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

Part 1: An interview with the late author and veteran CBC broadcaster, David Cayley

It is with great sadness that I say that on June 10^th, just two days after David and I met on FaceTime for this interview, he passed suddenly in his home with his wife and three of his four children beside him, along with their partners. He was 80 years old.

David Cayley was a Toronto-based Canadian writer and broadcaster. He is known for documenting philosophy of prominent thinkers of the 20th century – Ivan Illich, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and René Girard. He is known for his work as a broadcaster on CBC Radio’s program Ideas. He died on June 10, 2026. He was 80 years old. Photo contributed.

Like most people, I was first introduced to David Cayley’s work as a member of CBC’s loyal audience, when he was a producer with the radio program Ideas. I was particularly glued to his 24-part radio series, “How to Think About Science,” which he produced in 2007-2008, exploring how the institution of science “knows what it knows.” It was there that I was first introduced, fortuitously, to a number of thinkers, including environmental philosopher Dean Bavington, who a few years later I had the pleasure of interviewing for a book I was writing about the continued demise of the cod and the scapegoating of the grey seal.

Cayley is known for his work documenting the philosophies of prominent thinkers and intellectuals including Ivan Illich, George Grant and Northrup Frye. In his provocative and prescient 1997 book, Expanding Prison: The Crisis in Crime and Punishment, Cayley argued that burgeoning prisons reflected an increasingly polarized society and that alternative forms of justice should be explored.

When Cayley left the CBC in 2012, he devoted himself to writing about Illich’s life—an effort that culminated in the 2021 publication of Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey. Illich was a profound thinker and intellectual, most famous for his critique of modern institutions, in which he argued against monopolies and said there were thresholds at which point institutions become counter-productive and cause more harm than good. Some of Illich’s most famous books include Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, and Medical Nemesis.

About a month after the World Health Organization made the assessment that COVID-19 could be “characterized as a pandemic,” I came across an essay written by Cayley titled, Questions About the Pandemic from the Point view of Ivan Illich.

In it, Cayley wrote:

Is the massive and costly effort to contain and limit the harm that the virus will do the only choice we have? Is it no more than an obvious and unavoidable exercise of prudence undertaken to protect the most vulnerable? Or is it a disastrous effort to maintain control of what is obviously out of control, an effort which will compound the damage being done by the disease with new troubles that will reverberate far into the future?

For Cayley, channeling Illich came naturally. He described Illich as his teacher and friend. “I don’t know if everybody is guided in this way, but for me, he was the man who most shaped my way of life and my thought,” he said.

By the time I interviewed Cayley about the pandemic in March 2021, he had also penned “Pandemic Revelations,” which appeared in The Journal of Ivan Illich Studies and “The Prognosis: Looking the consequences in the eye”, published in the Literary Review of Canada. The pieces are long and thought-provoking and Cayley did not hesitate to raise difficult questions about the pandemic in his attempt to grapple with how the world responded.

When I asked, back in 2021, why he wrote these essays, Cayley explained:

I was astonished by the instant consensus that seemed to take shape in March [2020], as if everyone already knew what this was, as if really it didn’t need to be studied or thought about or discussed because we already knew it was a grave global emergency that should be followed by turning our societies upside down. I was amazed by that and I realized I couldn’t think about it without going back to what Ivan Illich had written, since he was the author of a book called Medical Nemesis, published in the middle 1970s, which really challenged the hegemony of medical thinking in society.

Illich argued that the modern medical establishment, with its over-medicalization and professional monopolies, was creating a cycle of harm through three forms of iatrogenesis or physician or system-caused harm: clinical, social, and cultural iatrogenesis, which he described as a “self-reinforcing loop of negative institutional feedback.”

In Cayley’s latest book (2025): The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back), he continued the discussion about the pandemic response, describing how Canada’s main newspapers—The National Post and The Globe and Mail—as well as the country’s national broadcaster, the CBC, “took on a propaganda role,” a subject we explored further in the interview.

Cayley wrote that CBC’s “second era”—the era we currently find ourselves in—is one where the CBC has taken on the role of advocate or representative of an audience, “not about letting the people speak but about speaking for the people.” Cayley described this era, which began in the 1960s, as “populist,” but not in the political meaning of the term. In the second era the CBC tried to become a “model or replacement society rather than a servant of an existing society.” Cayley contrasted this with CBC’s “first era,” when the role of the public broadcaster was seen as a “a public utility or public square where people… make up their own minds.”

Cayley wrote that in the first era, “the CBC saw itself as a limited institution within a social order that it served but did not fundamentally challenge.”

According to Cayley, the second era is now over, and we are on the cusp of new era, one that will require the CBC to reassess and be open to a new way of engaging with what is becoming a much more polarized country.

In a word, to listen.

I spoke to David Cayley for almost two hours over FaceTime on June 8th, just two days before he passed suddenly. I will have more to say later, but it was an immense honour to know him. The world is a lesser place without him. The transcript has been edited for both length and clarity.

Linda Pannozzo (LP): You say that the CBC has lost its voice. When did you first notice it?

