Catherine Tait told Parliamentarians it's 'misinformation' to refer to millions in extra CBC pay each year as 'bonuses'
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CBC president Catherine Tait opened her appearance before a House of Commons committee with the apparent hope that MPs would focus on increasing the broadcaster’s funding and using regulation to protect it from predatory foreigners.
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But instead, the committee turned into two hours of tense grilling over why CBC executives were still collecting bonuses while approving layoffs — including one instance where Tait was openly accused of lying.
Her chief proposed solution was “sustainable long-term funding,” although she didn’t indicate how much that would be in addition to the broadcaster’s current $1.4 billion federal budget.
Tait’s appearance before the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage comes just a few weeks after the CBC was given an extra $42 million per year in Budget 2024 — in addition to a nearly $100 million increase which was earmarked to raise salaries in line with inflation.
The extra money didn’t prompt CBC to reverse any of the hundreds of jobs cut since December, but in a post-budget statement the broadcaster said it would likely stave off “significant additional reductions this year.”
Last year, Tait came under significant criticism for approving layoffs even as CBC continued to pay out bonuses to as many as 1,100 staff, including senior management such as herself.
In a January appearance before the committee, Tait contended that bonuses don’t exist, and that critics were merely referring to “performance pay” — a category over which she claimed she had no control whatsoever. “It’s not my decision whether I get a bonus or not,” said Tait.
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Tait took essentially the same tack on Tuesday, saying it was “misinformation” that the broadcaster paid out bonuses.
Which isn’t to say that CBC doesn’t hand out bonus compensation to executives at the end of the fiscal year. Internal documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation revealed that $16 million in such compensation was paid out in 2022.
But Tait argued that this shouldn’t be called a “bonus” because its terms are written into employment contracts.
“It has been a point of great frustration that this committee, or some members of this committee, refer to performance pay as a bonus,” she said. “A bonus in my mind is something that is given out on a discretionary basis.”
At one point, she refused to answer an NDP MP’s question as to what her own “performance pay” has been in previous years.
“This is personnel information. I don’t believe I’m under any obligation to disclose the exact amount,” Tait told Ontario MP Philip Lawrence, to which Lawrence replied, “We’re actually, uh, Parliament, which means we can ask for any information that we want.”
Tait responded “I’d like to get legal counsel to make sure it’s in compliance with the privacy act.”
The CBC president is paid between $442,900 to $521,000 per year, and her performance pay is a maximum of 28 per cent of that total. So, it could be as high as $145,000.
But the tensest exchange was easily between Tait and Conservative MP Rachael Thomas, who hammered on Tait’s assertion that she had no ability to alter the amount of bonus compensation paid either to herself or other executives.
Thomas focused in particular on January testimony from Tait in which the CBC president said that bonus compensation would be decided “at the end of the fiscal year, which will be the end of March 2024.”
This time around, when Tait said that performance pay numbers for the 2023 fiscal year wouldn’t be confirmed until a June board meeting, Thomas said that “either you lied on January 30th, or you’re lying now.”
“I really take objection to being called a liar,” replied Tait. “It actually is the first time in a 40-year career that anybody has addressed me in this way.”
Tait’s testimony that they hadn’t figure out bonuses yet wasn’t actually a contradiction of what she’d told the committee in January. As per parliamentary records, Tait told Thomas and the rest of the committee at the time “the end of the fiscal year is March 31, so we’d take some time to do the assessment. Normally, we would present the results to the board at our board meeting in June.”
But she did continue to assert that, as CEO, she had no power whatsoever to cancel bonuses, including her own. Almost all of her responses to Thomas on this subject involved some version of saying that bonuses were an “internal deliberation” that she could not stop — even if she was a senior member of the executive team that recommended them.
“Will you commit to killing executive bonuses to save as many jobs as possible?” asked NDP MP Niki Ashton, prompting Tait to reply “the consideration on performance pay will be deliberated at our next board meeting.”
In reply to a Liberal MP, Patricia Lattanzio, Tait called it a form of “constructive dismissal” if CBC were to stop performance pay, hinting that it could open them up to legal risk and operational failure.
“If we were to eliminate performance pay … we would no longer be competitive in attracting talent to the organization,” she said, adding that it “would create quite an obstacle for us” and remove “motivation” from staff.
Last week, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre published an op-ed in the National Post arguing that corporate lobbyists will be persona non grata should he become the next prime minister (an outcome that all available polls say is likely). “My future government will do exactly the opposite of Trudeau on almost every issue,” he wrote, adding “fire your lobbyist. And go to the people.” Canada maintains a relatively user-friendly lobbyist registry, so it wasn’t that hard to learn that Poilievre actually meets with lobbyists relatively frequently: 26 times in the past 12 months, in fact. The groups he met are most of the typical ones you would expect for a senior Conservative; mining companies, chambers of commerce, agricultural trade associations, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke. The only slightly weird ones are Mushroom Growers of Canada and the Canadian Health Food Association.
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