Canadian broadcaster reverses policy barring use of ‘terrorist attack’ label for 9/11

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) walked back its move Friday to advise its journalists not to refer directly to Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the U.S. as an act of terrorism — guidance that garnered widespread criticism from political leaders.

In an internal memo this week first reported by The Toronto Sun , CBC’s senior director of journalistic standards and public trust, Basem Boshra, instructed staff to “not refer to the Sept. 11 attacks as terrorist attacks.”

On Wednesday, FBI Director Kash Patel slammed this internal advisory and urged other leaders to do the same.

“Just this year, @FBI has been instrumental in or directly responsible for multiple disruptions of significant terrorist and violent criminal organizations operating within Canada,” Hoekstra said. “Failure to recognize and confront radical and terrorist ideologies significantly endangers our efforts to establish and harmonize a shared national and economic security partnership.”

Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, similarly decried the CBC’s now-defunct guidance in a social media post Friday morning, hours before the broadcaster removed the policy.

The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, also took to social media to urge the CBC to “immediately apologize and retract this directive.”

“To call 9/11 anything other than a terrorist attack is an appalling distortion of history,” Poilievre wrote. “It dishonours the victims and their families, the survivors, and the first responders who suffered from the horrors of that day.”

Following this criticism, which also centered around the decision’s proximity to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Boshra said in a Friday statement that the outlet would change its policy to not require attribution for labeling the Sept. 11 attack as an act of terrorism.

The CBC director said the paper generally follows guidance to attribute words like “terrorist” and “terrorism” to its sources rather than describing events as such directly.

“After reviewing our current language guidance, we have decided to adjust it to clarify that direct attribution is not required for describing the historic events of 9/11 as terrorism,” Boshra wrote. “We are doing so to remove what has unfortunately (and unintentionally) become an impediment to clarity and public understanding.”

The CBC controversy comes amid heightened tensions this week between the U.S. and its northern neighbor as the countries impose sweeping tariffs on one another in an escalating trade war .

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the country would match President Trump’s 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods “ dollar for dollar .”

The American president hit back this week by threatening additional import taxes and signing an executive order to rename “Lake Ontario” as “Lake America.”