Who is on CBC's blacklist?
The news of a CBC Blacklist came out yesterday when former CBC employee Travis Dhanraj presented to a parliamentary committee. He said that there’s a list of 45 people who CBC has formally said they refuse to have on.
Side note (March 13): Bruce Arthur at the Toronto Star talked with anonymous CBC employees who said that Dhanraj’s main beef was that he couldn’t take the show in directions that the show wasn’t intended to be taken. I have written before about how Dhanraj is obviously a conservative trying to make a career of being a maverick, and leveraging his career at CBC to do it. Regardless of what he says or said or will say, my experiences have very little to do with the right-wing campaign that’s being organized around this issue.
There’s no question about whether or not CBC has a blacklist. It isn’t by accident that the most exciting, critical and compelling voices in English Canada are never allowed on the air. The question is: who is on it?
Back in 2015-2017, my career was starting to take off. My kids were in daycare. I was in a transition from leaving my blog at Rabble and moving to something new. I was uniquely located in Quebec City, giving me a bit of an edge to talk about federal politics. I was on The Current three times from 2016 to 2017 talking about young workers, the Conservative leadership race and something else I forget. It was normal for me, and for my fellow lefties, to be on the air.
In April 2017, I was on The National to talk about the anti-Islamophobia Bill M-103. The interview was short. I was involved in solidarity actions fighting Islamophobia in Quebec City and I talked a bit about that.
Someone formally complained against this appearance. They called me an Islamo-Marxist and challenged The National’s decision to have me on. The complaint was eventually dismissed as being without merit, but that was it for me. I felt the door close. I wouldn’t be asked on any current affairs program for analysis anywhere at the CBC, ever again.
Many people thought that the CBC’s attitude towards me was related to l’affaire Humboldt. After April 2018, it had perhaps became that, but in the beginning, no, I had been blocked a year earlier.
The blacklist’s impact was laid bare to me in 2020, where despite the fact that I was Canada’s only journalist tracking COVID-19 deaths related to outbreaks int he workplace, the CBC wouldn’t have anything to do with me. Once I heard Dr. Brian Goldman repeat my journalism on the air, though attributing it to Toronto Star journalists, I knew that my journalism work with CBC was over, forever. Where other COVID-19 experts and personalities would have dozens of interviews per day, I never once spoke with the CBC. This was particularly irritating, given that my journalism was way ahead what I heard coming out of my own local station. They’d usually report what I had already published one or two days later.
There were some exceptions to this. Radio-Canada had no similar limitation. I was on Piya Chattopadhyay’s show once in like 2019. And miraculously, for about two years, I was part of a rotating cast of characters on the Sunday morning television show that talked about random stuff. There, I talked about Dr. Seuss, about the Canadian Screen Awards, drugs — whatever the producers thought Canadians would want to hear about any given week. The one time COVID-19 happened to be the issue, because of my background, I had something to say that sounded more like journalism. Some poor soul at The National clipped my interview and broadcast it, and the Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley reigned hell upon the corporation for that mistake. (Remember: the blacklist isn’t just a list — it’s a contested space where enemies do everything possible to buttress the corporation’s decision to do the blacklisting).
I’ve also been on CBC Radio’s Syndication service three times in five years, where producers there have a bit more of a spine.
The Sunday morning TV show, The Sunday Conversation was cut on like December 28, 2023. They could no longer risk having people accidentally say anything about Israel. Of course, that wasn’t the official reason for why the program was axed (it was money!) The show was popular and cheap to produce, but it didn’t matter. The corporation was shedding itself of any chance for anyone to stage an on-air protest. The two dozen or so of us who were on the panel may have decided to do something to embarrass the public broadcaster in the eyes of Israel, it was best to cut it entirely.
When they first approached me to join the show, I asked how on earth I was allowed to be on, given the frostiness everywhere else and I was told — it’s Sunday morning. We get away with more stuff here than any other time in the schedule. Critically though, I was never there as a journalist. Instead, as an active and engaged citizen.
I’m far from being alone in having these experiences. Erica Ifill detailed her own moment of realizing that she was blacklisted:
Sarbjit Kaur explained how she felt the door slam abruptly, and that she’s sure it was related to her position on Israel’s genocide.
The corporation cares more about pleasing the state than doing journalism, and you can see the result of that: boring and basic coverage, cowardly commentary, tune-outable television that has chosen to make itself irrelevant.
Given the attention that this has gotten from the Conservatives and the right-wing press, I can only assume that these 45 people are right wingers who the CBC believes are nuts (and I can say that the producers at The Conversation were desperate to feature not-nuts conservatives and asked us all the time for panellist suggestions). The CBC’s bias is clear: they serve the government. Liberal today, Conservative tomorrow. But it’s actively hostile to those of us on the left, and this hostility is done at its own peril.
The final thing I’ll note is this. If you read about the careers of any major literary figures in Canada’s history — both fiction and nonfiction, essayists, poets, playwrights — they all list the CBC as being part of their career somehow. They worked there, filled in on air, wrote scripts, moved in and out of the public broadcaster.
As an Anglophone living in Quebec City, CBC should be my professional lifeline. There are only like 5 working English journalists in this city of 800,000. If it were 30 years ago, there’d be no question that the station would be a source of work, promotion and engagement. Today, it’s so irrelevant to my day-to-day life, that I barely remember it exists. They have never featured any of my five books just because I’m a local author. They have never asked me for analysis or comment. Impossible to imagine they asking for a weekly column. Completely insane to imagine that I’d be asked to freelance (ignore my unfinished radio degree, or the fact that I speak English, or the fact that I live here and sometimes they do need to take anyone, or the fact that I’m a nationally-recognized podcaster). No, I’m on some stupid list somewhere. And as a result, my career gets zero help from what is supposed to be our cultural engine.
I would drop Substack in a heartbeat if the public broadcaster had a similar platform for independent journalists. I would say yes without hesitating to doing something on air. But that’s no longer how Canada works.
The CBC News/Current Affairs have become compromised imho. They have lost the trust that I had in their reporting, and with it also my loyalty as someone who’s been tuned in since the mid 1980s. I can certainly relate in questioning their relevance beyond serving and supporting the establishments powers and voices. Thanks Nora for speaking out on this blacklist.
I'm glad you are here.