Looking for political news at CBC's The Current

If you were in charge of a national news program, and every morning you featured three stories that Canadians should know about, how often do you think your stories would talk about politics? The politics could be municipal, provincial or federal but, as a national radio news magazine, federal is the easiest of the three, as it ensures that you will have the widest group of people who are directly impacted by what’s being talked about.

Or maybe you see your job as needing to promote and highlight the politics that are happening locally. You are part of a network that informs Canadians about their own neighbours — to surpass the regional barriers that remain perniciously in place after all these years. What are the lessons that can be learned from the Gatineau by-election, by Blaine Higgs’ connection to New Brunswick’s corporate overlords, by the apparent nosedive taken by Scott Moe? Any of these stories make for compelling radio. How often would you feature them?

Canada used to have a radio program that did feature these kinds of stories. Every morning at 8:38 or so, you could tune in to CBC Radio and hear a story that was related to some kind of politics. You could figure out who to blame or praise for this or that thing. A politician might be questioned live on the radio, by a skilled interviewer. It made CBC Radio’s The Current worth listening to.

When the show’s host Anna-Maria Tremonti retired in 2019, they swapped in the host for Toronto’s drive-in radio show, Matt Galloway. All of a sudden, Galloway, who used to grill city and provincial officials on his daily show, became a limp fish. His questions all follow the same format: short question, cuts himself off, rambles a bit about what he expects the answer will be and then re-asks the same question. It doesn’t matter if he’s interviewing a baseball announcer a doctor or an author — it all follows the same pattern.

But it isn’t his interviewing that is the trouble. When I asked you how often did you think your show would feature political news in Canada, did you answer: rarely?

I listened to The Current for the first time in a long time last Monday morning. The segment I caught was about competition in Canada’s airline industry. Galloway’s questions were infantile: “What makes the major airlines think they can get away with nickel and dimming Canadians,” he asks one guest, an American university professor. Oh, I dunno Matt. Maybe it’s because it isn’t illegal and they can pretty much do what they want? Is this really the thing you wrote down on your cue card before you were live to air?

The politics of the show are long gone. The last time that show had a segment about federal politics was on May 7. Almost a month has gone by since the producers thought to check in on federal politics. And even a month ago, the segment was just a conversation with Paul Wells about Justin Trudeau. Like, in general. In that same period of time, there was just one single segment on provincial politics: PEI’s decision to limit immigration visas.

Let’s get conspiratorial about it: since Galloway took the host chair, there has been an editorial decision to suppress political coverage at The Current. Coverage of the Liberals will look biased towards the Liberals and coverage of the Conservatives will look biased towards the Liberals and so it’s better if the show features a clown parade of the latest positive thinking or bee-adjacent books coming out from the United States. What about how “Walking backwards might 'look a little weird,' but it could be just the exercise you need?” Maybe I’m being unfair — walking backwards might save your life.

The show cannot afford to have an honest political conversation and so what’s better than filling their segments with fluff?

There was a time before an edict went out within the corporation to no longer invite me onto their shows that I was on The Current kind of regularly. I recall one segment was about the Conservative leadership race and I was on because I had attended one of the two debates that were held as a reporter for Rabble.ca. Funnily, not only was it my last time hired specifically to do political analysis for CBC but it was also the last time that the Conservatives gave me media accreditation.

Now, there isn’t a reason to get conspiratorial about anything. I don’t think that there is a grand conspiracy within the CBC to support the Liberals. I do think that there is a conspiracy to hide under some coats though, and hope that everything blows over just in time for the CBC to emerge as relevant again. Hiding under coats is a fine strategy if you’re trying to make someone forget you exist but it is famously known that if you make yourself irrelevant, it will mean that you are irrelevant. That’s not a good place for the public broadcaster to be in as the Conservatives promise to destroy the corporation when they are next elected. Please take notes from the NDP.

But you gotta imagine that Poilievre laughs when he tunes in by accident because it’s the only thing on the radio when he’s driving between North Bay and Temagami as he works on stealing Ontario’s north from the NDP. Segment, segment, segment — who is taking any of this seriously?

Lucky for him, increasingly fewer people.