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/petitions/defund-the-cbc-and-end-media-bailout

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersFederation #CatherineTait #CBCBonuses #FrancoTerrazzano

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Worst kept secret—red tape strangling Canada’s economy

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

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 industry, child care, supermarkets 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

Business

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

Published on February 22, 2025

Todayville

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.