In 1982, tragedy struck Sesame Street: Will Lee, the actor who played the beloved grocer Mr. Hooper, died of a heart attack. The show’s producers initially shrank from the prospect of explaining death to their preschool audience, toying with the idea of having Mr. Hooper move to Florida. But Sesame Street was intended to provide groundbreaking educational programming for children. For the show’s creators, ignoring death felt like a cop-out.
So after consulting with child psychologists, the show’s lead writer wrote a scene in which Big Bird served as a surrogate for their very young viewership, asking the questions kids might ask. “He’s gotta come back,” Big Bird says. “Who’s going to take care of the store? Who’s gonna make me birdseed milkshakes and tell me stories?” Several grown-ups patiently explain that Mr. Hooper won’t be coming back. “It won’t be the same,” says Big Bird. “You’re right, Big Bird,” says Bob. “It won’t be the same without him here anymore.” At the end of the program, Big Bird hangs a drawing of Mr. Hooper above his nest—and learns that a new baby has been born on Sesame Street.
I was too young to have seen this episode when it originally aired on US Thanksgiving in 1983, although I vividly remember seeing it in reruns. Like millions of North American kids, I grew up on the Street. Who among us didn’t love the Count, those yip-yip-yip Martians, and those funky bangers about the number twelve. It was only in retrospect that I picked up on the radical impulse behind the show, set not in a suburban home or imaginary castle but on a street notable for its cultural diversity and—there is no other word—poverty. A newspaper review of the show’s 1969 debut described it as a “slum.”
But it was also a kind of utopia. From its inception, Sesame Street was quietly countercultural, rewiring the highly commercial mass medium of television—a tool for selling high-calorie cereal to children—into a means for education. One of the show’s early champions had noticed his four-year-old daughter’s tendency to memorize TV commercial jingles and wondered if those techniques might be put to a higher purpose—hence all those earworm songs. Sesame Street was geared toward teaching kids basic skills in literacy and numeracy but also, over the years, straightforwardly addressed social issues, from disability to divorce, breastfeeding to natural disaster (Big Bird’s nest was destroyed by a hurricane in season thirty-two).
Educational programming was, for a time, part of a broader spirit of public uplift that united progressives and conservatives, governments and corporations. At one point, Sesame Street’s funding was saved by the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater. The series, broadcast on 190 commercial and public stations, was possible only due to an $8 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and other private and governmental agencies. It later relied, in part, upon the public it served and believed in “viewers like you.”
It was nice while it lasted. In 2016, after nearly five decades on PBS, Sesame Workshop inked a new distribution deal with Warner Bros. (now Warner Bros. Discovery), bringing Sesame Street to HBO. New episodes of the show—originally conceived to close the literacy gap for inner-city Black children—were now reserved for paying subscribers of HBO. Last December, Warner Bros. announced that it would not renew its distribution deal with Sesame Workshop, effectively cancelling the show after its upcoming fifty-fifth season.
The cancellation of Big Bird and co. would be a loss, but there’s something bigger going on. Sesame Street’s fate is symptomatic of a larger shift in how corporations, governments, and, increasingly, citizens have lost faith in the spirit of solidarity that made initiatives like the PBS show possible.
In other words, this is more than a budgetary decision. Liberal democracies are in the grips of an anti-establishment fever in which education equals elitism, ignorance equals authenticity, and any defence of the public good is vilified as incipient Stalinism. Techno-populists are fighting for a dumber world, and they are winning. To oppose them, we need to build a new case not just for public funding but for the continued existence of the “public” itself.
We are living through an era of large-scale divestment from public institutions, particularly those devoted to the cultivation of an educated citizenship. Nowhere is this clearer than in our public schools, many of which are physically crumbling.
In my neighbourhood in the east end of Toronto, many parents work in state-of-the-art corporate “ecosystems”: gleaming downtown office warrens outfitted with bespoke designer furniture, lavish client lounges, natural lighting, and eating areas that command expansive views of the cityscape. But first, they drop their children in dilapidated, leaky public schools, with revolting washrooms and no air-conditioning, in facilities that would have been considered subpar even in the poorest Soviet satellite states of the 1970s.
Approximately half of the Toronto District School Board buildings are over sixty years old, and years of underfunding have resulted in a backlog of 23,500 needed repairs to infrastructure components—70 percent of which are in critical or poor condition, according to the board. Without additional funding, the TDSB estimates a $4.94 billion repair backlog by January 2027.
