CBC/Radio-Canada to scrap much-maligned ‘performance pay’ for managers

After a wave of criticism for handing out so-called “performance pay” to managers when it was considering layoffs, CBC/Radio-Canada’s board of directors is ending the practice altogether after a third-party review, the corporation said Wednesday.

Previously, some of the public broadcaster’s non-unionized employees — executives and managers — were entitled to bonuses if it met or exceeded certain metrics like revenue targets, audience size and digital reach.

It’s a practice used by other federal Crown corporations and government departments. But it didn’t sit right with many Canadians, some members of the government and opposition MPs when the company, under then-CEO Catherine Tait, was poised last year to slash some 800 jobs because of a supposed lack of funds.

CBC/Radio-Canada handed out $18.4 million in performance pay to 1,194 such employees for the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to documents obtained by The Canadian Press — bonuses the federal Conservatives called “beyond insulting and frankly sickening” at a challenging economic time.

Tait and her team ultimately called off many of the layoffs after the federal government came through with more money to plug a budget shortfall driven in part by inflationary pressure. 

Tait was non-committal about doing away with performance pay, maintaining the funds were part of a manager’s compensation package and not “bonuses” in the traditional, private-sector sense of the word. Veteran Quebec TV executive Marie-Philippe Bouchard took over the top job last fall.

In announcing the plan to scrap the policy, CBC/Radio-Canada said in a statement it wants to focus less on short-term goals like revenue and more on “longer-term public service goals,” like improving its “value to all citizens and strengthening Canadian culture.” The new compensation structure will reflect that shift, it said. 

But management and executive compensation is not necessarily going down as a result.

“In order to keep overall compensation at the current median level, salaries of those affected will be adjusted to reflect the elimination of individual performance pay,” the company said.

“CBC/Radio-Canada will continue to set individual and corporate objectives and measure performance, but performance targets will no longer be used to determine part of individual compensation.”

An outside consultancy, hired to review CBC/Radio-Canada’s compensation structure after the brouhaha, said in a report released today that its executive and management remuneration is generally “conservative” and roughly the same or in some cases less than what people in comparable positions in similar sectors earn elsewhere.

In order to prevent major executive and management turnover, the human resources consulting firm Mercer said the public broadcaster “should be mindful of not falling below market if it wants to retain and recruit the expertise and talent it needs to deliver on the organization’s national mandate.”

CBC/Radio-Canada’s parliamentary appropriation, the taxpayer money given to the company to operate, has barely kept pace with inflation — and is about the same as it was 20 years ago in real dollars, according to a review of past CBC/Radio-Canada annual reports.

For example, the 2005 allotment was $877 million — about $1.32 billion in today’s dollars, which is roughly what was allocated for operational expenditures by Parliament last fiscal year.

The country’s population has grown by some eight million people in that time and the media ecosystem has changed dramatically with the advent of streaming and more competition from foreign-owned firms.

Prime Minister Mark Carney promised during the last election campaign to boost funding to bring it closer to what’s allocated to public broadcasters in other developed countries.

The G7 average funding for public media is about $62.20 per capita, according to government figures — Ottawa currently allocates about $33.66 per capita to CBC/Radio-Canada.

During the recent election, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre campaigned on defunding CBC and retaining the French-language Radio-Canada, saying other broadcasters and media organizations could fill the news and entertainment void at no cost to taxpayers.