The following excerpt was sent out from cloverdalereporter.com:
Photo illustration: Lou Carlozo
The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Radio-Canada will eliminate about 600 jobs and an additional 200 vacancies will go unfilled as it contends with a $125 million budget shortfall.
The public broadcaster said Monday that CBC and Radio-Canada will each cut about 250 jobs, with the balance of the layoffs coming from corporate divisions such as technology and infrastructure. Some of the cuts will be made immediately while others will be carried out over the next 12 months.
It has also identified about 200 currently vacant positions that will be eliminated.
The cuts were attributed to “the same structural factors affecting all media companies,” which CBC specified include rising production costs, declining television advertising revenue and fierce competition from tech giants.
The broadcaster had already begun taking action to resolve its budgetary challenges earlier in the year, when it cut more than $25 million in spending on travel, sponsorships and marketing, and it postponed some technology initiatives and limited filling vacant positions.
These cuts will go deeper and impact a wide swath of the workforce, which included 6,500 permanent employees, about 2,000 temporary workers and roughly 760 contract staff at the end of March.
Along with the job cuts, CBC will be reducing its English and French programming budgets, including about $40 million in independent production commissions and program acquisitions. It said the move would result in fewer renewals and acquisitions, new television series, episodes of existing shows and digital original series.