‘The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice’

Part 2: An interview with the late author and veteran CBC broadcaster, David Cayley

[Part 1]

Linda Pannozzo (LP): In your book you argue that the CBC should be about having conversations, as difficult and polarized as that might be, as opposed to what you call presenting a “settled narrative or a single authorized version of things.” The CBC is a large organization. How do you think this kind of orthodoxy to an official narrative—where information or competing viewpoints are omitted or certain questions just don’t get asked—how does this occur? Are there directives coming from above, within the CBC or outside the CBC, influencing the editing process? Or is it self-censorship among the reporters? How do you think this actually happens?

David Cayley (DC): Well, that’s a big, big question. First of all, I think group mind is more significant than any directive. Let me go back to what began to form my view. In 1975, I was the producer of the morning show in Vancouver when I witnessed something that I hadn’t consciously been aware of seeing before, which was a complete change of narrative. It’s not a surprise that somebody my age had been an opponent of the Vietnam War. It would be a surprise if I wasn’t. But suddenly, just before what came to be known as the Fall of Saigon, I witnessed something that looked to me like a kind of revolving stage set in which the lights went down, the set revolved, a completely new scene presented itself, and everyone acted as if that had been the scene all along. In other words, we were losing a war—not that this had been a foregone conclusion since 1954, if not from 1924—and what would follow would be the [Operation] Babylift, the trouble in Cambodia, but with its antecedents all erased. So, the civil war in Cambodia was very rarely connected to the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

I was quite puzzled by this. I would say a similar thing happened at 9-11. I think you could go back to the beginning of the First World War, where one historian described it as sleepwalking, a kind of trance state in which people enter into new realities. The beginning of COVID was another. But anyway, I was very puzzled. So, the book that made some sense of it for me was Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s Political Economy of Human Rights, a two-volume work which looked at the media coverage, amongst other things, of Southeast Asia, and discovered that the genocide in Cambodia was patent. How extensive it was, what its antecedents were, those were debatable, but clearly there was a genocide of a kind.

David Cayley, Photo: Obituary

There was, at the same time in East Timor another genocide carried out by the Indonesian regime, which was a friend to the United States. Chomsky and Herman compared the two and found that East Timor essentially didn’t exist in the media and that Cambodia dominated the media. So, we see what is brought before us, and what is bought before us is some sort of worldview which has pre-eminently a friend-enemy structure. I think that’s a way of summarizing Chomsky and Herman, but what they showed and later argued more explicitly in Manufacturing Consent was that a free media can operate as a propaganda system, and it can operate that way because essentially it wants to be agreeable to its sources and agreeable to its audience. What it’s an agent of is quite a complicated question because one will say of an economic interest, one will say of a zeitgeist. I don’t want to try and settle that here. It’s a lot of different things.

But I think this is a question—when we come back to the CBC—of the world that these broadcasters belong to and recognize as a world. It’s not a question of anybody saying, you must do this, you have to do that.

LP: So, the reporters, editors, etc., they themselves embody an ideology?

DC: I think so. I think the media are rarely original, and in a certain way, a mass medium can’t be original. That’s why you would have a public broadcaster, in order to liberate it from some of the constraints that make mass media elements of the status quo.

LP: Some people would argue that if the CBC reported some of these competing points of view, from the perspective of different publics, let’s say, there would be a risk of amplifying misinformation or” bad actors,” which is a term that I’ve heard a lot in the last four or five years. What are your thoughts on that?

DC: Well, I think it’s a repressive theory. It’s more or less what the current Prime Minister said when he said he would support the CBC as an organ of national unity and misinformation prevention. He wants it to be a cheerleader and to do down contrary opinions.

I don’t want to argue that the CBC has ever been some sort of transparent, perfect public forum. I think it achieved some things in that respect in its first era, when there was an adult education emphasis, when there really was an attempt to go out and gather opinion from citizens—Citizens’ Forum and Farm Radio Forum were some of the names of these programs. They can be over-emphasized to the point of overlooking the fact that it [the CBC] was also an entertainment medium carrying a lot of popular entertainment.

But I think it has become unusually narrow. It would take courage, it would involve risk, and it would involve a new theory, I think. That the CBC should be exemplary rather than representative is not an idea that anybody has much at the moment. It would involve a number of changes in assumption, and it would be risky, because it was the logic that was introduced to the CBC by Richard Stursberg when he took over television in 2005. He was blunt: if it’s not popular and nobody’s watching it, there’s no point in it. It was a straight calculus. ‘These programs that I’m cancelling may be worthy, but they’re not getting enough viewers. If we don’t have a million viewers, it doesn’t count.’ He was blunt about it.

