Charles Adler (broadcaster)

Adler's paternal grandparents, Joszef and Rosza Adler, were Orthodox Jews who owned a grocery store in a Hungarian village. They were murdered in the Holocaust along with two of his father's siblings and members of his extended family. His father, "Mike", who had served in the Hungarian Army until being discharged, escaped deportation to Auschwitz when a Catholic friend smuggled him over the Hungarian border to Romania where he survived the war as a farm labourer. After the war he was deported to a Siberia by the Soviets where he was imprisoned in a forced labour camp for three years before being allowed to return to Hungary.^[6][7]

He settled in Budapest, where he worked as a tailor. He met and married Rose, who had survived the Holocaust due to the intervention of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenburg who had covertly provided Swedish passports to Jews living in the ghetto.

Charles Adler was born in 1954. He and his parents fled Hungary, escaping over the border into Austria while carrying Charles in a backpack, in 1956 after the failure of the Hungarian Revolution. The family were accepted by Canada as refugees.^[8]

Adler grew up in Montreal, where his family had settled and where he started his broadcast career while attending McGill University.^[9] After a stint at Radio McGill, he became a producer at CKGM in Montreal in the summer of 1973. His first professional radio job as an on-air personality began in 1974, when he hosted a weeknight rock show at CKXL in Calgary. Within the year he was back in Montreal working at CJAD, followed by work at stations in Hamilton, London, Winnipeg and Toronto. He returned to Calgary in 1989 to launch a talk radio show called Hot Talk.^[10] He followed that with a move to the USA that saw him host a nationally syndicated radio show out of Tampa that hit more than 120 markets.

In 1994, he launched a television show called Adler on Line in Boston which a year later earned Adler an Emmy Award for Best Host in New England. 1996 saw him returning to Canada to host the Charles Adler Show in Toronto on CFRB. Two years later he was back in Western Canada, hosting Adler on Line on CJOB in Winnipeg. In 2001, Adler was the debut host on Global Sunday, a national Sunday night TV show. Along with numerous appearances on Canadian news and current affairs shows, Adler has also guest hosted in the USA on the Fox News Channel.

In 2004, Corus Radio launched Adler as a national host of Charles Adler which aired on 14 radio stations for more than eight years. In 2011, he began to host a self-titled daily talk series on the Sun News Network that aired weeknights at 8:00 and 11:00 (ET) and ran until September 2013. He also wrote a column for Sun Media's chain of newspapers.^[10] Adler returned to hosting a daily talk show on 680 CJOB in Winnipeg and was heard on weekends on 630 CHED in Edmonton and Newstalk 770 in Calgary. Adler announced on July 30, 2015, that after 17 years he was leaving CJOB effective August 7, 2015. Adler moved to Vancouver, British Columbia in order to be closer to his family.^[11] On October 13, 2015, The Charles Adler Show launched on SiriusXM and aired until November 21, 2016.

In November 2016 Corus re-launched Adler as a network show. Charles Adler Tonight was based at Global News Radio 980 CKNW in Vancouver where the show aired weeknights. The show was also heard on Global News Radio 770 CHQR in Calgary, 630 CHED in Edmonton, in Winnipeg at 680 CJOB, CFMJ AM640 in Toronto, and CFPL AM980 in London. The show ran for five years until concluding in September 2021.^[9]

Adler received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association on May 27, 2017.^[12] Adler was a regular columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press at various times, most recently from April 2023 until his appointment to the Senate.^[13]

In 2024, Adler was appointed to the Senate of Canada, on the advice of Justin Trudeau. His appointment was widely criticized: Minister of Northern Affairs Dan Vandal, the only Manitoban in Trudeau's cabinet, said that "There are many eminently qualified Manitobans who are better suited to represent our province than Charles Adler".^[14] The Conservative Party of Canada accused Trudeau of "appointing his Liberal friends to defend his disastrous policies".^[15]

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs issued a statement asking the governor general and prime minister to reconsider and rescind Adler's appointment due to past comments he had made referring to Indigenous leaders as "boneheads"^[16] and other offensive language to refer to First Nations leadership.^[17] The comments were made 25 years before his appointment,^[18] during a broadcast on 680 CJOB in Winnipeg, and which were later adjudicated by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.^[16] The Decision stated that "Those who occupy positions of power on the reserves may legitimately be described, on account of the decisions which they make, as “boneheads” or “intellectually moribund” by opinion-holders in the media" and that the Council "can only consider them fair political commentary."^[19][18]

Though Adler identified himself as a conservative for much of his broadcast career, and has even been described in media as "the closest Canada ever came to having its own Rush Limbaugh",^[20] since 2019 he has stated that he has "parted ways" with conservatism and has been increasingly critical of the Conservative Party of Canada and its provincial affiliates, particularly over issues concerning Islamophobia and civil rights, and now considers himself a centrist.^[21]