This has been a long overdue accounting and airing of a painful chapter of my life – not that all of you were expected to read it but I just really needed to do it in some kind of coherent form for the record. Now I’ve roped you in to my tale, I hope it’s clear that by this point I have some perspective on the episode and I’m not entirely self-pitying. There has been much to celebrate on a personal and creative level in the intervening years and I acknowledge the privileges and opportunities I continue to have to whatever degree. But my employer took a lot from me and traumatized me in a way I could never have imagined. Someone has to say these things because I’m not the only person to have had this kind of experience with the CBC and I think it’s important to have the conversation – especially as our public broadcaster faces a long-promised threat from some powerful political aspirants. If you’re seeing this for the first time, make sure to go back to the start of this little series and check out instalments one, two and three.
My departure from CBC Radio had been kind of engineered around me while I was in a fog of humiliation and illness… but also just weeks after the third network offering from Paolo, Chris and me – The Nerve: Music and the Human Experience – made its series debut on Radio Two on October 4th, 2008 – the day I was returning from a truly restorative trip to Italy with Sarah and her parents. In the photo above, you can see that I’m pretty big and I can’t put that all on the CBC as I’ve accordioned in my weight many times in life. This time the effect was more profound as it lead to stress-induced diabetes – something I continue to live with and manage successfully – that at the time just felt like another insult and burden on the daily humiliations coming from the work environment at CBC.
A week after my return from Italy and the launch of The Nerve, I travelled to Chicago. Paolo and I had been invited by our friends at the Third Coast Audio Festival there to speak at a ceremony where our dear friend, collaborator and mentor, Chris Brookes, was to be inducted into their “Audio Luminary” hall of fame. It was a long-deserved honour for our colleague who himself had been damaged by his time at the CBC in St. John’s but forged a subsequent path for himself as an audio-wizard for hire, producing extraordinary radio documentaries in collaboration with broadcasters around the world, including the CBC. [After this instalment, I’ll be experimenting with a members-only post and I’ll include in that the speech I wrote for the induction event – stay tuned!]
There was a reception at the hotel and I’d arrived before Paolo and was making the rounds connecting with various colleagues. One, a producer from CBC in Montreal named CW looked at me with some evident concern and asked how I was doing. I confessed that things were not good and that I was currently on a medical leave. She looked crestfallen – as if she’d heard the tale a million times before. “Just remember”, she said, “great radio gets made at CBC in spite of management, not because of it”. This was an almost exact quote of something I’d heard years before at a CBC Radio office Christmas party where the legendary Max Ferguson showed up and I got to chat with him for a bit. Ferguson had remade what radio could be for many listeners and was a huge success back when I was a kid but had repeatedly had his spirit crushed and was tossed on the scrap heap by some bright spark or another in management who had no understanding of what he did. At the reception in Chicago, CW also offered this observation: “It used to be that producers made radio shows at CBC. Now, managers who are frustrated producers come up with ideas and appoint producers to execute their vision, meddling and directing the whole way.” All of this was cold comfort but at least made me recognize that this was just a case of a toxic organization behaving with predictable toxicity.
The question, really, is “how does that kind of toxic environment persist in an organization? Is it not evident to everyone that it’s a poisonous atmosphere and needs to change for the benefit of everyone?” Sadly, that’s not how it works. Organizations like that stabilize with a certain balance of toxicity that allows some within it to thrive and forces others to comply just to keep their jobs. Perfectly nice people can become so inured to that status quo that it just seems normal. Case in point: my producer, AM. We really did get along fabulously well for most of our near decade together and it was in many ways a productive partnership. We were also neighbours and would go to each other’s houses for dinner and share a lot of laughs and entwine our friends and families. AM was always adamant that she was a producer at heart and had no interest in joining the management side of the equation. Nevertheless, she was seconded to management more than once while I was at CBC and may have joined it permanently since. It was important to her to be seen as a creative – and yet, during a key managerial secondment, she was one of those in thrall to the American consultants who provided programming guidance in the transition from RadioTwo to RadioMusic. And let’s not forget that just as things were deteriorating for me, the new arts program Q, hosted by one Jian Ghomeshi, was just getting going. It would prove to be the quintessence of the idea of a toxic work environment actively and tacitly supported by management with something bordering on cultish devotion.
