Let’s face it. With all of this consolidation going on, we’ve known for some time that a whack of restructuring was in the works, and hey – news alert! – the whacking is well underway.

Corus Entertainment, CTV and CanWest Global have all been doing the pink-slip Hokey-Pokey lately, each after its own fashion. Herewith, a whimsical look at the manner in which each spins its spin-offs, and a look at what’s to come.

The JR Shaw family-controlled Corus is giving it to us fairly straight up – perhaps a bit of a rub-off of the management style of cable honcho Jim Shaw, not one known for holding back. ‘Corus Entertainment Announces Organizational Changes in its Corporate and Television Divisions’ reads the fateful press release.

As with ‘Restructuring,’ the term ‘Organizational Changes’ has moved beyond being a euphemism. Roughly translated, it means ‘scroll down, Mac, the number of employees axed will be near the bottom.’

So down we go. Weeeeeee. ‘Content creation hub,’ blah blah, ‘brand-focused approach,’ blah blah, ‘consistent marketing strategy,’ blah, ‘platform innovation team,’ blah, ‘seamless transition’ Ah-ha. There it is. Fifty-three.

Fair enough, I guess. This is the fruition of a streamlining process that’s been going on since July, so nobody can say they didn’t see it coming.

If you look at the press coming out of CTV, meanwhile, it appears that most everyone’s getting kicked upstairs, as the broadcaster goes, in the inimitable prose of CEO Ivan Fecan, ‘from strength to strength.’

Susanne Boyce remains creative pooh-bah, kinda like she was before, only with a meatier title; Rick Brace is engineer of the business locomotive; and a long list of CTV acolytes are movin’ on up. There are even a few former CHUMers on the list. Among them, Isme Bennie becomes VP and GM of Bravo!, Stephan Argent is VP digital media, David Goldstein becomes senior VP of regulatory affairs, and Sarah Crawford VP public affairs.

‘The key to our continued successful growth is to use our new scale to improve our programs and better differentiate our channels and new media experience, while becoming more efficient off screen,’ said Fecan in a statement. That strength-in-numbers logic didn’t go over so well with CRTC chair Konrad von Finckenstein when CTV wanted the whole CHUM kit and caboodle, but give Fecan marks for consistency.

Our memories are so very short that the execs who have been ankled, especially at CHUM, already seem to be ancient history. There’s Jay Switzer, of course, and Roma Khanna, while Maria Hale left for Telus and Mary Powers for CTV, and then to go it on her own as a consultant. On the CTV side, pink slips are indeed going out, though very quietly, and if the grapevine is to be relied upon, sparingly. Among senior names, VP of digital media Kris Faibish is out; former SVP dramatic programming Bill Mustos, on sabbatical in France for a year, is not coming back, and his replacement, Tecca Crosby, was shown the door.

A CTV insider acknowledges that there’s lots of negotiating happening in the background, with a few going here and there, though mostly voluntarily, mostly through attrition. (I guess it wouldn’t do to put out a release declaring, ‘Our employees are happy to leave.’)

But the sleight-of-hand award has to go to CanWest, which is busily preparing itself to make a meal of the broadcast assets of Alliance Atlantis. In spite of the fact that that portion of the company is being held in trust – probably until early next year – we already know that the vast majority of AAC execs are, a-hem, history.

While he can’t comment on specific individuals, AAC’s independent trustee Jim MacDonald calls this kind of planning operational prudence.

‘What I think normally happens in this process is that the purchaser tries to communicate to various people as much as they possibly can about their future intentions, in order to deal with people as early and as forthrightly as possible,’ he says.

I guess CanWest is pretty confident that it will get the OK to acquire those assets from the CRTC, counting eggs before they’ve hatched.

One Toronto-based media buyer predicts that if CanWest’s takeover of AAC goes through as planned, there will not be the full-scale cull that some are dreading, since the AAC specialty assets are new to the company. ‘Look at Global’s holdings – outside of their digis [its only specialty is TVtropolis],’ he says. ‘Those aren’t going to sell themselves. They need a lot of those people.’

AAC’s digital media assets, meanwhile, are not being held in trust, and they’re not new to the company, given that CanWest already has its own well-staffed department. CanWest has already rather unceremoniously axed blogtv.ca as well as AAC digital media honcho Claude Galipeau, and there could well be more to follow.

We more recently saw an unpopular move on the local news front, which critics say was disingenuously announced in a news release trumpeting ‘CanWest to Launch State-of-the-Art Broadcast Centres.’ The devil is in the verbs, which begin with the subhead, in which ‘Streamlining’ and ‘Operational Efficiencies’ appear in the same sentence. Oh dear. Scroll down, people.

‘Transition to high definition,’ blah blah, ‘to Canadians, by Canadians’ (groan) blah blah, ‘home-grown news gathering,’ and here it is, as promised: 200. Ouch.

The CEP, which reps 1,000 employees at Global network stations in Canada, didn’t waste any time weighing in on that one, with a release titled ‘Global puts staff and communities last with cutbacks.’ Beat around the bush, why doncha.

‘It seems to me there’s going to be more of this going on,’ says CEP VP media Peter Murdoch. ‘The broadcasting stations are becoming more like big retail franchises or mines. They’re more concerned about the value of the property than the value of the product.’

Perhaps they’re bracing themselves for a darker possibility, in CanWest’s world view anyway. With the CRTC sticking more strictly to the letter of the law in recent decisions, analyst Ben Mogil of Westwind Partners predicted in a recent note that CanWest is going to be forced to up its stake in AAC by an additional $130 million.

The already debt-laden company is going to have to pull a rabbit out of its hat to find that kind of coin. In which case, all bets are off.