Earlier this spring, the heritage minister’s office asked me to serve on a non-partisan expert panel that will advise the government on the future of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Radio-Canada. 

I was torn. The CBC is a public institution—the biggest player in Canada’s media sector, it gets $1.3 billion in taxpayer dollars each year—and this was a call to public service. I worried, though, that my involvement would be seen as a political act, or torqued to seem like one by those wanting to undermine The Logic’s reputation for impartiality and editorial independence. 

I sought the minister’s pledge that the panel would be nonpartisan, which she and her team provided, though they didn’t go so far as to tell me who else would be asked to serve. Discussions with The Logic’s leadership team assured me this would not compromise our newsroom’s ability to cover the CBC or, more broadly, our ability to do our jobs as journalists, so I accepted the appointment.

In keeping with The Logic’s policies, I have declined any reimbursement or honoraria offered. To avoid conflicts of interest, I have also recused myself from any future coverage of the CBC or of Heritage Canada. If The Logic’s newsroom covers this file, I’ll be reading what they report at the same time you do. 

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I believe that democracy requires a free and independent press—so much so that while I have spoiled ballots, I have never voted, donated to any political campaign or publicly supported any political party or government. 

I was born in South Africa in the late 1970s, growing up under an apartheid regime without a free press. I hadn’t heard the name Nelson Mandela until I left the country when I was nine years old. On our way to starting a new life in Canada, my family visited relatives in the U.K. A television screen showed me a broadcast from London’s Wembley Stadium, where a tribute concert was celebrating Mandela’s 70th birthday. The future South African president was in the middle of his 25th year in prison. The South African government had not released a single photo of him in all that time. Few people knew what he looked like. It’s hard to describe what government censorship looks like unless you’ve experienced it firsthand. 

Arriving in Canada awakened my interest in journalism. I would sit at the foot of my parents’ bed at night watching coverage of some of the most formative events of the 20th century: The fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, the standoff between a group of Mohawk people and Canadian soldiers and police officers at Oka, the massacre at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, the Quebec referendum, the first Gulf War, the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

The dichotomy of spending my youth in an environment where the government controlled the media and my formative years in a place where journalism thrived has given my life its driving purpose. 

That drive led me to launch The Logic six years ago. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished and I’m optimistic about both our future and the future of Canadian media more generally.

I’ve never bought into the idea that this business has to be a fight between journalism startups and legacy media. I think all news outlets contribute to a healthy and vibrant media ecosystem that should ultimately challenge Canadians to take part in the hard and necessary conversations. Investigations by The Globe and Mail or The Narwhal, podcasts from Canadaland, columnists from The Line and YouTube videos from J.J. McCullough, local reporting from Village Media or La Presse—a vibrant free press needs all kinds of players. 

Of course, there’s no bigger player than the public broadcaster, and none whose future sparks more debate. 

These are difficult days for the CBC. More than a third of Canadians say they are strongly in favour of completely defunding the Crown corporation. 

President Catherine Tait has said the corporation starts every year with a $36-million structural deficit because of inflationary pressures, and that “the public broadcaster faces chronic underfunding.” After CBC warned of massive layoffs, the Liberal government gave it a $42-million boost in last month’s federal budget. Meanwhile, its executives remain under scrutiny for failing to answer questions about bonus payouts, even when asked directly by politicians and by the CBC’s own journalists.   

The CBC’s impact on Canadian culture is massive. As for the news side, while it’s hard to find recent data on how many journalists there are in Canada, it’s believed that CBC and Radio-Canada employ roughly one-third of them. What it chooses to do or not to do—and what we choose to do with it—matters.

Before I accepted this invitation, I made it clear to the minister and her staff that if they were looking for a rubber stamp, someone to populate a photo op or someone who wouldn’t challenge assumptions, they should look elsewhere. 

While the deliberations will remain confidential, the panel will look at ways to modernize CBC-Radio Canada’s funding, governance and mandate.

My hope is that the panel’s work will be helpful—not just for this government, but for any future government weighing decisions about the CBC. 

Being an entrepreneur means being a pragmatic optimist, so take what I’m saying with a grain of salt—but I’m tired of the doom-and-gloom messaging about the future of media. As I’ve written, people have a fundamental desire to be informed. It is how we preserve our families, our self-interests, our communities and our cultures. I see my service on this panel as simply another way of trying to help build a brighter future for Canadian journalism.