine.

In London, U.K., Canada’s public broadcaster leases office space bordering the city’s Soho district, famous for its restaurants and nightlife, located a short drive from Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park.

And in New York City, the CBC leases office space in downtown Manhattan, a short walk from Rockefeller Centre and Central Park.

It also leases multiple properties in six Canadian cities, including two in Prince Rupert, B.C. (pop. 12,300) and two in Matane, Que. (pop. 14,000).

In Montreal, the CBC leases three properties, including its French-language headquarters on Papineau Avenue. While it is now refusing to say what it costs to lease its Montreal HQ, back in 2019, the CBC disclosed it was paying $20 million per year.

“Why does the CBC need to lease these properties in far-flung countries, let alone multiple properties in smaller Canadian towns, and how much is all of this costing taxpayers?” Terrazzano said. “The CBC costs taxpayers more than $1 billion every year, so at the very least it owes Canadians full transparency.”

In 2021, the CBC took $1.2 billion from taxpayers, including $21 million in “immediate operational support” to ensure its stability during the pandemic. In late-2022, the feds gave the CBC another $42 million to help it “recover from the pandemic,” as reported by the National Post.

The CBC gave staff $28.5 million in bonuses and pay raises in 2022. There are now 949 CBC staff taking home a six-figure annual salary, with the number of employees on the sunshine list doubling since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to power in 2015.

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Automotive

Bad ideology makes Canada’s EV investment a bad idea

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Dan McTeague

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It doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy. In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.

What does Donald Trump’s resounding win in the recent U.S. election mean for Canada? Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to have been much thought about the answer to this question in Ottawa, because the vast majority of our political and pundit class expected his opponent to be victorious. Suddenly they’re all having to process this unwelcome intrusion of reality into their narrow mental picture.

Well, what does it mean?

It is early days, and it will take some time to sift through the various policy commitments of the incoming Trump Administration to unpack the Canadian angle. But one thing we do know is that a Trump presidency will be no friend to the electric vehicle industry.

A Harris administration would have been. But, Trump spent much of his campaign slamming EV subsidies and mandates, pledging at the Republican National Convention in July that he will “end the electric vehicle mandate on day one.”

This line was so effective, especially in must-win Michigan, with its hundreds of thousands of autoworkers, that Kamala Harris was forced to assure everyone who listened that the U.S. has no EV mandate, and that she has no intention of introducing one.

Of course, this wasn’t strictly true.

First, the Biden Administration, of which Harris was a part, issued an Executive Order with the explicit goal of a “50% Electric Vehicle Sales Share” by 2030. The Biden-Harris Administration (to use their own formulation) instructed their Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to introduce increasingly stringent tailpipe emission regulations on cars and light trucks with an eye towards pushing automakers to manufacture and sell more electric and hybrid vehicles.

Their EPA also issued a waiver which allows California to enact auto emissions regulations that are tougher than the federal government’s, which functions as a kind of back-door EV mandate nationally. After all, auto companies aren’t going to manufacture one set of vehicles for California, the most populous state, and another for the rest of the country.

And as for intentions, though the Harris camp consistently held that her prior policy positions shouldn’t be held against her, it’s hard to forget that as senator she’d co-sponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act, which would have mandated that all new vehicles sold in the U.S. be “zero emission” by 2040. During her failed 2020 presidential campaign, Harris accelerated that proposed timeline, saying that the auto market should be all-electric by 2035.

In other words, she seemed pretty fond of the EV policies which Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault have foisted upon Canada.

For Trump, all of these policies can be filed under “green new scam” climate policies, which stifle American resource development and endanger national prosperity. Now that he’s retaken the White House, it is expected that he will issue his own executive orders to the EPA, rescinding Biden’s tailpipe instructions and scrapping their waiver for California. And though he will be hindered somewhat by Congress, he’s likely to do everything in his power to roll back the EV subsidies contained in the (terribly named) Inflation Reduction Act and lobby for changes limiting which EVs qualify for tax credits, and how much.

All of this will be devastating for the EV industry, which is utterly reliant on the carrots and sticks of subsidies and mandates. And it’s particularly bad news for the Trudeau government (and Doug Ford’s government in Ontario), which have gone all-in on EVs, investing billions of taxpayer dollars to convince automakers to build their EVs and batteries here.

