Even CBC’s friends are big mad about the big bonuses

From the Canadian Taxpayers Federation

This even weirder than the Masters of the Universe cartoon episode where the hero He-Man teamed up with the villain Skeletor to save Christmas.

The CBC doled out $18.4 million in bonuses. Meanwhile, the state broadcaster was also threatening to eliminate some positions just before Christmas. And that has even its “friends” upset.

A group called Friends of Canadian Media typically functions as a cheerleading squad for the CBC.

The group has praised the state broadcaster for years, comparing people who want it defunded to fans of professional wrestling – as if that’s a grave insult.

But this latest plot twist from the CBC even has its friends delivering a smack down.

In an email to supporters about the CBC bonuses, Friends of Canadian Media stated:

“This decision is deeply out of touch and unbefitting of our national public broadcaster.”

When it comes to these big bonuses, the CBC’s cheer team is now agreeing with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation that the bonuses are wrong.

Now, that’s where the agreement ends.

“CBC/Radio-Canada’s per capita funding currently sits at a 60-year low, thanks to decades of neglect from successive governments of all political stripes,” the group writes.

The CBC has “low funding” and is suffering from “neglect”?

The friends might want to lay off the kale smoothies for a bit because it sounds like they’re going fermented and that’s clouding their judgement.

The CBC’s government funding is astronomical and it gets an obscene amount of attention from our government, despite its ratings circling the drain.

The CBC’s taking $1.4 billion from taxpayers this year.

The money we spend on the CBC could pay the salaries of about 7,000 cops and 7,000 paramedics. It could buy more than 3,000 homes in Alberta. It would cover groceries for about 85,000 Canadian families for a year.

What the CBC costs taxpayers is the opposite of low funding.

The CBC has dished out $130 million in bonuses since 2015. There are 1,450 CBC staffers taking home six-figure salaries. Since 2015, the number of CBC employees taking a six-figure salary has soared by 231 per cent.

The Canadian Press reported that latest round of bonuses for executives at the CBC is more than $70,000 per person. That’s more than the average Canadian family takes home in a year.

The CEO of the CBC, Catherine Tait, is paid between $460,900 and $551,600 in salary per year. She’s also entitled to a bonus of up to 28 per cent. For the kids paying attention in math class, that’s a potential bonus of up to $154,448.

That’s a super weird form of low funding and neglect.

It’s got to be tough to land that woe-is-me message when millions get thrown around for bonuses.

Even a CBC news anchor asked her boss tough questions about the bonuses on national television.

“The Canadian Taxpayers Federation, through an FOI request, showed $16 million were paid in bonuses in 2022, can we establish that is not happening this year?” Adrienne Arsenault asked Tait on Dec. 4, 2023.

“I am not going to comment on something that hasn’t been discussed at this point,” Tait replied.

Turns out: those bonuses were in the works and now we know they’re costing taxpayers $18.4 million this year.

Meanwhile, Canadians are tuning out of the CBC while being forced to pay for it.

The CBC News Network’s share of the national prime-time viewing audience is 2.1 per cent, according to its latest third-quarter report.

Put another way, 97.9 per cent of TV-viewing Canadians choose not to watch CBC’s English language prime-time news program.

The CBC needs to be defunded. It’s a huge waste of money, a tiny handful of Canadians are tuning in and journalists should not be paid by the government. It’s a good bet the debate on that larger point will keep getting hotter.

But this part of the debate is down for the count: the outrageous CBC bonuses need to end.

When the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Friends of Canadian Media agree on something, consensus has been achieved and the fight’s over.

Kris Sims is the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and a former member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Related Topics:#CanadianTaxpayersFederation #CBCBonuses #KrisSims FriendsOfCanadianMedia

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Canada invests $34 million in Chinese drones now considered to be ‘high security risks’

Published on December 8, 2025

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s fleet of 1,200 drones, 79% pose national security risks due to them being made in China

Canada’s top police force spent millions on now near-useless and compromised security drones, all because they were made in China, a nation firmly controlled by the Communist Chinese Party (CCP) government.

An internal report by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to Canada’s Senate national security committee revealed that $34 million in taxpayer money was spent on a fleet of 973 Chinese-made drones.

Replacement drones are more than twice the cost of the Chinese-made ones between $31,000 and $35,000 per unit. In total, the RCMP has about 1,228 drones, meaning that 79 percent of its drone fleet poses national security risks due to them being made in China.

The RCMP said that Chinese suppliers are “currently identified as high security risks primarily due to their country of origin, data handling practices, supply chain integrity and potential vulnerability.”

In 2023, the RCMP put out a directive that restricted the use of the made-in-China drones, putting them on duty for “non-sensitive operations” only, however, with added extra steps for “offline data storage and processing.”

The report noted that the “Drones identified as having a high security risk are prohibited from use in emergency response team activities involving sensitive tactics or protected locations, VIP protective policing operations, or border integrity operations or investigations conducted in collaboration with U.S. federal agencies.”

The RCMP earlier this year said it was increasing its use of drones for border security.

Senator Claude Carignan had questioned the RCMP about what kind of precautions it uses in contract procurement.

“Can you reassure us about how national security considerations are taken into account in procurement, especially since tens of billions of dollars have been announced for procurement?” he asked.

The use of the drones by Canada’s top police force is puzzling, considering it has previously raised awareness of Communist Chinese interference in Canada.

Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, earlier in the year, an RCMP internal briefing note warned that agents of the CCP are targeting Canadian universities to intimidate them and, in some instances, challenge them on their “political positions.”

The final report from the Foreign Interference Commission concluded that operatives from China may have helped elect a handful of MPs in both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian federal elections. It also concluded that China was the primary foreign interference threat to Canada.

Chinese influence in Canadian politics is unsurprising for many, especially given former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s past  admiration for China’s “basic dictatorship.”

As reported by LifeSiteNews, a Canadian senator appointed by Trudeau told Chinese officials directly that their nation is a “partner, not a rival.”

China has been accused of direct election meddling in Canada, as reported by LifeSiteNews.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, an exposé by investigative journalist Sam Cooper claims there is compelling evidence that Carney and Trudeau are strongly influenced by an “elite network” of foreign actors, including those with ties to China and the World Economic Forum. Despite Carney’s later claims that China poses a threat to Canada, he said in 2016 the Communist Chinese regime’s “perspective” on things is “one of its many strengths.”

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The EU Insists Its X Fine Isn’t About Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.

Published on December 8, 2025

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By Christina Maas

Europe calls it transparency, but it looks a lot like teaching the internet who’s allowed to speak.

When the European Commission fined X €120 million on December 5, officials could not have been clearer. This, they said, was not about censorship. It was just about “transparency.”

They repeat it so often you start to wonder why.

The fine marks the first major enforcement of the Digital Services Act, Europe’s new censorship-driven internet rulebook.

It was sold as a consumer protection measure, designed to make online platforms safer and more accountable, and included a whole list of censorship requirements, fining platforms that don’t comply.

The first target is Elon Musk’s X, and the list of alleged violations look less like user safety concerns and more like a blueprint for controlling who gets heard, who gets trusted, and who gets to talk back.

The Commission charged X with three violations: the paid blue checkmark system, the lack of advertising data, and restricted data access for researchers.

None of these touches direct content censorship. But all of them shape visibility, credibility, and surveillance, just in more polite language.

Musk’s decision to turn blue checks into a subscription feature ended the old system where establishment figures, journalists, politicians, and legacy celebrities got verification.

The EU called Musk’s decision “deceptive design.” The old version, apparently, was honesty itself. Before, a blue badge meant you were important. After, it meant you paid. Brussels prefers the former, where approved institutions get algorithmic priority, and the rest of the population stays in the queue.

The new system threatened that hierarchy. Now, anyone could buy verification, diluting the aura of authority once reserved for anointed voices.

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However, that’s not the full story. Under the old Twitter system, verification was sold as a public service, but in reality it worked more like a back-room favor and a status purchase.

The main application process was shut down in 2010, so unless you were already famous, the only way to get a blue check was to spend enough money on advertising or to be important enough to trigger impersonation problems.

Ad Age reported that advertisers who spent at least fifteen thousand dollars over three months could get verified, and Twitter sales reps told clients the same thing. That meant verification was effectively a perk reserved for major media brands, public figures, and anyone willing to pay. It was a symbol of influence rationed through informal criteria and private deals, creating a hierarchy shaped by cronyism rather than transparency.

Under the new X rules, everyone is on a level playing field.

Government officials and agencies now sport gray badges, symbols of credibility that can’t be purchased. These are the state’s chosen voices, publicly marked as incorruptible. To the EU, that should be a safeguard.

The second and third violations show how “transparency” doubles as a surveillance mechanism. X was fined for limiting access to advertising data and for restricting researchers from scraping platform content. Regulators called that obstruction. Musk called it refusing to feed the censorship machine.

The EU’s preferred researchers aren’t neutral archivists. Many have been documented coordinating with governments, NGOs, and “fact-checking” networks that flagged political content for takedown during previous election cycles.

They call it “fighting disinformation.” Critics call it outsourcing censorship pressure to academics.

Under the DSA, these same groups now have the legal right to demand data from platforms like X to study “systemic risks,” a phrase broad enough to include whatever speech bureaucrats find undesirable this month.

The result is a permanent state of observation where every algorithmic change, viral post, or trending topic becomes a potential regulatory case.

The advertising issue completes the loop. Brussels says it wants ad libraries to be fully searchable so users can see who’s paying for what. It gives regulators and activists a live feed of messaging, ready for pressure campaigns.

The DSA doesn’t delete ads; it just makes it easier for someone else to demand they be deleted.

That’s how this form of censorship works: not through bans, but through endless exposure to scrutiny until platforms remove the risk voluntarily.

The Commission insists, again and again, that the fine has “nothing to do with content.”

That may be true on a direct level, but the rules shape content all the same. When governments decide who counts as authentic, who qualifies as a researcher, and how visibility gets distributed, speech control doesn’t need to be explicit. It’s baked into the system.

Brussels calls it user protection. Musk calls it punishment for disobedience. This particular DSA fine isn’t about what you can say, it’s about who’s allowed to be heard saying it.

TikTok escaped similar scrutiny by promising to comply. X didn’t, and that’s the difference. The EU prefers companies that surrender before the hearing. When they don’t, “transparency” becomes the pretext for a financial hammer.

The €120 million fine is small by tech standards, but symbolically it’s huge.

It tells every platform that “noncompliance” means questioning the structure of speech the EU has already defined as safe.

In the official language of Brussels, this is a regulation. But it’s managed discourse, control through design, moderation through paperwork, censorship through transparency.

And the louder they insist it isn’t, the clearer it becomes that it is.

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