That was his theory. If you’re not popular, you may as well shut up. There was no room in it for what I called being an example, for doing something exemplary, for calling the public to you even if they don’t immediately come, for any imperative outside of being popular. It doesn’t have any foundation, I don’t think.

LP: I want to explore the topic of misinformation and disinformation a little bit more. In your book you mention an organization called ScienceUpFirst, which claims to decipher what is misinformation in the scientific realm and its core funding comes from the Public Health Agency of Canada and also the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. It started in 2021, and according to a government press release, with the aim to encourage COVID-19 vaccine uptake by sharing “credible information on vaccines.” Former Senator Stan Kutcher was one of the founders of the organization—I don’t know how much about his past that you know, but I’m going to include some detail in an endnote in the post. But basically Kutcher has been highly connected to big pharma as a paid consultant, and he was also a ghostwriter of a very controversial study about antidepressants, where court documents have indicated that data were hidden and the reported results were misleading. Despite this information, which is available in the public realm, none of this is hidden away, the CBC kept turning to this organization without ever mentioning Kutcher’s track record. What are your thoughts on that?

DC: Well, my first thought is that this sounds like a subject of which I should be interviewing you, not you interviewing me. But what I know is what Rodney Palmer, an old CBC and CTV editor who testified to the National Citizens Inquiry, showed. He showed in his testimony that every source to whom the CBC regularly turned during the pandemic was subsidized by ScienceUpFirst. So, that’s about all I know. It isn’t just that they were subsidized—as if they had been bought and sold—but that they formed a community of opinion and the CBC only turned to that band of opinion.

It was evident to me from March 20 [2020] onward that there was a very major split in scientific opinion, and that’s easy to document. For me, it begins with John Ioannidis, who was as famous a scientist as probably there is, because of his having touched off the so-called reputation crisis with an article called “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” Ioannidis wrote on March 17th that to formulate policy in the absence of data would potentially be fatal. No one yet knew what the character of this disease was. There were stories from China about Wuhan’s great success in controlling it. There were scary images from New York and Bergamo. But essentially, little was known.

I didn’t know this at the time, but on March the 20th, Dr. Richard Schabas—who was for ten years the Chief Public Health Officer of Ontario, a man deserving of the trust of his fellow Ontarians, who behaved in an exemplary way during the first SARS crisis, and gave good advice to the public and had been regularly on CBC radio and television—gave an interview to CBC News World, in which he raised some questions about the advisability of lockdown as a policy. It was, in his eyes, a policy that violated all the major tenets of public health orthodoxy in his time. He expressed himself well, he expressed himself moderately, but he did raise questions.¹

That interview was taken down before the end of the day. Letters which Schabas obtained and shared with me, and also sent to the CBC Ombudsman, were sent out, emails saying, ‘no more Richard Schabas. This is like entertaining a climate change denier.’ That was a direct quote. He’s cancelled.

Later that summer, a whole galaxy of public health veterans, including the former chief [public health officer] from Manitoba, three former Canadian chiefs, a bunch of former deans of medicine, put out a quite mild open letter to the Prime Minister, saying that, ‘What’s going on is out of line with what we think is sound public health policy,’ calling for a balanced approach. They didn’t even get a hearing.

I found out about that letter two months later when a friend mentioned it to me, and I thought, ‘No, that can’t be. Former public health establishment objects and nobody even covers it?’ But it was true. It was an open letter to the prime minister, but I never heard of it. Nobody I knew had heard of it. But essentially, that’s the former establishment speaking. So, this is this strange phenomenon that I mentioned of a scene change or a set change. Suddenly a new orthodoxy is in effect and what was an acceptable opinion is now an unacceptable opinion. But it’s very easy to show that many, many prominent, credentialed, sober scientists thought that the policy following COVID was unwise, and they were excluded from what some people call the legacy media. That’s also easy to show. Basically, their opinions were treated as misinformation.

Dr. Richard Schabas was Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health from 1987-1997. During the first SARS outbreak, Schabas was chief of staff at York Central Hospital (2002-2005). Schabas was cancelled from the CBC in 2020 because he raised questions about the advisability of lockdown as a pandemic policy.