As I was still reeling from the loss of my career at CBC (and having the door held for me on my way out with such glowing and gracious and utterly shallow words by my former producer) I was walking down the street in my neighbourhood and AM was sitting in her car in front of the Sobey’s. She rolled the window down and hailed me. I went over and with a big smile she asked “Hey! How’s it goin’ ?” It was if she actually believed that I left my career willingly rather than having been manipulated by an HR-backed psychiatrist while I was most vulnerable. And who knows – maybe she was being sincerely cheerful. But that could only be the case if she didn’t actually see me for the past year – didn’t even consider whether the person she’d worked with so closely for ten years wasn’t in extreme and highly visible distress. So I can only imagine this is one of those cases where she is so thoroughly invested in the status quo that anything that threatens to pierce that bubble of perception is deflected or disregarded. I told her I was doing “not so good” and that she could tell MS to “suck my d***”. She appeared shocked. I wrote to her later and said, “Maybe one day I will be able to have a ‘how’s it going’-type conversation with you but not until there is an acknowledgment about what really went on with me. It is not my job to sustain your illusion of the CBC and your place in it at my own expense”.
Much worse than my former producer, was my former “best friend” – someone whom I’d introduced to the world of radio when I facilitated getting him a show at CKLN when I worked there in the late 1980s-early 90s. We were very close for many years and he was fascinating partly because he’d re-invented himself in his early 20s – changing his name, his career trajectory, his hometown and his outlook; even changing his friends and family – rejecting those who reminded him of a world he felt was beneath and behind him. For a time, he dated a close indigenous friend of mine who ultimately told me: “Ugh. He’s one of those guys who wants to pretend he’s a mystical Nishnawb” and she split up with him. It’s on me that I didn’t at the same time, though I really should have. In the days that followed my exit from CBC, I reached out to him and his wonderful, creative wife – KG – to whom he was an absolute cad and gaslighter, as it turned out. They agreed to meet me at a bar owned by a former CKNLer, the Crooked Star on Ossington. Soon after I got there, KB announced that he could only spend so much time as he had some vague ‘things’ to attend to. “No, K,” said KG, “this is Jowi. And we’re going to spend as much time with him as he needs.” In that moment, I realized that she was my real friend and he never really was. I was someone who suited the ambitious facade he was trying to create for himself and when I was no longer useful to him, he dumped me just as he’d dumped other friends and even family over the years. He never spoke to me again and I’m grateful for that because I think he’s one of the most terrible, manipulative and talentless people I’ve ever met but who knows how to worm his way just about anywhere. Good riddance, Mr. Shiny Shirt.
Living where I lived at the time didn’t make things easier. Parkdale/Roncesvalles was well known as an enclave for CBC types. After a while, needing to replace at least some income (Six String Nation was earning money but only paying for the debt of it’s creation), I took a part time job in a friend’s fancy pantry/gift shop, ringing through customers on Sundays. Invariably, former colleagues (including AM’s partner) would come in to pick up chocolate or flaky salt or organic maple syrup or rare spices and condiments. Those encounters always left me with this uncanny, off-balance feeling because they would never mention the fact that I used to work with them at CBC – never acknowledge that I had disappeared from their ranks with only a blandly shining email from my former producer. They would be most pleasant and smile and act as though I had simply always worked in this shop and ask me to direct them to the Du Puy lentils. On the one hand, this was troubling behaviour and added to my humiliation. On the other, it was a kind of evidence that they were captives of this toxic workplace – afraid that “there but for the grace of god…” It all felt a bit… Soviet.
One jolly idea I had during this dark period, after I’d had my own book launch successfully in 2009 and constantly meeting more former personnel who’d had their spirits crushed by the CBC, was to do a book about the phenomenon. It wasn’t meant to simply trash on the CBC. The idea was to begin a real conversation about the rot inside the structure of the corporation that was negatively impacting real people who were doing great and important work there for and on behalf of the public. I thought a book of interviews with those who had suffered would allow us to put those stories in the context of saving a great institution from self-inflicted disease and decay and to let Canadians get some transparency around a beloved/reviled body that has long been a political football. I was told by my then literary agent that no publisher in Canada would publish that book.
Why?
Because those publishers all have other books on their release schedules and they need the CBC to promote them – CBC was seen as the only serious media vehicle for struggling publishers in a small market like Canada to get the kind of publicity needed to make book selling remotely viable. Well, when you put it that way it kind of makes sense. Of course, since then there have been massive changes in the Canadian publishing industry AND the Canadian media landscape. Both have fractured in ways that might make such a book possible now. Some reader can let me know what they think.
