TORONTO – The CBC is continuing to chip away at its work force as its leaders said they would last June. Today, 244 more positions were eliminated at local stations spread out across the country, with 100 from the French language service and the balance from English CBC.
These cuts are part of the 1500 workforce reductions which were announced last June.
“Today we are moving ahead with the implementation of our plan to be more local at lower cost, announced last year in the 2020 plan,” reads a memo from Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor in chief, CBC News and Centres. “That means we are also sharing difficult news with our local teams about job reductions in local stations. We announced last summer these reductions were coming but it doesn’t make the details any easier to hear. We said in June we would need to reduce the annual operating cost of local services by $15 million. Today we know that means we will have 144 fewer positions across the country. The actual people impacts will be higher in some instances as we shift the nature of the positions we have moving forward.”
Here are the reductions across the country from the English language side, per region:
Newfoundland & Labrador, 7 positions; Nova Scotia, 11 positions; Prince Edward Island, 2 positions; New Brunswick, 4 positions; Quebec, 9 positions; Ontario, 30 positions; Manitoba, 3 positions; Saskatchewan, 11 positions; Alberta, 37 positions; British Columbia, 25 positions; The North, 5 positions.
“Given the financial target we needed to meet, these reductions were worked out by the senior leadership team for News and Centres including the senior managing directors for each region. The resulting local business plans have been finalized this week,” added McGuire’s memo.
“We deliberately did not apply an across-the-board percentage cut, nor did we identify particular activities. Instead we re-thought our delivery of local services from the ground up.”
That means no stations are being closed and all local radio programming is being maintained. This announcement follows the CBC’s notice in December that its local TV news is being reduced from 90 minutes to either 30 or 60 minutes and that it will be adding one-minute hourly news updates in the TV schedule.
The Corp. is also introducing a continuous local news service for mobile devices and will be supporting that with 80 new digital jobs. “It’s a significant change in our delivery of local news and information — perhaps the largest transformation ever undertaken by CBC in local,” added McGuire’s memo.
At Radio-Canada, there will be 80 current positions eliminated with the remaining 20 coming from retirements or vacancies which will not be filled.
