Eight partisan errors, seven against conservatives: The CBC’s own corrections make the case for an outside audit
Between January 2021 and July 2026, the CBC published 209 correction and clarification notices on its English-language corrections page. Ten touched on partisanship or ideology; of the eight that were substantive, seven distorted the record against conservatives and one flattered the Liberals. Zero ran the other way. That tally comes from a systematic review by Dave Snow, an associate professor of political science at the University of Guelph and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, who coded every notice the public broadcaster has issued over more than five years—the first analysis of its kind. The uniformity of direction is the finding that should trouble anyone who funds the CBC, which is to say every Canadian taxpayer.
The pattern holds beyond party politics. Of 13 corrections involving Indigenous issues, five walked back reporting that overstated the culpability of Canadian institutions or the Catholic Church—including two separate occasions, more than four years apart, when the CBC wrongly reported that the RCMP had fatally shot an Indigenous person. On Israel and Gaza, four corrections retracted grave allegations against Israel: a claim that 14,000 Palestinian children could die within 48 hours (the estimate covered a year), an unverified allegation that Israeli soldiers buried Palestinians alive, torture allegations aired without Israel’s denial, and Palestinian detainees described as “hostages” in the language reserved for those Hamas abducted.
Each individual error is defensible as the ordinary friction of journalism. Journalism produces mistakes; correcting them is a virtue. What the corrections page cannot explain away is direction. Random error scatters. The CBC’s errors cluster: against conservatives, against the Canadian state and the church on Indigenous files, against Israel on the war in Gaza. When a newsroom’s mistakes consistently favour one worldview, the mistakes are not random—they are a window into the assumptions that shape coverage before any error is caught.
The trajectory is worsening, not improving. Annual correction notices declined steadily from 2021 to 2024, then more than doubled to 48 in 2025. By July 21 of this year the CBC had already logged 46—a pace of roughly 83 for 2026, a 73 percent increase over 2025 and more than double any year from 2021 to 2024. This acceleration arrives just as Ottawa has deepened its stake: after the 2025 election, the Carney government boosted the CBC’s budget by $150 million, partly to “combat disinformation.” A broadcaster whose own ledger of mistakes is growing is an awkward instrument for that mission.
The Senate committee that studied the CBC for two years found trust in the broadcaster has fallen 14 percentage points among both anglophones and francophones since 2018, and warned that allegations of ideological bias “are serious and undermine trust in the public broadcaster.” Its remedy—periodic review of CBC news content by outside experts to assess fairness and balance—is modest, proportionate, and now empirically justified. The corrections record is self-reported and internally policed; even on the CBC’s own generous terms, the tilt is visible.
Parliament should insist the Senate’s recommendation be implemented as a condition of the CBC’s expanded funding. A broadcaster secure in its majority-government funding and free of electoral threat has every institutional incentive to rest on its laurels. Left unaudited, the correction count will keep climbing, the trust numbers will keep falling, and the case for the CBC itself will erode one notice at a time.
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