As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.
All of which to say there are some things that CBC reports on pretty well. I does scrutinize the govt at times, albeit selectively (like everyone else). Maybe the problem people have with it is that it's a public service that has a clear liberal bias.
Also, the BBC has no problem criticizing the UK government.
People complain that it makes them biased but I don't really think so. At least not currently. For example CBC Power & Politics is decent programming and its not some one sided political overage at all.
In the recent past a lot of Canadian news outlets were incredibly cringe. Woke is now a poisoned word, but they were the cringey kind of woke where any criticism of foreigners for any reason was considered racist. A lot of that was Justin Trudeau Era institutional behaviour that has stared to go away though. The remaining holdovers being some courts and judges mainly.
I think lot of the distrust of news in Canada is a (somewhat reasonable) holdover for when they acted like this.
For Americans reading this though, this is all a completely different baseline compared to American News media. Canadian News might as well be true neutral in to the polarization down south.
Quite the pickle.
I do find it funny that the Online News Act, enacted by a Liberal Government, which effectively banned Canadian news from Facebook caused a financial crisis for the media companies that the government wanted to “protect” by strong-arming companies like Google and Meta into paying these companies for distributing their product for basically free for them.
Pretty economically illiterate to try to force a distribution company to pay the company they are providing their distribution service for.
There is no winning.