November 19 UPDATE -- Is the @CBCOttawa Twitter account being run by a teenage girl?





November 12 UPDATE -- CBC treats anti-oil comedian's diploma-ripping stunt as "news"

Last week I told you about Scott Vrooman, who as a "spokesman" for the anti-oil group 350.org that was picketing 24 Sussex, treated his interview with me like a bad comedy routine.

Later that day, he videotaped himself ripping up his degree from Dalhousie because they refused to divest from oil and gas stocks.

Now the CBC is promoting this as serious "news."

November 6 UPDATE -- #SelfiesWithTrudeau is just another reason to sell the CBC:

The CBC put up sponsored posts on social media asking for people to send in their selfies with Trudeau.

Doesn't that seem weird? (And of course, you paid for it!)

Plus CBC's Peter Mansbridge got exclusive "behind the scenes" access that day. Does that have anything to do with the $150M Trudeau promised the state broadcaster if elected?

October 15 UPDATE -- The CBC is making Palestinian terrorists look like victims:

CBC continues to minimize the recent terror attacks in Israel. Through their biased choice of words and images, the CBC depict Palestinians as victims rather than perpetrators.

CBC also hasn't aired any of the widely available footage of Israelis being randomly attacked by knife-wielding Muslim terrorists.

CBC journalist Margaret Evans has been singled out for criticism in a new investigation by Honest Reporting Canada.

October 14 UPDATE -- Sell the CBC? At least half of you agree:

It used to be a very lonely game critiquing Canada’s state broadcaster, but with CBC failing so badly during this election campaign, I’ve been getting some company.

And as our new poll shows, about half of Canadians agree with me that we should sell CBC. I’ll get to those results in a minute but let’s remind you of why CBC has been critiqued from people normally friendly to them.

In the middle of an election campaign, CBC refused to show a single English language leaders debate.

The Macleans debate, the Globe debate and the Munk Debate were all made available to CBC for broadcast either for free or a nominal fee -- a fee much lower than the cost of producing two hours of television.

They refused to show a single one.

Why? Because they were in a snit.

CBC was upset that the Conservatives had said they wanted some variety in election debates rather than just doing the same old boring debates, with the same old boring host on ridiculous looking sets.

The three debates that did happen were as well produced as anything CBC and the broadcast "consortium" could have put on.

(The main private networks deserve criticism for not showing the debates as well, but we don’t subsidize those networks with more than $1 billion a year.)

Why do we give CBC that billion dollars if they can’t do something as basic as showing an election debate? (It's true: They showed one debate. It was in French and they translated it, but they refused to show the English debates.)

I’ve seen criticism of this from David Akin, my old colleague at Sun. David is not and never has been a CBC hater. Michael Geist, a Toronto Star columnist, criticized CBC for failing on this front. The Globe asked CBC honcho Jennifer Macguire why they didn’t show the debates and she said, “Our position was that they were being broadcast by our competitors. We had no visibility into either the editorial or production pieces of it, and we weren’t a partner.”

They broadcast Roger’s Hockey Night in Canada without any say in how things work, but not an election debate?

It’s a b.s. answer. CBC carries all kinds of live events they don’t have control over and that their competitors are also broadcasting.

They didn’t do it because they couldn’t get their way.

I said their failure to do so showed they should be sold. It’s time to sell the CBC. Thousands of you agreed and signed our petition, many of you opened your wallets and chipped in to say you wanted to help fund our poll to see what Canadians think about selling CBC.

Most people in the media wouldn’t dare ask that kind of question because they all want to work at CBC or they get regular appearance fees so it isn’t in their interest to talk about selling the state broadcaster.

Well, I’m not afraid to talk about it -- and neither are Canadians.

Here is what we put to Canadians using a reputable online panel demographically balanced to reflect the country. We polled 1,506 adult Canadians on October 7th and 8th and the results are considered accurate within 2.5 percentage points 19 times out of 20.



Here is the actual question:

SOME PEOPLE SAY THAT THE CBC SHOULD BE SOLD TO SAVE TAXPAYERS $1 BILLION PER YEAR, WHILE OTHER PEOPLE SAY THE CBC SHOULD KEEP BEING SUBSIDIZED BECAUSE IT IS AN IMPORTANT NATIONAL CULTURAL INSTITUTION. WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS IS CLOSEST TO YOUR OWN POINT OF VIEW? * SELL THE CBC, AND SAVE TAXPAYERS' MONEY * KEEP SUBSIDIZING THE CBC, AND GIVE THEM EVEN MORE MONEY

What did Canadians tell us?

They said they were divided. While 52% said keep CBC and give them more money – and we asked that because that is what Justin Trudeau and Tom Mulcair are promising this election – I was shocked to see that 48% now say sell CBC.



I’ve been at this a long time. I actually wrote the book on CBC failures and laid out the case for selling them in CBC Exposed.

But I’ve never seen support as high as 48%.

When I first asked a pollster to ask Canadians about this, just 33% wanted CBC sold. In 2014, Abacus Data polled for me again and it was up to 45%. Now it is 48%.

In Ontario, the split is 50-50. In British Columbia, 52% say sell. In Alberta, 60% say sell.

Despite what you are told by our cultural gate keepers, CBC is not the treasured national asset they want it to be.

Canadians have mixed feelings on continuing to shovel a billion dollars a year at a broadcaster that can’t perform the basic tasks asked of it by Parliament.

They can’t show a debate but they do compete with every newspaper in the country, not something they were asked to do.

They can’t show a debate but they can run a streaming music service to compete with Apple and Google; I guess without CBC paying royalties to give away music for free, artists like Eric Clapton and Grand Funk Railroad would never get heard. Really, why does CBC run eight online pop music channels?

I want to thank each and everyone of you that signed our petition and donated to the crowd funding of the poll.

Share the poll results with your friends and family – let them know CBC has failed and that just as many Canadians say sell CBC as say keep it.

And if you have someone you know that gets all worked up about the state broadcaster, you can still buy my book CBC Exposed -- and if you want it autographed and personalized, that can happen too. Just go to brianlilley.com/shop and you can get it in time for Christmas.





PS: You can also purchase your very own SELL THE CBC T-SHIRT separately at The Rebel Store by clicking here.

Canada’s state broadcaster fails again. For the third time CBC refused to carry the federal leaders debate.

CBC’s mandate says “…the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, as the national public broadcaster, should provide radio and television services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains.”

Wouldn't showing a national federal election debate fit within that mandate?

All three debates should have been broadcast in full on radio and TV across CBC. Instead the debate was shown on TV by CPAC, and by Hamilton’s little independent station CHCH TV, a station that while seen across many parts of Canada doesn’t have the reach that CBC does.

CBC has been acting like petulant child since the Conservatives decided that they wanted a new debate format rather than the one English and one French organized by the consortium of broadcasters.

If CBC can’t be bothered showing something as important as an election debate, why should we subsidize them?

It's time we sell off CBC.

SIGN OUR PETITION to sell the CBC, by clicking below.

The CBC doesn't have to be shut down, let’s just sell them so that they can sink or swim on their own.

If people like them the way the CBC claims they do, then the CBC will live on.

But we can find out what Canadians really think.

Please DONATE NOW to help us commission a poll. We want to find out if Canadians agree with selling the CBC.

The poll will cost about $1,500, please CLICK BELOW to donate right now.

You can also purchase your very own SELL THE CBC T-SHIRT by clicking here.

CBC outlived its usefulness long ago, if it was ever useful. But failing to show federal election debates while asking for special taxes to give you more money just shows how entitled and out of touch these guys are.

PS: Here at The Rebel, we've been critical of the state broadcaster from the start: