CBC budget cuts - the real reason?

Today, as in the past few days, there is news of more budget cuts for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
I think there has been a pattern among center-right governments in this country over the past generation or so.
The pattern was established by Brian Mulroney not long after he was sworn in as Prime Minister in September, 1984.
According to Knowlton Nash's book The Microphone Wars, the 1984 cuts to CBC were "proportionately far heavier than to other areas of government spending." There was "prolonged, loud cheering" in the House of Commons when the cuts were announced.
The CBC President at the time described the decision as "a catastrophe." But, he felt, "there was no way we would win with public opinion at that stage."
Mulroney was a very canny, and very sneaky, politician. He made most of the cuts, not among executives (though they earn the highest salaries) but among on-air personalities. The savings were comparatively modest, but the public noticed the increased weakness in the CBC's on-air presence and protested the cost of this increasingly inferior service. This was a predictable outcome (see below). Mr. Mulroney was either stupid enough to think that the weakness would not show, or malicious enough to create weakness intentionally under the guise of saving money. Not even the most virulent of Mulroney's enemies would accuse him of being stupid. This leaves "malicious", which I believe to be a very accurate description.
A Toronto Star editorial on Dec. 13, 1984 read, in part, as follows "[Prime Minister] Brian Mulroney campaigned… saying his first priority would be to create new jobs for Canadians. Yet now, without having created a single identifiable new job, he's throwing at least 750 Canadians out of work by chopping the CBC's budget." The editorial concluded: "Who gains? Not the CBC…and certainly Canadians won't."
On its editorial page the same day, the Globe and Mail said: "All right: the CBC had to share the general financial pain… but [Communications Minister Marcel] Masse should lay off the CBC before they chew off so much bark that the trunk withers and dies… There are many ways to kill an independent voice of national interest, and whittling away its funding is only one of them."
This independence is precisely what Mulroney objected to. So, I am convinced, did Jean Chretien. So, I believe firmly, does Stephen Harper. Though none of them admitted it, the above newspaper citations seem to me to invited the foregoing interpretation of events.