It’s not just physical infrastructure that is languishing. According to the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, per-pupil funding in Ontario has dropped from $12,282.44 in 2018 (the year Doug Ford’s conservatives took power) to $11,506.03, adjusted for inflation—the lowest level of per-pupil funding in more than a decade. Funding shortfalls result in bigger class sizes, narrower course offerings, and a reduction in supports for vulnerable students.
The situation may be even more dire in higher education, where colleges and universities are laying off faculty and staff, closing programs, and even shuttering entire campuses. The immediate cause is new federal caps on international students, whose inflated tuition fees had propped up an unsustainable system for years. The deeper cause is, once again, a lack of sustainable government funding, which has been trending downward for decades. Since 1980, national per-student funding has fallen from $22,800 to $17,600 per year, according to numbers from Higher Education Strategy Associates.
Federal investment in medical and health research has similarly stagnated: the government’s funding for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has not increased this century, when adjusted for inflation. Medical experts have warned that the failure to fund biomedical research “will have damaging consequences not only for health advances but also for economic growth.” Faced with their own funding shortfalls, public libraries across Canada are cutting services and leaving positions unfilled.
Meanwhile, Pierre Poilievre—still favoured to be the next prime minister of Canada—recently doubled down on promises to defund our national broadcaster. Damien Kurek, the Conservative heritage critic, has called the CBC a “broken and failing propaganda machine” and vowed to “turn the CBC headquarters into beautiful homes for Canadian families.” Should Poilievre succeed, it will be in no small part thanks to long-standing Liberal fecklessness on the CBC file. For years, the Trudeau Liberals mused about modernizing the CBC. As recently as late 2023, Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge asserted that the time had come to redefine the broadcaster’s mandate. Yet the Liberals failed to take meaningful action, and the CBC may soon find itself squarely in Conservative crosshairs.
Of course, this vampiric lust to drain institutions devoted to the common good is even more pronounced in the US, where President Donald Trump is preparing an executive order aimed at closing the Department of Education; if the order fails, he is reportedly determined to dismantle it from within.
Meanwhile, Trump and his team are busily gutting the United States Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the General Services Administration. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who head the Department of Government Efficiency, have called for cancelling the $535 million (US) federal budget for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In the current climate, other Republicans see an opportunity to snuff out a long-standing ideological opponent. “[L]et’s defund PBS and NPR,” US senator Mike Lee recently posted on X.
Given the giant sucking noise currently coming from Washington, it’s probably just a matter of time.
There was an era, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when governments in the US and Canada took the public good seriously, making vast investments in the lives of ordinary citizens.
In 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration employed roughly 8.5 million Americans in building thousands of schools, hospitals, and community centres. The WPA also funded artists, musicians, and writers and contributed millions to arts programs that later became the National Foundation of the Arts.
The public-minded spirit of Roosevelt’s New Deal continued into the age of Lyndon B. Johnson, whose Great Society programs included not only the War on Poverty but also the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which secured funding for preschools and school libraries and established the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in 1965, which funded cultural institutions including museums, libraries, and public broadcasting. In 1967, Johnson declared that public broadcasting would become “a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families, and to provide assistance in our classrooms.”
That vision didn’t last. The Reagan Revolution funded tax cuts and increased military budgets by slashing social welfare programs. Under Reagan, free-market fundamentalism was consecrated as state doctrine. In his 1981 inaugural address, Reagan claimed that America’s economic problems were “proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.” For Reagan, the great social welfare programs of FDR and Johnson were wasteful—or worse: they might actually incentivize dependence on government and inhibit the spirit of individualism.
Republicans became increasingly convinced that publicly funded media and education are inherently hostile to their own political interests. “To stop public funding is good policy and good politics,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 states. The government can’t afford “more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year,” nor should it compel “the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.”
In November 2021, Big Bird’s official Twitter account tweeted: “I got the COVID-19 vaccine today! My wing is feeling a little sore, but it’ll give my body an extra protective boost that keeps me and others healthy.” Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz replied: “Government propaganda . . . for your 5 year old!”
The rise and possible fall of the CBC is a different story. In Canada, the rationale for a public broadcaster rested not only on educating our citizens but also on cultivating a Canadian culture distinct from that of the US. The 1951 Massey Commission noted that a cohesive national identity was inhibited by Canada’s enormous geography and comparatively small population. Moreover, with the advent of radio and TV, the gargantuan American cultural industry could overwhelm our market and turn Canada into an “empty shell without a vigorous and distinctive cultural life.” The national broadcaster was intended to safeguard us against that.
