The CBC’s new plan to grow, win back audiences is ambitious but vague, experts say

OTTAWA – Experts say CBC/Radio-Canada’s new five-year plan to grow its audience offers a reply to its many critics — but it lacks specifics and it might be too little and too late.

Earlier this week, the public broadcaster released a plan for expanding its viewership by reaching out to children and youth, newcomers and “non-users or dissatisfied users.”

CBC president Marie-Philippe Bouchard told The Canadian Press in an earlier interview that the plan includes a new focus on rural areas and Western Canada through a larger on-the-ground journalistic presence.

But connecting with that estranged audience will take more than enhanced local coverage, said Peter Menzies, a former CRTC vice-chair and former publisher of the Calgary Herald, now a senior fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

“I think they need to make sure that when they do that coverage, they’re speaking to people in a voice that they find familiar,” he told The Canadian Press.

That means “if you’re talking to people in Moose Jaw, you sound like somebody who knows what Moose Jaw is all about,” he added.

“Unless you’re sort of embedded in your community and you understand how it thinks, listens, how it hears things, you’re not going to be successful.”

Menzies said smaller communities may have early-career reporters who work there for a short while before moving to larger markets — and that means newsroom managers need to “understand those communities and … make sure that you get relatively smooth transitions.”

CBC also needs to decentralize decision-making away from its Toronto headquarters, he said.

“It’s very difficult for anybody in Toronto to be making sound decisions about what the interests are of viewers, readers and listeners in Western Canada, and rural parts of Ontario for that matter,” he said.

Marsha Barber, a journalism professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and former producer at the CBC, said the public broadcaster’s “biggest challenge” will be to reach those Canadians who don’t use its service, or who feel alienated by it.

It will have to “prioritize using diverse opinions and voices from across the country to bolster its coverage,” Barber said in an email, adding CBC will have to be “very specific” about what it will do differently following previous attempts to boost its audience.

Menzies said the CBC’s new five-year plan might be landing too late to make a difference.

“Impressions get very embedded, and it’s been a few years that this has been going on now … Once your connection is broken with people in media, it’s very hard to earn them back and I think it’s going to be extremely challenging,” he said.

But Jessica Johnson, a senior fellow with McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy, said the CBC still has a shot at connecting with a broader audience.

“With local journalism, rural journalism especially, you just have to show up. You just have put a body there,” she said.

Johnson, who published a report on the CBC this summer, said her research showed that more than half of Canadians aren’t satisfied with their local news options — and those who live in rural or semi-rural areas are even less satisfied.

“That’s such a low-hanging piece of fruit, and reinstalling local journalism bureaus doesn’t have to be that expensive,” she said.

CBC/Radio-Canada’s plan comes months after an election which saw Conservative Party Leader Pierre Poilievre repeatedly vow to “defund” the CBC.

There has been an unprecedented amount of political focus on CBC/Radio-Canada in the past two years, Johnson noted.

“I see the CBC really hearing the criticisms that have been levelled against it,” she said.

Johnson said that while strategy is ambitious, it’s also vague.

“It’s definitely missing the how and also … the how much,” she said.

Though the Liberals have promised to increase CBC/Radio-Canada’s budget and make its funding more stable, the strategic plan was released ahead of the federal budget, which will be tabled in early November.

Sarah Andrews, senior director of government and media relations at the advocacy group Friends of Canadian Media, agreed the CBC is responding to some of the criticisms that have been raised in the past few years.

She said the fact that the public broadcaster is aware of the “need to be more in communities, more boots on the ground, more journalists on the ground in those areas, is a good thing.”

Andrews said she would like to see more specifics, particularly about plans for individual communities. She noted that after the passage of the Online News Act — which resulted in CBC/Radio-Canada receiving a portion of Google $100-million fund — the broadcaster outlined plans to hire up to 30 journalists in 22 communities.

The new five-year plan says the public broadcaster has plans to “fund additional coverage and hire sufficient journalists to cover 15-20 communities with a population greater than 50,000, that currently have no or little local CBC/Radio-Canada presence.”

Andrews said that “to identify where those … communities are that don’t have local reporting on the ground, and to have a timeline as to when journalists could be expected in those communities, I think that’s certainly something that would be encouraging for communities that do feel disconnected.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 18, 2025.