As of press time, the picket lines continue to encircle CBC’s Toronto headquarters and other Ceeb locales across the country.

Viewers who normally get their daily news from Peter Mansbridge, one of 5,000-plus Canadian Media Guild members locked out by the Ceeb over the pubcaster’s desire to be able to hire more contract employees, have had to contend with a BBC feed or look elsewhere. Viewership for The National with Mansbridge has been dwindling in recent years, and with its temporary disappearance from the airwaves, private nets CTV and Global smell blood. They are taking out print ads and boosting on-air promos in an attempt to permanently steal away remaining CBC news loyalists. And according to a story in this issue of Playback (see p. 4), they seem to have met with some success, at least in the short term.

And then there is the sports fan, long the Ceeb’s bread and butter. Viewers of a recent CFL match between the Toronto Argonauts and Edmonton Eskimos had to put up with a broadcast frantically slapped together by CBC management. With CBC play-by-play hosts and color commentators locked out, the pubcaster found a solution in piping in the audio from Commonwealth Stadium’s PA system. The quality of the resulting program has been publicly lambasted by the CFL, but early numbers indicate that not only did fans not stay away, but that the broadcast got more viewers than usual for a Canadian football game. Some believe the CBC benefited from viewer curiosity over how the telecast would be produced, although the audience bump probably has more to do with the football season gaining momentum.

And there is further talk about how the Ceeb might be benefiting from the lockout. One theory indicates the CBC is actually profiting from it, to the tune of about $1 million per day. Government funding – such as it is – continues to roll in to the Crown corporation during the work stoppage, and advertisers have yet to pull their support, so the CBC continues to bring in revenue while not having to pay its non-management staff.

Some industry observers accuse the CBC, which is reeling after a tough year that saw its eyeball-generating jewel, Hockey Night in Canada, off the air for an entire NHL season, of locking out its own employees to recoup lost income in TV’s dog days of summer. But now, with the NHL set to go forward with its ’05/06 cycle, and fan excitement like a dam about to burst, the prediction is that the CBC will gleefully ride the lockout for another month, and then make a strong push to resolve its differences with the union by October, thereby allowing Ron McLean and Don Cherry to do their Stan and Ollie routine with the first drop of the puck.

Those who believe this story point to Richard Stursberg, exec VP of CBC Television, as the architect, demonstrating more of the bottom-line concerns that characterized his previous stewardship of another public agency, Telefilm Canada.

Let’s hope this theory is not true.

While we must all understand that the Ceeb functions in the real world – and its world has gotten far more real in recent years with significant budget cuts – for our public broadcaster to profit at the expense of its own employees is beyond cynical.

On one hand, it is true that the fractured TV landscape has changed, and private broadcasters – along with business owners in many different fields – have increasingly gone to a freelance employment model. So why, then, should the CBC not be allowed to do so as well?

Well, for one thing, because the CBC is not a private broadcaster. The Ceeb has taken great pains to remind us of that – like whenever it is confronted about poor ratings for one of its programs. The standard response, usually given by outgoing executive director of network programming Slawko Klymkiw (see story, p. 7), has been ‘Well, you can’t compare ratings for our shows to those on private networks, because we are a public broadcaster and we have a different mandate.’ Well, if that’s the case – and perhaps Stursberg sees it differently – then perhaps CBC’s employment practices should similarly not be patterned after those of private broadcasters.

This is the Canadian way – jobs in the public sector are supposed to reflect the highest employment standards in the land. And if you want a career in public broadcasting in this country, then should you have to deal with the stress and anxiety of having to conduct your career on a contract basis?

There are no easy solutions to dealing with the pubcaster’s funding woes. Maybe the answer lies in maintaining the very best TV, radio and new media production staff on a full-time basis and moving them around within the CBC as new projects dictate, instead of chiefly hiring freelancers on a project-by-project basis. This kind of regular change within a broadcaster can be good, as it keeps both programming and full-time employees fresh.

The CBC should be consistent in terms of the mandate it has worked so hard at promoting.