The danger in doing this book in this moment is that once again the CBC is facing an existential crisis stoked by reactionary right-wing zealots like Conservative leader (and noted apple-eating enthusiast) Pierre Poilievre, who (although I’m sure he knows better) misleadingly equates public broadcasting with state broadcasting and has promised to defund the CBC – real US-style culture-warrior b.s. Stories like mine and countless others who’ve suffered from CBC management’s toxic structure would no doubt be cynically welcomed by Poilievre and his ilk as yet more reason to trash this institution and pave the way for the kind of tribalized media that is pulling America apart right now.
Let’s get something really, really, really clear:
I continue to believe that the CBC is staffed by hundreds of really good, really talented people doing really important work sustaining public discourse and working in the public interest, in most cases fairly and objectively. The trolls who reflexively scream “bias” can be easily debunked, though it never seems to make a difference. Public broadcasting is a sacred pillar of democracy and we need only look south to see what comes from a media dominated by commercial and corporate interests. I will vote for the protection of the CBC, I believe in the value of the CBC, I will protest in support of the CBC and I hate what the CBC has done to me and others – not because those good people did that to me but because the management of CBC is rotten in the commonplace way that many big organizations are rotten: untalented people fail upwards, cynical people survive and thrive, alliances are formed and power protects its own.
In a city like mine, the fourth largest in North America, it’s easy to imagine that we’re swimming in the same media environment as the U.S. or UK and at the same speed – especially since we consume so much media from those markets as part of our own news and entertainment diet. What becomes increasingly clear the further you get from major centres is that Canada is not a natural market and never has been. We can complain about our cellphone bills – in many ways quite reasonably – but at some point you have to acknowledge that the cost of establishing a network across the world’s second largest territory with a mere fraction of the population destroys any possibility of competition or economies of scale. Same for promoting culture or moving people from one place to another. Another discount airline folded in Canada last week. You don’t say? We don’t have 300 million people looking to fly from Detroit to Panama City Florida or Phoenix to New Orleans all the time. Institutions like the railroad (built at extraordinary cost to get western grain to a tiny port on the west coast, among other things, through vast expanses of wilderness with few to serve other than big business interests) and the CBC and the Canada Council, are all part of an effort to bind us as a nation capable of playing on the same field with Europe and America, if not actually always competing (though there are obviously areas where we do, such as natural resources).
So I firmly believe the CBC is a vital asset worth fighting for but that doesn’t mean it’s not run by assholes and it certainly doesn’t mean everything they do is great. For example, the CBC leverages its existing radio content to get into the podcast space and, using that audience and brand recognition, siphons scarce sponsorship resources away from independent podcast producers – many of them former CBC employees downsized or banished or forced out due to the whims of the aforementioned a-holes. If CBC is truly a public broadcaster, they need to back off and let independent producers get a fair shot with advertisers. ALL CBC podcasts should be ad-free. Likewise, CBC Gem, the corps’ streaming service, is terrible. They have a bunch of good content and they feel they need to be in the streaming space so they take ad revenue to get them into the space and they can’t even do that right. Ad breaks often seem to be mis-timed and there are so many, with so many endless repetitions of the same ads, that it makes the service almost unwatchable.
CBC should NOT be involved in pro sports. CBC should not be running American syndicated content. It should be an incubator. It should be a platform for the Canadian Film Centre and the NFB and countless media-creation schools. They should be fully and generously funded to foster genuine conversation between disparate communities in Canada; they should be the best of the best in local, national and international journalism; they should provide a cultural and political and linguistic meeting ground for indigenous, settler and immigrant communities that celebrates each of their contributions and acknowledges each of their challenges; they should showcase Canadian amateur talent in sports (including the Olympics, which they should always do) and the arts; they should create the very best in children’s educational television; they should workshop pilot projects with young talent in drama and comedy that might one day prove viable for commercial networks to pick up and pay for; they should have a robust documentary unit. And every Canadian should recognize that that’s the only way we get to have a genuine national conversation and, really, the only way we get to be a real country.
I just have to tell you one more CBC thing that really hurts:
I mentioned previously that WNYC’s RadioLab founder, Jad Abumrad, had congratulated me on The Wire when we briefly met at the Third Coast Festival in Chicago in 2005 and called our work “inspiring”. Jad and Robert Krulwich had been developing the RadioLab concept since 2003 but it first aired in its current format with its current unique voice in 2005 – if I’m not mistaken, just days or weeks after The Wire premiered. We were working in the same kind of sonic and storytelling territory. They eventually won a Peabody Award for their work too – in 2010! I love RadioLab. I find them enormously inspiring. So there I was in 2008, basically kicked to the curb by CBC. Meanwhile, RadioLab was a juggernaut for WNYC, with live tours including a stop at the then Sony Centre (today Meridian Hall) in Toronto with an audience of some 3000 fans, promoted and breathlessly reported on by CBC. CBC actually runs RadioLab (and This American Life from NPR) on its airwaves. There we were – Paolo, Chris and me – making that kind of groundbreaking radio INSIDE THE BUILDING, INSIDE OUR OWN COUNTRY and they decided they didn’t want to make that kind of radio. They’d rather buy it from someone who was inspired by us.
