HalifaxThe CBC, taken on its own terms, is one of the country's most successful national institutions. It produces, every weekday, a national morning newscast, a national afternoon current-affairs program, a national evening news broadcast, and an evening flagship the rest of the developed world's public broadcasters quietly study. It runs a radio network on which the country's mid-sized cities still hear themselves named at the top of the hour. It runs a French network that, by every available cultural-coverage metric, is the most important non-Quebec-based francophone institution in the country. It produces a documentary unit whose output, in any given year, contains at least two pieces of journalism that this magazine, were it staffed at three times its present size, would not have been able to produce. The CBC is not, in any honest reading of its work, broken. It is, on the contrary, doing more than its budget reasonably permits.

The argument of this essay is not, therefore, that the CBC has failed at its work. The argument is that the CBC has, in the years it has had the option, failed to imagine what its work could be. The work the CBC presently does is internal. Every dollar in the CBC's budget is, in the corporation's working culture, a dollar for a CBC reporter, a CBC producer, a CBC story. The dollar does not, in any meaningful operational practice, leave the building. The country, in the meantime, has a small and shrinking ecosystem of independent publications, magazines, websites, regional papers, single-editor newsletters, that, on any reading of the cultural balance sheet, contribute disproportionately to the country's self-understanding. None of these publications, with the partial exception of a few that have qualified for the Canada Periodical Fund, receives a meaningful share of any public-sector media spending. The CBC, which is the largest pool of such spending the country operates, transmits nothing to them. The CBC has not, in any senior strategy document this magazine has seen, considered transmitting anything to them.

The model exists, in three countries

The BBC has, since the early 2010s, operated a Local Democracy Reporting Service that places a defined number of full-time local-news reporters in commercial regional newsrooms across the United Kingdom, funded by the BBC's licence-fee revenue, producing content the BBC and the host newsroom both publish. The model has, on every available evaluation, materially extended local-news coverage in jurisdictions that had been steadily losing it. The ABC, in Australia, has operated a comparable partnership with regional independent publications since 2017. The German public broadcaster ARD operates a smaller version of the same arrangement with a defined set of cultural magazines. None of these countries has lost any meaningful editorial independence on the side of the participating commercial outlets. None of these public broadcasters has seen its own audience erode. The arrangement, on every observable metric, has strengthened all parties.

The country has not, in this generation, considered the arrangement. The reason it has not considered the arrangement is partly institutional caution on the CBC's part, the corporation, with some justification, worries about being drawn into editorial relationships with publications whose later work might embarrass the broadcaster, and partly the absence of any organised constituency, inside the country's media-policy conversation, pushing for the arrangement. The independent publications, who would benefit most, are by definition too small to lobby. The CBC, which is the only actor with the operational scale to construct the arrangement, has not, internally, been asked.

Every dollar in the CBC's budget is a dollar for a CBC reporter, a CBC producer, a CBC story. The dollar does not, in any operational practice, leave the building.

What it would cost

This magazine has done the rough calculation. A program that placed a single dedicated CBC-funded reporter in each of the country's fifty most established independent print and digital publications, at a salary commensurate with the median CBC newsroom journalist of equivalent tenure, with a small overhead budget for editorial support, would cost the CBC, in total, between four and six million dollars a year. That figure is roughly four-tenths of one percent of the CBC's current annual appropriation. It is less than the cost of a single mid-tier prime-time television series the network commissioned last year. It is the budget item the country would, on any honest cost-benefit accounting, find easiest to defend. It is the budget item that, in any actuarial reading of where the country's cultural future is most fragile, would produce the greatest return.

The reporter, in such a program, would be employed by the host magazine and contractually committed to producing work that appears, in some agreed form, both in the host magazine and on a designated CBC platform. The CBC's editorial control over the reporter would be no greater than the editorial control the BBC currently exerts over its LDRS partner outlets, which is to say minimal and confined to broad standards. The host magazine would retain primary editorial responsibility. The reporter, in the meantime, would be writing for the country at scale, on a salary that the host magazine could not, on its own commercial revenue, support.

The CBC's quiet permission

The CBC has not, to this magazine's knowledge, been asked for this. The CBC's senior management, when sounded out by various media-policy researchers over the past five years, has expressed the kinds of polite reservations any large institution offers when asked to consider extending its operational footprint. The reservations are not unreasonable. They are, however, soluble. The country has, in three other G7 jurisdictions, the operational templates that have already solved them. The CBC's senior management has not, in any public document this magazine has located, engaged with the templates.

Full disclosure: this magazine benefits if the program is built. So do forty-nine other publications doing comparable work across this country. The interest is declared. The argument, even so, is correct.

The CBC sits on Front Street with every microphone and every studio and every transmission tower the country bought it to build a public conversation. The conversation, on the building's present habits, is mostly the building's. The country is wider than the building. The corporation has known this for at least a decade. The corporation has done nothing about it.

Four million dollars. Fifty newsrooms. One memo from the senior management to its own board. The country has been waiting for a public broadcaster brave enough to write it.

Write it.