On Wednesday, Nov. 26, as former CBC Radio star Jian Ghomeshi was being arraigned in a Toronto courtroom on four counts of sexual assault and one of resistance by choking, Chris Boyce, executive director of CBC Radio, a man Ghomeshi once called his professional “mentor,” was facing a different kind of scrutiny as he submitted to questions on-camera from Gillian Findlay, host of CBC’s The Fifth Estate. In the interview, part of a documentary chronicling Ghomeshi’s rise and spectacular fall, Findlay dropped a bombshell on Boyce that would soon shock viewers too: while CBC management claimed it investigated Ghomeshi, then the host of Q, with a “cross-section” of the show’s staff before firing him on Oct. 26, 16 of 17 Q staffers told The Fifth Estate they had never been approached. There appeared to be no investigation, Findlay concluded. An increasingly rattled Boyce demurred, saying there had been one—and that Todd Spencer, director of human resources, and Linda Groen, director of network talk radio, had participated.

That Friday, just hours before the program aired, Spencer convened a meeting with the Q unit, a gathering that took on the Kafka-by-way-of-Monty Python cast that has coloured post-Ghomeshi-scandal communication from CBC management. Spencer reiterated there had been an investigation, but it had been done so covertly that they might not have realized it was an investigation. So subtle was this investigation, in fact, that even the investigators were unaware of it: on Monday, a leaked email from Groen to Boyce surfaced, in which she denied she’d ever been asked to investigate complaints about Ghomeshi’s behaviour, “formally or otherwise.”

In the past month, public airings of internal CBC dysfunction have become a national spectacle—allegations from current and former Q staffers of Ghomeshi’s abusive behaviour that includes a charge of sexual harassment; leaked memos that banned (and then unbanned) former CBC-TV host Linden MacIntyre from the airwaves for daring to mention that Peter Mansbridge was “no shrinking violet” when discussing Ghomeshi and the “toxic” atmosphere at CBC. The gong show continued this week, as the Canadian Media Guild (CMG), the CBC employee union, sent a memo cautioning members from participating in a third-party investigation into Ghomeshi’s behaviour at the CBC conducted by lawyer Janice Rubin—a measure ostensibly intended to bring clarity, resolution and new proactive policy recommendations. The union threw a spanner into the process, airing concern that Rubin’s recordings of conversations with CBC staff may “be provided to CBC management” who could use them “to discipline the employee being interviewed.”

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Management countered with a memo that called some of the CMG’s information “incorrect.” It said Rubin informed every person who has come forward “that these recordings are for her use only and they will not be provided to CBC/Radio-Canada.” The memo then went on to raise more questions, suggesting that people who come forward to talk could, in fact, face disciplinary action, as the CMG had claimed. According to the new memo: “In the case where a participant faces discipline as a result of information provided during the investigation, the participant would be allowed to review a transcript of the interview to make sure it accurately reflects the interview and their own statements.” Employees must surely be more confused than ever.

Inside the CBC, the grim mood is exacerbated by a sense that public trust is eroding at a delicate and crucial time. “Why should anyone think anyone competent is working in the CBC right now?” one frustrated employee asks. “We may as well run a CBC doomsday clock.” Beyond the CBC’s walls, the scandal, and the Crown corporation’s handling of it, has laid bare a complex ecosystem: a labyrinthine bureaucracy that seemed to permit all manner of wrongdoing; a destabilized workforce shaken by some $230 million in funding cuts over the past three years that made it vulnerable to the demands of a coddled star; a management that seems determined to stand by its faulty decisions—if it says anything at all. President Hubert Lacroix has been largely absent as the biggest scandal in years has engulfed his organization.

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