Statistics Canada: almost a million dollars for a podcast that has only 229 subscribers

The federal government has loosened the purse strings to produce podcasts which have not had much influence. The best example is that of Statistics Canada, whose bill is close to a million dollars… but which only reached 229 subscribers.

Since January 2021, the federal agency has broadcast 21 episodes of the show “Hé-listen bien!”, a podcast exploring a diversity of topics such as food inflation, artificial intelligence, gender identity and racism systemic.

To date, the production of this podcast has cost a total of $971,417, according to government documents obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation after an access to information request.

These sums were used, essentially, to pay the salaries of the three to five employees who work full time on the production of the show.

With 229 subscribers, “Hey-listen well!” had a fairly modest success: the different episodes were downloaded 1,414 times on average, for a total of 29,697 downloads in three years.

A podcast at $22,000 per episode

Statistics Canada is not the only federal agency to have ventured into producing podcasts in recent years. Several organizations, such as the Canada Revenue Agency, Global Affairs Canada, the Ministry of Agriculture, and many others, have also gotten involved.

Let us cite the case of the Canadian Conservation Institute (CCI) and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) which produced, from 2019 to 2021, seven episodes of a program with the catchy title: “The CCI and the RCIP tells its story”.

The bill, in this case, came to $155,736, or more than $22,000 per episode.

This amount includes costs of $9,000 for podcast production training, $2,000 for equipment, and $115,000 to pay the salaries of full-time employees responsible for this project.

Full-time employees

Another example is the “Healthy Canadians” podcast, produced by the Public Health Agency of Canada, which features “nuanced conversations with health experts,” and which was “largely produced domestically.” unceded tradition of the Algonquin Anishinabe people,” specifies the government website.

In addition to the salaries of four full-time employees, this show, which has more than 4,000 subscribers on YouTube, resulted in expenses of $67,000, half of which for an “editorial planning strategy” and “employee training for the podcast.

According to documents made public in 2023, the federal government had spent $1.7 million on the production of podcasts on that date. However, this figure does not include all salaries paid to employees paid exclusively to carry out these projects.