Colby Cosh: Did Carney meddle in CBC affairs to secure Eurovision?

On Tuesday the Canadian Press carried a wire story (written by NP alumna Anja Karadeglija) about Canada joining the Eurovision Song Contest. You will remember Prime Minister Mark Carney practically quaking with delight on Canada Day when he announced that Canada was going to have a 2027 entry in Eurovision, a camp-glam TV ritual that has launched dozens of music careers and that arguably serves as the continent’s nearest approximation to the Super Bowl. The PM even reached into the past to revive the old advertising slogan, “The world needs more Canada!” Why, it almost seemed as if he was using the occasion to reinforce his new European-facing, middle-powers foreign-policy orientation.

(At practically the moment of Carney’s announcement, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the coalition of state broadcasters that operates Eurovision, amended its statutes to incorporate the CBC as a full member of the EBU after 76 years as an associate member. This happened largely without fanfare or fuss in Europe proper.)

Karadeglija’s news story, providing the fruits of a CP freedom-of-information request, focuses on topics that are cherished by NP readers. She observes that the precise costs of Eurovision participation are not known — they vary from country to country and might be as high as C$1.5 million — and reports that the CBC itself is treating its own cost estimate as a secret, because of course it is. I’ve written a few times about the CBC’s truculence over financial information, which is infuriating and incompatible with its public-service mandate. But there’s a bigger issue here.

As the CP story points out, Canada’s invasion of Eurovision was heralded in the 2025 federal budget — the same one that boosted the CBC’s budget by $150 million. As someone in the federal Heritage department immediately seems to have pointed out, federal ministers are not supposed to be determining what appears on the CBC, nor making decisions to fund specific CBC programming. To do otherwise would be to trample on the principles of the Broadcasting Act. Moreover, the corporation had studied Eurovision participation before — the EBU has occasionally allowed mere associate members to join the competition — and concluded it was too expensive without “additional funding.”

Within a matter of weeks after this careful boundary-drawing, the process was underway for the full absorption of the CBC into the EBU, the CBC’s budget had been fattened and the Liberal prime minister, who is absolutely not supposed to use the CBC as a partisan cat’s-paw, was making our Eurovision participation the subject of a stump speech, one with a crystal-clear symbolic connection to his political program. Maybe he is already having a sequined suit made and practising his guitar chords.

I offer this as just one more thing to remember the next time someone at the CBC lectures us about its non-partisan and independent nature. After all, it’s a full member of the European Broadcasting Union now, and one of the official core values of EBU adherents is that they are “completely impartial and independent from political, commercial and other influences and ideologies.”

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