On This Day: CBC begins broadcasting, 1936

On Nov. 2, 1936, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation began operations, replacing the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission and giving Canada a public broadcaster modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation.

CBC/Radio-Canada gives Nov. 2, 1936, as the date the Canadian Broadcasting Act replaced the commission and created the new state-owned corporation. In its first broadcast, chairman Leonard Brockington told listeners to expect many new things, according to the broadcaster’s own account of its history.

The corporation’s roots go back to the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting, known as the Aird Commission, which reported on Sept. 11, 1929, and recommended a national public broadcasting system, according to the Wikipedia history of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission. The Canadian Radio League, founded in 1930 by Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt, campaigned for a publicly controlled national system.

Prime Minister R.B. Bennett’s government set up the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission on May 26, 1932, after the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council confirmed that radio fell under federal jurisdiction, the same account said. The commission regulated broadcasting and ran its own stations.

After the 1935 federal election, Mackenzie King’s Liberal government moved to replace it. According to that account, one factor was the commission’s broadcast of the dramatized political series Mr. Sage during the 1935 campaign, which criticized King and the Liberals. The new law made broadcasting a Crown corporation, which gave it more distance from the government of the day.

Sources differ on the timing of the legislation itself. One legal history notes that the Canadian Broadcasting Act received royal assent in June 1936, while CBC/Radio-Canada and other accounts treat Nov. 2, 1936, as the day the corporation took over and went on the air. The dates are not necessarily in conflict: the law could have been passed months before the corporation began operating.

Brockington, a Winnipeg lawyer, was the CBC’s first chairman and served until 1939, when he was succeeded by René Morin, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia’s list of the corporation’s leaders.

The corporation has since operated in English and French, on radio and later television, and its funding and mandate remain a regular subject of political debate. The federal heritage minister has proposed changes to its mandate, as Canada News Media reported, and our guide to the country’s biggest news websites places the broadcaster in the wider media landscape.

Nov. 2 is therefore the day Canadians point to as the CBC’s birthday, even though its founding law was passed earlier in the year.

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Sources: CBC/Radio-Canada; The Canadian Encyclopedia; Wikipedia, Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission.