The CBC dodged a bullet this afternoon. The federal budget that was released today spared the CBC, and three other crown corporations. CBC staff widely feared this budget would include some painful structural cuts.

The worry arose from the strategic review process that was launched last May. That process could well have resulted in deep budget cuts to the corporation. According to the review guidelines as much as five per cent of the CBC’s budget was at stake.

The first two years of the strategic review process has already resulted in cuts of almost $1 billion. The federal budget released today, identified another $287 million in cuts from 12 different government departments, but the CBC, The Canada Council for the Arts, the National Film Board of Canada and Telefilm Canada all escaped unscathed.

CBC staff were relieved this afternoon as details of the federal budget emerged. The budget document itself doesn’t elaborate on why the CBC was not forced to cut programs under the review process, simply stating that “reallocations were not necessary as programs delivered by these organizations are aligned with the priorities of Canadians.”

Lise Lareau, the president of the Canadian Media Guild said “That means the dreaded and secretive “strategic review process” that the government began last fall and which could have wiped away as much as $50M from the CBC’s allocation is OFF.”

However Lareau added that the CBC is not out of the woods yet, “whether there will be some collateral damage from some broader departmental cut, it’s too early to say,” she wrote in an email, “I find that we rarely find out the (usually bad) details until the supplementary estimates come out, and that can take days or weeks.”

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