LP: In terms of the way forward, you write that the CBC could be “a stable ground from which to analyze and understand the whirlygig of apparent change.” What kind of programming decisions would signify that a shift is taking place in that direction at the CBC?

DC: It wouldn’t start with programming. I think it really begins in a personal stance, in habits of thought, in a disposition, which would express itself in programs. That is, when you talk about programming decisions, you’re already talking about something achieved. I think it has to percolate. I think people have to think differently.

There’s a whole chapter of the book called “Living in the Question,” which is partly inspired by a German philosopher called Hans-Georg Gadamer, but it really holds that there is a virtue in questions, there’s a virtue in conversation. A question can be a doorway; we can be led by our conversation rather than leading it. So that disposition, to be surprised, to listen.

I think there are many, many habits of thought that prevent that disposition from showing itself. One is identity, and identity means something that’s static, something that is contained within itself, something that’s the same as itself, something already achieved. I have my identity. You and I maybe share an identity, so we want to cultivate our group feeling. It works against the sense of something not yet discovered, something not yet known, the pursuit of an opening in a subject that looks closed. It demands a certain distance, it demands a disposition of unknowing rather than, ‘I know and I want to convince the others.’

Since I wrote this [book], people have asked me, ‘How would you implement these changes at the CBC?’ Implement? Excuse me? I have no idea! I’m asking for a reassessment of the circumstances and a reassessment of the character of the CBC and its people. I think it has to begin with a different set of starting points. It can’t begin as a program.

LP: In an interview that you did with The National Post, you were quoted as saying, “The CBC’s idea that it would belong to the audience, that it would stake its legitimacy on the audience has brought it to a place where it has only one preferred audience and can’t address the rest of the country.” What argument would you use to convince those people who find themselves in the CBC’s preferred audience that there needs to be a change with the CBC?

DC: It does have an audience. It’s lost a lot of that audience. It’s a very common thing for me to meet younger people who grew up in households where—I’m sure it was an exaggeration— their CBC radio was never turned off. The people who tell me this don’t listen to the CBC now. They listen to podcasts because [they say] the podcasts are more pertinent. Maybe the podcasts are more pertinent and the CBC can’t be all things to all people, but I think losing the ear of the country, or part of the country—I don’t think we can live well together in a state of suspended civil war. I don’t think we can live well together on the assumption that disagreeable opinions are misinformation.

I would like to argue that misinformation to the extent that it exists—and I’m not denying that somebody may believe that Bill Gates has two heads, and he manifestly doesn’t—but what appears as misinformation is always arising out of a stance, some posture in which people have found themselves, and which needs questioning, which might prove itself to be permeable if questioned.

So, I think the present situation is not a viable one, and not long-term. Mr. Carney may look like daddy and it may work for a while, but in the end, he’s just re-presented the old policy and I think the disaffection won’t go away, the questions won’t go away.

It’s not just an era in the life of the CBC that has ended. It is an era in the life of the world. That the times of trial may be very, very prolonged before any new age of the world takes shape. But I think the CBC should be on the side of questioning, of open-mindedness, and I think fundamentally, a posture of openness and of recognizing that.

So, these are the kind of arguments I would make to the hypothetical CBC listener. I think I would also probably try and draw their attention to the strange fate of the social democratic left, which is very visible in the pandemic. The people who wouldn’t let a morsel of genetically modified food past their lips, who were settled opponents of big pharma, who knew some of the scandalous facts of the pharmaceutical industry’s power and abuse of that power, suddenly—again I would argue through fear and through enemy psychology—as soon as they hear their neighbour say, ‘this is an experimental vaccine,’ they know their neighbour is spreading misinformation. That’s not reasonable. Of course, it was an experimental vaccine. It hadn’t been tried before. What does experimental mean? It was a novel genetic technology, and nobody except the ‘yahoos’ said so. Strange phenomenon. So, I think there’s some hope in the social democratic left somehow coming to its senses here, to being freed of this enemy structure.

After all, amongst other things, what showed up in Ottawa in 2022 was the working class for whom the social democratic left used to pretend it spoke. So, I think there’s a lot of soul-searching that could go on amongst the right-left-thinking.

LP: Is there anything I haven’t touched on that you would like my readers to know or that you feel you just want to expand on?