Over the ensuing decades, however, countervailing economic and technological trends—the North American Free Trade Agreement, increasingly globalized cultural and financial networks, and now the platform economy—undermined the goal of a distinct Canadian culture. Our own free-market evangelists assured us that Canadian cultural consumers benefit from the choice of American options and that “artificially” privileging our own culture (through government funds or Canadian-content rules) would kneecap our creators by depriving them of the opportunity to compete in an open market.
The granting agencies and CanCon rules would persist, but the free-market globalists largely carried the day. By the late 1990s, the after-school programming slot on the CBC was occupied by The Simpsons: the Canadian public purse was funding a media company owned by Rupert Murdoch. By 2015, Justin Trudeau was arguing that “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” Conservative critics later seized upon this remark as an example of Trudeau’s progressive excess. However, in reality, it represents the logical conclusion of the free-market consensus operative in Ottawa for decades.
Once we had established that Canada’s “core identity” was either non-existent (or, worse, the expression of genocidal evil), the CBC was left with an impossible mandate: there was no “vigorous and distinctive” national life for the national broadcaster to broadcast. A recent CBC headline, “Fewer people feel proud to be Canadian, poll suggests,” is symptomatic of this death spiral: the CBC is now reporting on the conditions leading to its own obsolescence.
Can the tide be turned? Can we imagine a Canada that strengthens its schools, universities, and public media—the intellectual infrastructure that informs, inspires, and educates citizens within our liberal democracy?
We naturally focus on the economic side of this question. Public institutions are costly, and policy makers are understandably interested in whether schools and universities are producing job-ready graduates and whether libraries are providing a return on investment. Citizens, conditioned to seeing themselves as customers of government services, ask: “What’s in it for me?”
Such questions can’t be ignored. But a deeper cultural issue is at play. The case for public funding hinges upon our shared belief in “the public”—not as an abstraction but as something to which we are committed, even obligated. Political processes exploit differences between demographics, interests, and world views; in the pursuit of electoral power, they drive wedges between voting blocs.
By contrast, the public must be understood as a collective life whose flourishing, as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues, must matter to “citizens for its own sake and not just instrumentally to their several individual goods.” The question is not “what’s in it for me” but “what’s in it for us.” The public good is not a drain on our resources but a source of common purpose.
To imagine such a public, Canadians must nurture a sphere distinct from politics. When conservatives protest that universities, school boards, and the CBC have become propaganda machines, we need to demonstrate that such institutions are devoted to the public good in a way that transcends political differences.
This requires widespread civic buy-in. Canadians—particularly the younger generations—are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness and isolation; their increasingly online lives leave little room for genuine social interaction or shared community goals. Our institutions need to offer more contact points for citizens to get involved, and they need to become stickier.
The next federal government must revivify our anemic armed services. But beyond military renewal, we should also think about new kinds of national services—perhaps a dedicated corps focused on challenges such as the potable-water crisis on Indigenous reserves, major infrastructural projects, or preventative measures for forest fires. Some form of mandatory public service should be part of the conversation.
A viable public sphere needs shared rituals, and Canada’s have been flagging. Just look at school graduation ceremonies, which have become stilted, zombified affairs. We may not huddle around Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday anymore, but if we fail to create new ways to come together, we will wake up one day to realize we’re not a country—just millions of people living in the same place.
More than anything, we need bold new partnerships. In late-1960s America—a time of deep division, segregation, and inequality—a small group of television creators and philanthropists asked how the dominant technology of their era could serve the public good. The answer was Sesame Street, a lasting example of how public–private collaboration can tackle social challenges in meaningful ways.
Of course, we are living through a perilous moment in our national history, with the multiple, overlapping crises of housing shortage, affordability, and serious threats from our closest international ally. I have never known my country to feel more adrift, more lost in the world. This moment of great uncertainty could be a moment for ambitious renewal. The best way to prove the worth of our public institutions is to make them solve the very problems populists only pretend to care about. Specifically, those institutions must address the social anomie, alienation, precarity, and resentment that breed backlash, and they must do so by re-energizing the public sphere itself around shared national projects.
Most of us want to break free of our algorithmically determined reality fields. We yearn for connections that transcend the political or familial tribes for a shared sense of reawakened public purpose. The first step is for leaders to remind themselves that such a public still exists.
