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I don’t care what CBC President Catherine Tait calls them. It doesn’t matter whether she approves the corporation’s executive bonuses or they’re set by some klatch of fairies dancing in a forest under the full moon.
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A bonus is a bonus is a bonus.
However, Tait’s insistence that the $15 million the CBC doles out annually to 1,100 managerial level employees is “performance pay” and that there is no way for her or anyone at the state broadcaster to stop them, is not only harming her personal credibility. It is also making even more people dubious of what CBC journalists say on television and radio.
If the boss can’t be counted on to admit the obvious …
Tait has insisted for months that the broadcaster does not pay bonuses. She argued that the average $14,000 in individual top-ups the CBC pays to almost 15% of its workforce is “performance pay.”
Tait made that argument at the Heritage committee in January and again on Tuesday. Except this time, she and the CBC doubled down.
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Prior to Tait’s second appearance, the CBC made public a letter it had sent to the committee in March complaining that several members were guilty of “deliberately false accusations” against Tait and Mother Corp.
The CBC even had an executive hand out copies of the letter to media before Tait’s Tuesday appearance so no one would miss the corporation’s insistence that Conservative MPs Kevin Waugh and Rachael Thomas, in particular, were lying.
The CBC never said Waugh and Thomas were “liars,” per se. But accusing someone of uttering “deliberately false accusations” amounts to the same thing.
Tait described as “misinformation” the claim by Conservative MPs the CBC pays bonuses. “It has been a point of great frustration,” Tait continued, “that this committee, or some members of this committee, refer to performance pay as a bonus.”
She insisted these generous extra payments could not be bonuses, because they are written into managers’ employment contracts. “A bonus, in my mind, is something that is given out on a discretionary basis.”
First, I don’t care about the definition of bonus “in her mind.” Most private-sector bonuses are written into workers’ contracts, too, so there is no valid distinction between performance pay and bonuses, even if Tait thinks there is.
Furthermore, when the Canadian Taxpayers Federation filed an access to information request for details on CBC pay, the sheet that came back contained a category called “Performance Incentive/Bonus.” So clearly the CBC personnel office understands them to be bonuses.
And listen to Tait’s own words.
After lecturing committee members about her distinction between performance pay and bonuses, Tait said she has no authority over her own extra pay, nor anyone else’s at CBC.
Tait’s bonus could be as much as $145,000 a year, above and beyond her annual salary of nearly half a million. But she claimed, “It’s not my decision whether I get a bonus or not.”
A what!? Let’s rewind the tape. It’s not her decision whether she gets a “bonus” or not?
When Tait is seeking to deflect criticism from the size of CBC bonuses and the number of employees being given extra cash or the connection between 800 job cuts and the payment of millions to execs, they’re “performance pay.” But in a fit of anger over being questioned about her own supplementary pay, even Tait’s own instinct is to call them “bonuses.”
Time and again, the snide, condescending Tait has damaged what credibility the CBC has left. She treats the public, MPs and critics as idiots, while making obnoxious, pompous claims that the CBC is “a beacon of truth in a sea of fake news” and “the single most effective tool that we have as Canadians to combat disinformation.”
Even as she herself is peddling misinformation.
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