DC: I had a blessed career at the CBC. I was so, so lucky, and some of that was personal. I had a good boss and what was given to us at Ideas in the 30 years between 1980 and when I left in 2012 was a chance to try and exemplify the kind of attitudes I’ve talked about: to engage in a kind of trans-political questioning. It was something we tried to do. So, it’s there. I don’t mean anything more than that. Ideas could be a different program than it is now without having to change its format or change its branding. It just has to behave differently, think more deeply.

The book isn’t a blueprint or a plan of any kind, it’s saying that this is a unique time—all times are unique—but we need to discern the character of the time and the proper role of public broadcasting, and that discernment will have to involve a certain amount of thinking, a certain amount of questioning, a certain amount of unknowing of things now thought to be known, a certain distance, and getting over the assumptions that we need to get as close as we can to one another. Perhaps we need to stand back and allow a little space in which this questioning could flower, and new things might appear.

I do feel strongly that there is an upside to living in interesting times. There is a loosening, for some at least, of quite stifling assumptions. But that adventure has to be embraced and not lost to a reactionary mood. I know I can be misunderstood on this question of reaction, but I just mean it pretty much in terms of physics: about going back. It doesn’t matter if it’s “Making America Great Again,” or it’s restoring “trusted news” or faithfully “following science.” It’s all an attempt to [re-establish] the modernity that is failing, and involves throwing away a precious opportunity to think of what might replace it.

In conversation with David Cayley on Facetime, June 8, 2026.

At the end of our formal interview, David and I spoke for about ten more minutes on a more personal level. We didn’t know each other well, but we had formed a connection. For me, that connection (albeit a one-sided one at the time) began when listening to his Ideas broadcasts on CBC. I appreciated how his default was depth—trying to understand things, and not shying away from difficult topics.

A mutual connection was forged during the pandemic. His first essay on the pandemic — and why I reached out to him in the first place — resonated not only for me, but for many around the world. David said it went viral, and was translated into nearly every European language. “I think it’s as famous as I’m ever going to get.”

Near the end of our recent Facetime interview, we talked a bit about our own reactions to the pandemic and how those were likely influenced by our individual worldviews or stances.

“Do you think faith has anything to with it? Something that would make you less afraid of freedom, or more valuing of freedom than control?” David asked.

“I didn’t feel fear about the pandemic itself, I felt fear about the control being exerted.”

“Me too,” David replied. “We had that in common.”

“Do you think it’s important that those people, us, find each other?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Before he died, David was working on a short book about “the pandemic as a watershed.” He hoped the book, ultimately, would help to bring people together. He said he wanted to write the book as an “open letter” to “an old friend on the left,” who he had a “falling out with” during the pandemic.

We made a tentative plan that I’d visit him again the next time I was in Toronto.

A few years ago, I had the honour of visiting David, and meeting his wife and collaborator Jutta Mason, at his home. We spent three hours sitting at his dining room table engaged in a wide-ranging conversation whilst munching on pistachios. I felt I had met a kindred spirit. It’s a memory I will cherish.

A few days ago, CBC Ideas rebroadcast David Cayley’s program on the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney. At the end of the piece, host Nahlah Ayed said that David passed away “after singing a song at his weekly bluegrass night.”

According to his obituary, “One of [David’s] great joys was playing music with friends, as he was doing at the moment of his death.” He was surrounded by family.

Rest in peace, David.

---

1. In his book, Cayley goes into more detail about Dr. Richard Schabas who had been Ontario’s chief medical officer of health for ten years from 1987 to 1997, during which time the CBC interviewed him “hundreds of times.” The CBC reached out to Schabas during the SARS outbreak in 2003, when he was chief of staff at York Central, one of the hospitals affected by the outbreak. At the time Schabas was critical of the panic-inducing public health messaging, which he says should have been reconsidered as more information became available. The CBC turned to Schabas again in March 2020.

Cayley writes:

In his interview on March 22, 2020, he [Schabas] questioned some of the measures, like lock downs, that were being taken against COVID-19. The interview disappeared from the CBC’s website the day it was posted. CBC News Managing Editor Tracey Seeley wrote to her colleagues: “NN [News Network] unfortunately ran an interview with Dr. Schabas this morning, and a clip was included in our web story. We… had Uncoder unpublish it completely. [Such] sources are considered ‘the climate change denier’ equivalent of corona prevention.” Dr. Schabas, Seeley said, was an “outlier” and “should be treated as such.”

Cayley says, “this set the tone for coverage in which scientific disagreements were rigorously excluded from public discussion. People were simply told that their leaders were ‘following science,’ regardless of the fact that available science was both scant and contested.”