Remembering a giant of Canadian radio
David Cayley (1946 - 2026)
David Cayley died at his home in Toronto on June 10 at the age of 81. I never met him in person and our only interactions were over email. But when you’ve spent so many hours in the company of someone’s voice, it can certainly feel like you know them, and the effect is only magnified when you’ve long treasured their work.
Most of you have probably never heard of Cayley, a longtime producer and broadcaster with CBC Radio’s magnificent Ideas program until his retirement in 2012. We might live in an age of podcasting, but the term doesn’t really seem adequate for what Cayley did on Ideas. He didn’t just write, present, and produce exquisite documentaries, he elevated the format. A serious thinker in his own right who authored no less than ten books, Cayley had a singular gift for distilling complex ideas and could present them, in compelling fashion, for experts and the broad public alike. Anyone who takes even a cursory glance at a catalogue of his work will immediately register its breadth of theme and subject. You’ll see history, you’ll see philosophy, you’ll see science, you’ll see religion, you’ll see politics. Cayley wasn’t exactly a household name in Canada. But as our closest equivalent to the BBC’s Melvyn Bragg, he probably deserves to be (as does his Ideas colleague Paul Kennedy).
Cayley’s best work, for me, will always be his remarkable profiles of artists, thinkers, and philosophers like René Girard, Karl Polanyi, and William Blake. In form and in substance, these documentaries harken back to a lost age of public intellectualism; to a time when people would happily sit down to listen to a sixty-minute disquisition about abstract ideas, then mail a cheque to CBC headquarters for the official transcript. For most of Cayley’s professional life, as for most of the history of radio, this meant tuning in at a specific time every week because you couldn’t just get things on demand. Part One of a four-and-a-half-hour series on the life of French mystic and Christian Platonist philosopher Simone Weil? Sign me right up.
In a country that has sometimes been indifferent about its own history, Cayley was someone who doggedly refused to ignore or provincialize the richness of Canadian intellectual life. His treatments of figures like Charles Taylor, C.B. Macpherson, Northrop Frye, George Grant, and Harold Innis invariably featured a roster of other fascinating men and women from every corner of this vast land whose commentary helped bring the ideas to life. In addition to being brilliant radio, they are a monument to the dynamic output of scholarship and theory that flourished here throughout the 20th century — even as a young nation was still grasping in the dark for its modern identity. Never let anyone tell you Canada hasn’t produced great thinkers or great minds.
When I corresponded with Cayley back in 2024, I was searching for the raw tape of interviews he’d conducted for his 1987 program on the University of Toronto’s C.B. Macpherson, including one with my late friend Ed Broadbent (a doctoral student of Macpherson’s in the 1960s). He graciously, and apologetically, explained he had lost a whole lot of material upon his retirement. Tragically, it seems, Canada’s public broadcaster neglected to preserve this incredible trove of archival material (though it’s possible at least some of it now rests in obscurity at Library and Archives Canada). As things stand, you can’t even find the majority of his broadcasts online. Cayley, who spent more than three decades creating work that was expressly designed for the wide Canadian public to hear and enjoy, was clearly frustrated by this, having written on his blog that “The most recent of the more than 250 programmes remain available on the Ideas website, but the rest languish unknown, unheard and inaccessible in the CBC Archives.”
Some years ago, with a view to rectifying this, Cayley uploaded nearly fifty of his old programs to that very blog and made them freely available. In doing so, he has left behind behind not only a generous parting gift for Canadians and the world but an enduring testament to a career well spent and a life well lived.
Appendix: David Cayley’s programs by subject (from davidcayley.com/podcasts)
See also this more recent interview with Tara Henley about his life and work.