During all of this, as bad as I felt myself, I also felt really bad for Sarah. When we met (at the Cameron House on February 9, 2006, following our Six String Nation video promo shoot and recording with Justin Rutledge), I was a successful national radio host with multiple projects on the go, nearing critical stages in preparation for the building of Voyageur, jetting off to Haida Gwaii, shooting videos with materials contributors across Canada, meeting executives, finding backers to replace the promised funding that was cut by the then new Stephen Harper Conservative government, going to New York to meet the Battlestar Galactica folks and Trey Parker and Matt Stone and get a Peabody Award from Jon Stewart. I was firing on all cylinders and felt like my stubborn commitment to my creative vision and integrity to my ideals was finally paying off. By 2008 my radio career was over, I was deeply depressed and was struggling (quite successfully, I should admit, but struggling nonetheless under much-diminished supports and prospects) to make a go of Six String Nation for the long term. I’m not sure if Sarah had internally the moment that my mother had with my father following the loss of his Steelworkers campaign three decades earlier – where she felt an ultimatum to get her partner out of a deep, deep funk might be called for – but I’m grateful that she stuck with me (though perhaps she should have tried the ultimatum route because I dragged her through that deep depression for years).
In the picture above, we had been together just two and a half years. We’d gone to Italy to mark Sarah’s father’s 65th birthday (and her mother’s pending 70th!) At that point, Trevor was one year younger than my dad was when he died and just three years older than I am now. There’s no shortage of reminders of how quickly time passes. And nobody, including me, expects that you don’t pick up a few scars along the way. I have a million reasons to feel lucky and grateful. In the 11 years or so that I was with CBC, I had amazing experiences, an extraordinary platform that afforded me many opportunities I might not otherwise have had. I met some incredible people, forged some enduring friendships, had brilliant experiences and produced remarkable work that I remain tremendously proud of. I also feel like they stole something very precious from me by means of their ignorance, hubris, laziness, ego, lack of vision and callous disregard for basic human decency. And only because they’ve been brainwashed to think that that’s how the game is played. And I wonder if that’s how my dad felt when he was betrayed by friends and colleagues at the Steelworkers in the late ‘70s. Like him, I’m sure I’d battle right alongside my tormentors to protect the principles and greater mission of the institution but, like him also, I might take that opportunity to tell them what I really thought of them as people – as I hope I’ve done with this series of posts.
All these feelings, all of this bitterness, has been living rent free in my head for far too long. Though they are now less frequent than they once were, I still have dreams about encounters with AM. Writing this sprawling (yet still, I hate to say, incomplete) account in all its tedious detail here has been cathartic and I hope will allow me to create more space in my brain for better projects to come. Thank you for giving me the encouragement to put this trauma into words and for inviting me to steal your time so generously.
A couple of bonus stories will come next week for paid subscribers.
Thank you for this answer. Classical means also non-western classical to me. A crucial study was done and published by Gelbart (The invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’ Cambridge University Press), stating the connection between classical and folk music. It describes pop music as mainly money driven and therefore culturally corrupt. This is underlined by the Garland Encyclopaedia for World Music. And by me since my background is folk just as much as classical. And I played in a rock band for a short while.
I am impressed by the Six String Nation, this is a great way to connect people in times where we get driven apart. This should be widely known here in Europe, we could use such an example
During a road trip in Nova Scotia I was able to listen to your programme Global Village. It struck me as very innovative, a format somewhere between journalism and artsy world music that I never heard before. Back home I followed in the www for a while and when the program stopped I went back to my work in classical music.
It is weird how radio shows on world music come and go, how world music is completely out of focus everywhere in western cultures at this moment. Could that be an undisclosed background for your trouble with CBC? I have noticed over the last decades how this particular repertoire triggers the music industry: either pop oriented companies (broadcasting just as much as recording) try to take over the musical concept and ‘pop’ it up or just totally ignore it. I’ll stay within the classical world since that is way more reliable.