Business
CBC staff with six figure salaries balloons under Trudeau government
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.
Business
Warning Canada: China’s Economic Miracle Was Built on Mass Displacement
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again: Dimon Liu’s warning to Canadian Parliament.
Editor’s Note: The Bureau is publishing the following testimony to Canada’s House of Commons committee on International Human Rights from Dimon Liu, a China-born, Washington, D.C.-based democracy advocate who testified in Parliament on December 8, 2025, about the human cost of China’s economic rise. Submitted to The Bureau as an op-ed, Liu’s testimony argues that the Canadian government should tighten scrutiny of high-risk trade and investment, and ensure Canada’s foreign policy does not inadvertently reward coercion. Liu also warns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain leverage over Canadians and treat them as it has done to its own subjugated population—an implied message to Prime Minister Mark Carney, who has pledged to engage China as a strategic partner without making that position clear to Canadians during his election campaign.
OTTAWA — It is an honor to speak before you at the Canadian Parliament.
My testimony will attempt to explain why China’s economic success is built on the backs of the largest number of displaced persons in human history.
It is estimated that these displaced individuals range between 300 to 400 million — it is equivalent to the total population of the United States being uprooted and forced to relocate. These displaced persons are invisible to the world, their sufferings unnoticed, their plights ignored.
In 1978, when economic reform began, China’s GDP was $150 billion USD.
In 2000, when China joined the WTO, it was approximately $1.2 trillion USD.
China’s current GDP is approximately $18 trillion USD.
In 2000 China’s manufacturing output was smaller than Italy’s.
Today it’s larger than America, Europe, Japan, and South Korea combined.
If you have ever wondered how China managed to grow so fast in such a short time, Charles Li, former CEO of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, has the answers for you.
He listed 4 reasons: 1) cheapest land, 2) cheapest labor, 3) cheapest capital, and 4) disregard of environmental costs.
“The cheapest land” because the CCP government took the land from the farmers at little to no compensation.
“The cheapest labor,” because these farmers, without land to farm, were forced to find work in urban areas at very low wages.
The communist household registration system (hukou 戶口) ties them perpetually to the rural areas. This means they are not legal residents, and cannot receive social benefits that legal urban residents are entitled. They could be evicted at any time.
One well known incident of eviction occurred in November 2017. Cai Qi, now the second most powerful man in China after Xi Jinping, was a municipal official in Beijing. He evicted tens of thousands into Beijing’s harsh winter, with only days, or just moments of notice. Cai Qi made famous a term, “low-end population” (低端人口), and exposed CCP’s contempt of rural migrants it treats as second class citizens.
These displaced migrant workers have one tradition they hold dear — it is to reunite with their families during the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday, making this seasonal migration of 100 to 150 million people a spectacular event. In China’s economic winter of 2025 with waves of bankruptcies and factory closures, the tide of unemployed migrant workers returning home to where there is also no work, and no land to farm, has become a worrisome event.
Historically in the last 2,000 years, social instability has caused the collapse of many ruling regimes in China.
“The cheapest capital” is acquired through predatory banking practices, and through the stock markets, first to rake in the savings of the Chinese people; and later international investments by listing opaque, and state owned enterprises in leading stock markets around the world.
“A disregard of environmental costs” is a hallmark of China’s industrialization. The land is poisoned, so is the water; and China produces one-third of all global greenhouse gases.
Chinese Communist officials often laud their system as superior. The essayist Qin Hui has written that the Chinese communist government enjoys a human rights abuse advantage. This is true. By abusing its own people so brutally, the CCP regime has created an image of success, which will prove to be a mirage.
If you think the CCP will treat foreigners better than its own people, when it extends its power over you, please think again.
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Business
Judge Declares Mistrial in Landmark New York PRC Foreign-Agent Case
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan declared a mistrial Monday afternoon in the high-profile foreign-agent and corruption case against former New York state official Linda Sun and her husband Chris Hu, after jurors reported they were hopelessly deadlocked on all 19 counts.
After restarting deliberations Monday morning with an alternate juror, the panel sent a note to Judge Cogan stating:
“Your honor, after extensive deliberations and redeliberations the jury remains unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The jurors’ positions are firmly held.”
Cogan brought the jury into court and asked the foreman whether they had reached agreement on any counts. They replied that they were deadlocked on every one. The judge then declared a mistrial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Alexander Solomon immediately told the court that the government intends to retry the case “as soon as possible.” A status conference is scheduled for January 26, 2026, to determine next steps.
Jury selection began November 10, 2025, and the government called 41 witnesses to the stand, compared with eight for the defense and one rebuttal witness for the prosecution. Deliberations began on December 12, and by this afternoon the jurors had sent three notes to the court — each indicating deadlock.
As The Bureau reported in its exclusive analysis Friday, the panel’s fracture had become visible as jurors headed into a second week of deliberations in a landmark foreign-agent and corruption trial that reached into two governors’ offices — a case asking a jury of New Yorkers to decide whether Sun secretly served Beijing’s interests while she and Hu built a small business and luxury-property empire during the pandemic, cashing in on emergency procurement as other Americans were locked down.
Prosecutors urged jurors to accept their account of a dense web of family and Chinese-community financial transactions through which Sun and Hu allegedly secured many millions of dollars in business deals tied to “United Front” proxies aligned with Beijing. The defense, by contrast, argued that Sun and Hu were simply successful through legitimate, culturally familiar transactions, not any covert scheme directed by a foreign state.
Sun and Hu face 19 charges in total, including allegations that Sun acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the People’s Republic of China; visa-fraud and alien-smuggling counts tied to a 2019 Henan provincial delegation; a multimillion-dollar pandemic PPE kickback scheme; bank-fraud and identity-misuse allegations; and multiple money-laundering and tax-evasion counts.
Prosecutors have argued that the clearest money trail ran through New York’s COVID procurement scramble and a pair of Jiangsu-linked emails. In closing, Solomon told jurors that Sun’s “reward” for steering contracts was “millions of dollars in kickbacks or bribes,” contending the money was routed through accounts opened in Sun’s mother’s name and via friends and relatives.
The government has tied those claims to a broader narrative — laid out in Solomon’s summation and dissected in The Bureau’s reporting — that Sun functioned as a “trusted insider” who repurposed state access and letterhead to advance Beijing’s priorities, including by allegedly forging Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature on invitation letters used for Chinese provincial delegations, while keeping those relationships hidden from colleagues. The defense, in turn, urged jurors to reject the government’s picture of clandestine agency and argued prosecutors had overreached by treating ordinary diaspora networking, trade promotion, and pandemic procurement as criminal conduct — insisting none of the evidence proved the “direction or control” element central to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
Whether a future jury will see the same evidence as corruption and covert foreign agency or as culturally familiar commerce and politics — will now be tested again, on a new timetable, in a courtroom that has already shown just how difficult this record is to unanimously interpret.
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