Remember that “vehicles are the second largest Canadian export by value, at $51 billion in 2023 of which 93% was exported to the U.S.,” according to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association, and “Auto is Ontario’s top export at 28.9% of all exports (2023).”

Canada’s EV subsidies were pitched as an “investment” in an evolving auto market, but that assumes that those pre-existing lines of trade will remain essentially unchanged. If American EV demand collapses, or significantly contracts without mandates or tax incentives, we’ll be up the river without a paddle.

And that will be true, even if the U.S. EV market proves more resilient than I expect it to. That is because of Trump’s commitment to “Making America Great Again” by boosting American manufacturing and the jobs it provides. He campaigned on a blanket tariff of 10 percent on all foreign imports, with no exceptions mentioned. This would have a massive impact on Canada, since the U.S. is our largest trading partner.

Though Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland have been saying to everyone who will listen how excited they are to work with the Trump Administration again, and “Canada will be fine,” it doesn’t bode well for our country that our economic security rests on tariff exceptions to be negotiated by Liberal politicians who have spent the majority of Trump’s public life calling him a “threat to liberal democracy” and his supporters racists and fascists. Their hostility doesn’t lend itself to fruitful diplomacy.

In any event, Trump’s EV rollback and aggressive tariffs will spell disaster for the Canadian EV sector.

The optimism that existed under the Biden administration that Canada could significantly increase its export capacity to the USA is going down the drain. The hope that “Canada could reestablish its export sector as a key driver of growth by positioning itself as a leader in electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, along with other areas in cleantech,” in the words of an RBC report, is swiftly fading. It seems more likely now that Canada will be left holding the bag on a dying industry in which we’re invested heavily.

The Trudeau Liberals’ aggressive push, driven by ideology and not market forces, to force Electric Vehicles on everyone is already backfiring on the Canadian taxpayer. Pierre Poilievre must take note — EV mandates and subsidies are bad for our country, and as Trump has demonstrated, they’re not a winning policy. He should act accordingly.

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Canadians should expect even more spending in federal fall economic statement

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From the Fraser Institute

By Jake Fuss and Grady Munro

The Trudeau government will soon release its fall economic statement. Though technically intended to be an update on the fiscal plan in this year’s budget, in recent years the fall economic statement has more closely resembled a “mini-budget” that unveils new (and often significant) spending commitments and initiatives.

Let’s look at the data.

The chart below includes projections of annual federal program spending from a series of federal budgets and updates, beginning with the 2022 budget and ending with the latest 2024 budget. Program spending equals total spending minus debt interest costs, and represents discretionary spending by the federal government.

Clearly, there’s a trend that with every consecutive budget and fiscal update the Trudeau government revises spending estimates upwards. Take the last two fiscal years, 2023/24 and 2024/25, for example. Budget 2022 projected annual program spending of $436.5 billion for the 2023/24 fiscal year. Yet the fall economic statement released just months later revised that spending estimate up to $449.8 billion, and later releases showed even higher spending.

The issue is even more stark when examining spending projections for the current fiscal year. Budget 2022 projected annual spending of $441.6 billion in 2024/25. Since then, every subsequent fiscal release has revised that estimate higher and higher, to the point that Budget 2024 estimates program spending of $483.6 billion for this year—representing a $42.0 billion increase from the projections only two years ago.

Meanwhile, as spending estimates are revised upwards, plans to reduce the federal deficit are consistently pushed off into later years.

For example, the 2022 fall economic statement projected a deficit of $25.4 billion for the 2024/25 fiscal year, and declining deficits in the years to come, before reaching an eventual surplus of $4.5 billion in 2027/28. However, subsequent budgets and fiscal updates again revised those estimates. The latest budget projects a deficit of $39.8 billion in 2024/25 that will decline to a $26.8 billion deficit by 2027/28. In other words, though budgets and fiscal updates have consistently projected declining deficits between 2024/25 and 2027/28, each subsequent document has produced larger deficits throughout the fiscal outlook and pushed the timeline for balanced budgets further into the future.

These data illustrate the Trudeau government’s lack of accountability to its own fiscal plans. Though the unpredictable nature of forecasting means the government is unlikely to exactly meet future projections, it’s still reasonable to expect it will roughly follow its own fiscal plans. However, time and time again Canadians have been sold a certain plan, only to have it change dramatically mere months later due to the government’s unwillingness to restrain spending. We shouldn’t expect the upcoming fall economic statement to be any different.

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