At the end of last year, the public opinion firm Mainstreet Research polled a sample of over a thousand Canadian adults living in Canada. There are some very interesting results. Some 41 per cent said traditional media in Canada have a political bias towards the left-side of politics. That compared to 13 per cent who thought they had a political bias in favour of the right side. The rest didn’t know or saw no bias either way. A greater than 3-to-1 perception of left-wing versus right-wing bias is, of course, really lopsidedly bad. Still, it’s nothing like the results from the US which are catastrophically bad in terms of voters’ perceptions of (again, overwhelmingly) left-wing media bias. That sort of perceived or real journalistic bias (I, personally, would say it is patently real but readers can decide for themselves) in turn drives a near-total lack of trust in the fourth estate by Republicans in America.

But returning to these Mainstreet Research results, when the firm broke those results down by voting intention, over two-thirds of right-of-centre Conservative party voters thought traditional media were biased in favour of the Left. Perhaps surprisingly, over a fifth of Justin Trudeau voters (so centre left to pretty far-left Liberal party voters in Canada) agreed there was a left-leaning bias. So too did over a fifth of those who said they would vote for the further-left-again NDP Party. But here’s where it gets fun for those of us in this country who deeply resent our tax dollars being shovelled in dollops of over a billion a year to ‘our’ ABC which still cannot point to a single identifiable conservative presenter or producer on any current affairs TV show. You see in this Mainstreet survey 31 per cent of those polled would ‘strongly support’ the defunding of the CBC. (For some comparative editorialising by me, as a native-born Canadian who returns regularly to Canada, I would say that the CBC is clearly less left-leaningly biased than ‘our’ ABC is. The public broadcaster in the Great White North still leans patently left, but not as shamelessly so as here. Maybe that’s in part due to the fact that the CBC in Canada has for a long time been forced to take advertising which makes it a tad more balanced than here. If you want the split, the CBC receives about Cdn $1.2 billion per year from the taxpayer and earns about $500 million p.a. from advertising.)

Notice, too, that the pollsters weren’t asking about cutesy half measures but about the defunding of the public broadcaster. Meanwhile on top of that 31 per cent another 15 per cent ‘somewhat support’ this mooted defunding. So all up, just under half of surveyed voters from across the spectrum either strongly support or somewhat support gutting the national broadcaster of its annual taxpayer monies. And another 17 per cent ‘don’t know’, so are undecided. The level of those who ‘strongly oppose’ defunding the CBC amongst all voters was a mere 24 per cent.

I know some readers at this point are wondering what sort of support did this idea of defunding the CBC get just from those who are Conservative voters? (Tory voters in Canada are more or less the equivalent of Coalition voters here.) Well, the Mainstreet Research results for Conservative voters were 54 per cent ‘strongly support’ this defunding of the CBC while 17 per cent ‘somewhat support’ it. In other words, all up just shy of three-quarters of the party base wants to gut the public broadcaster of taxpayers’ funds. By contrast and unsurprisingly, those voters preferring the two main left-wing parties the Trudeau Liberals and the further left again NDP were 43 per cent and 49 per cent (respectively) ‘strongly opposed’ to defunding. I’m confident that the disparity in the level of support for the CBC, from the two sides of the political divide, will not come as a shock to any readers of this fine publication. But it does go some way to explaining why the new leader of the Conservative party in Canada, Pierre Poilievre, has been aggressively attacking the national broadcaster. Of course, lots of former Canadian Conservative party leaders have attacked the CBC as biased and some have even promised to take some of its taxpayers’ funds away. Former prime minister Stephen Harper made those noises now and again but once in office he actually funded the CBC better than some of his left-wing predecessors had done. (Sound familiar when it comes to the spinelessness of the Coalition here?)

What is different this time is that the new Tory leader seems to mean it. Maybe that is because Conservative party leaders in Canada are now chosen by the paid-up party members only and last year they chose Poilievre when the caucus or party room of MPs would never, ever have picked him. You see Poilievre gives every impression of being an actual conservative and because leaders are chosen only by party members there is nothing the MPs alone can do about it. (We know these upstanding specimens would virtually never resign on principle over anything.) Whatever the reason, Poilievre seems to be serious about his desire to defund the CBC. Just this month the Conservative leader explicitly attacked the national broadcaster and its chief executive. In several recent fundraising appeals to the party base Poilievre said that ‘the overpaid CBC President has launched a full partisan campaign against me. Canadians cannot trust anything her CBC says about me, because it is motivated by her partisan campaign against Conservatives’. It’s a clever line when you think about it. The public broadcaster will always line up behind the political Left, especially come election time. The extra monies Mr Morrison and Frydenberg threw at our ABC before the last election appeased no one and just made them look pathetic. Mr Poilievre’s idea is better. Any and all attacks by the CBC can be put down to raw self-interest and the public broadcaster’s trying not to have its taxpayer revenues gutted.

Did I mention that this Mainstreet survey also found that explicit attacks on media that were viewed as biased would be (strongly plus somewhat) supported by 30 per cent of voters and would have no impact on another 32 per cent? Those numbers were higher again for just Conservative party voters. Meanwhile, this same survey put Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives at 38 per cent support (10 points ahead of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals at 28 per cent with the NDP at 11 per cent). In Canada’s first-past-the-post system that probably equates to a Tory win. Of course the next election in Canada could be some way off; it depends on how long the NDP are prepared to support Trudeau’s minority government. What is crystal clear, however, is that the political advisor class in this country that urges Peter Dutton and the Libs to shy away from any and all fights related to the culture wars – in other words to the most important matters voters care about – is slowly killing the Liberal party. Can you imagine them advising Mr Dutton to take on the ABC?

Heck, they’d probably be telling him he has to spend a few years asking for more details before coming to a view on defunding.