David Cayley (DC): Well, I never said that it lost its voice. The publisher said that. My titles were always on this question of eras—that the CBC had reached the end of an era. The issue of voice is one that I never tried to broach in the book, but I guess implicitly I did, coming out of an insight that came to me reading Eric Koch, my old colleague and veteran of the early days of CBC radio, when he wrote his book about This Hour Has Seven Days. He said that that was the end of the first era of Canadian broadcasting, and somehow that snapped. I thought, yes, that makes sense. Even though it [Seven Days] was cancelled, it did set the tone for a new era.

That was my emphasis and one of the disappointments was that nobody seemed to really notice that part of the argument much. You can call that losing its voice, yes, but for me what that meant was [the first] era had ended, a style had done all it could and exhausted itself. The style that CBC adopted in the 60s was a form of populism in the sense that it took its justification primarily from its audience.

LP: For people who aren’t familiar with the program This Hour Has Seven Days, can you, in a nutshell, explain how that was a turning point?

DC: Yes, Seven Days was a current affairs show which went on the air in 1964 and the two driving forces in that work, Douglas Leiterman and Patrick Watson, basically had a kind of messianic feeling about television—one often has a messianic feeling about a new medium, and you can trace out the early internet period and see analogies. The infrastructure of democracy had arrived. They felt television was just being held back by these old fogies in Ottawa that basically formed their views in the radio era and just didn’t understand how this could form a community, could be with the people.

Seven Days promised the sky. It was going to be vibrant, it was going to be exciting, it was going to bring the whole country together, it was going to bring justice. If they were going to be crusading, they were going to be for the little guy, the taxi driver, the checkout clerk. We’re going to say, ‘This is our voice, this is us.’

It was thrilling television. They really did do what they promised, and it scared the wits out of the old timers in Ottawa, who didn’t understand how this could be good, because they had fought for more than a generation for the independence of the CBC. When the government created the CBC by that name in 1936, they thought they would tell it what to do. The minister would call and say, ‘Sorry, that item on prison riots, take that down, get rid of that.’ It was a long battle to gain a qualified independence. So, if the CBC didn’t observe a studied neutrality, how could it expect the government to keep its hands off?

A war was fought. Even though the old management had the power—they were able to cancel the show after two years—it’s as close as the media ever came to creating a national emergency. Alphonse Ouimet, the CBC president, was hung in effigy outside the Vancouver court. So, they lost but they won. The show was cancelled, but it set the tone: the old management were out, and a new era began on this populist assumption.

Laurier LaPierre, one of the hosts of This Hour Has Seven Days, openly cries on air during an April 1966 broadcast of an interview with the mother of Steven Truscott. Shortly thereafter CBC fired LaPierre and co-host Patrick Watson, and cancelled the show citing bias. The show was cancelled just before the end of its season. Public outcry ensued, as well as allegations of political interference.

LP: Can you also explain why you see this populist assumption as a problem?

DC: Well, let me say first—because I can be misunderstood and because the book has had its main audience seemingly amongst the enemies of the CBC, which is an unfortunate fact—that many great things were done in that era. One would probably want to mention Peter Gzowski and This Country in the Morning, which became Morningside. It really is part of the history of how Canada was created. So, I’m not trying to minimize the accomplishments of that period, but what happens when you stake your legitimacy on your audience? What happens when your audience fragments? You actually end up as the national broadcaster of a certain segment of Canadians, a band of Canadian opinion, a taste, a community.

When you talk constantly of “we,” “What do we think?” “How do we feel?” “What’s the weather for your weekend?”—this kind of very personalized, very intimate kind of talk is increasingly only for one part of the Canadian society because the public has fragmented under many, many pressures. We could take the next week to discuss all the things that have led to this, not least the media.

I’ll give you an emblem of it, which was the “Freedom Convoy,” which arrived in Ottawa as an obvious manifestation of a new public. I say obvious because you could see the people assembling on the bridges, in the parking lots, and when the public were polled later, close to half of Canadians expressed sympathy for this movement. But the CBC treated it as basically a foreign invasion and took the same view that the government took when they treated it as an occasion to declare martial law.

These were not our kind of people. They were, the prime minister said, unacceptable. He knew without ever talking to one of them that they were racists, that they are misogynists, they were anti-science—he said all these things in an interview with French television—and there’s no evidence that I know of that he ever opened a truck door and conversed with anyone. He just knew they were against vaccination mandates, so they must hate women, hate foreigners, etc.¹

The CBC did nothing about that. It absolutely failed in its duty towards a “new public”—now I’m also drawing on something which is developed in the book, which is a theory of publics, not the public. Publics are discreet formations, and this was visibly a new and large and vibrant public, but formless, as new publics always are. Some matter of concern has brought them into existence, but they don’t have a shape, they don’t a voice, necessarily.

I don’t know what else the Act establishing the CBC could mean, but that the CBC has an obligation to give form, character, to such a new public. The CBC completely turned its back. When the Fifth Estate came to sum it up, a week or two after it ended, their broadcast was pretty much that this was a matter of security concern. It was entirely discussed as a problem. It was not a manifestation of anything positive, anything that had a conversational character, a proposition: vaccine mandates are not desirable. That wasn’t an arguable position. So that’s an example of why the CBC now belongs to just one segment of opinion.

On December 29, 2021, then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appeared on the Quebec talk show “La Semaine des 4 Julie,” and referred to the unvaccinated as “extremists,” “racists,” “misogynists,” who “don’t believe in science,” and wondered aloud, “do we tolerate these people?” His controversial and polarizing statements preceded the Ottawa protests (as well as many others across the country) by about 3 weeks.

LP: I was going to ask you about the “Freedom Convoy.” There was something you articulated in your book, and I also noticed it at the time, how the CBC displayed a level of disdain towards the protesters—even though there was a great deal of diversity among the protesters themselves, as well as a much broader public for whom that protest resonated across the country, and in the world, even. What do you think happened within the CBC to justify that treatment of that story?

DC: Well, we could talk about that all week, but in a word, fear. The basis for the fear can be traced in various ways. In 2016, Trump is elected, Brexit is enacted. Somehow there’s a dangerous populist revolt brewing that is threatening to the people who are making the decisions. They construe it in essentially reactionary ways—according to me—that they have to fortify all the things that they see as being threatened. They have to fortify objectivity in journalism, fortify the belief in science. ‘This is a dangerous rabble.’

[They become] the enemy and are characterized by misinformation. Misinformation and conspiracy are really, really important here. I can read on Wikipedia that eminent scientists engage in conspiracy theory if they have the wrong opinion. It gets really polarized, and it has a war structure. So, the enemy is never right in war, and it’s seditious to say that they are.

LP: In your book, you draw on thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Harold Innis—you actually dedicated your book to Innis. In a nutshell, and I know that’s a big ask, but why are they important, and what do you think that they would say about how the CBC is doing right now?

DC: Well, I can’t find a word in Innis about the CBC, so if he had anything to do with the CBC, I don’t know about it. But Harold Innis—it’s hard to be brief about him—he arguably is the ancestor of media theory. He was one of the first to suppose that there is what he called a bias of communication, so that our cognitive style is largely determined by the media, and reciprocally—he never created a simplistic theory—with the medium that we’re using, whether it’s a stone tablet or FaceTime. So that was his great contribution.

Along with his colleague, Eric Havelock, who studied specifically the transition from an oral to a literate culture in ancient Greece, in books like Preface to Plato, what sometimes is called the Toronto School came into existence. [Marshall] McLuhan identified with that and wrote quite extravagant things about Innis. He said at one point that his own work was just a footnote to Innis. It is an extravagance, it’s much more than that.

There were many others: Walter Ohm, Neil Postman, for me, Ivan Illich. Scores of others who could be mentioned. But in the end, they all drew attention to the fact that communication is mediated and its content is relative to that mediation. So that’s as brief as I can be and I think that becomes increasingly important—this is now the argument in my book—when we undergo, as we are undergoing, a media revolution which is very difficult to assess, how would we assess it when we’re in the middle of it?

What have we seen, just in my own lifetime, and yours, is everyone is a publisher, a broadcaster, and in a little device that they hold in their hand, they have essentially all the capacities that used to belong to a handful of television stations, a mass circulation newspaper. I mean it’s pretty unthinkable, it’s pretty hard to take in, it is very hard to imagine control, without that being even more terrifying than the capacities of the media.

So, my argument for the CBC was that a national broadcaster, a public broadcaster with a statutory obligation to enlighten us—I’m not making that up—as well as to entertain the country, it needs to take seriously its own character as a medium.

Now, populism, as I’ve defined it, is one of the ways you can try to make the medium disappear: ‘Hi, it’s me, your friend from the CBC talking to you in person. I want you to believe there’s nothing between us. You enjoy my complete confidence, I enjoy your complete confidence. We’re really one big family. Canada lives here.’

And it’s not true. This is a devised and structured broadcast coming from a distant source, and my argument is that it’s time to highlight that. It’s time to become self-conscious about media, or else, because it’s hard to know what the unselfconscious Smartphone user is involved in, but it seems like it’s a kind of group mind.

It may be that McLuhan’s global village image fits in a way. It may be a condition analogous to a kind of pre-literate tribal condition, maybe, but it’s certainly unprecedented, and it certainly needs to be made conscious. I think that’s a task for the CBC. I know the CBC can’t afford to be all that earnest. I’m really just proposing points for discussion. The CBC has always been a guest, and sometimes an unwelcome one in its own country. It has limited capacities. But at least it can try to begin to think about its situation and become conscious of its situation, and I think it’s a time to be conscious of media and of mediation.

[Part 2 will be published in the next few days]

1. By December 29, 2021—after bringing in both vaccine passports for air and train travel as well as vaccine mandates for federal employees—Trudeau appeared on the Quebec talk show “La Semaine des 4 Julie,” and referred to the unvaccinated as “extremists,” “racists,” “misogynists,” who “don’t believe in science,” and wondered aloud, “do we tolerate these people?” His stance, arguably, sowed deep divisions in Canadian society, and preceded the Ottawa protests by about 3 weeks.