As much as I hate to be negative, I want to caution you against going out and buying a new transistor radio to pick up the Kingston morning show just yet. CBC has a long and inglorious history of making pretty-sounding promises to the CRTC and Parliament, then turning around within days of achiving funding and/or license renewal and saying "Oh. Darn. Looks like we didn't have all the information going into the presentation. Turns out we can't do all those things we promised after all."

The most recent - and most egregious - case of the CBC reneging on commitments happened after the last round of licensing hearings. At those hearings, they promised to increase coverage and funding to local programming, specifically promising NOT to do anything that would impact on local supper hour newscasts. Within mere weeks of getting what they wanted from the CRTC (as if that august body, known for extended hearings at a kabillion dollars a day to rubber-stamp whatever comes before them would ever even consider denying or attaching conditions to a CBC license!), the CBC announced that supper hour broadcasts across the country would be slash in half.

When pressed as to the difference between what he said to the CRTC and what he was then doing, CBC Executive Harold Redekopp bristled. "I never lied to the CRTC. I just didn't have all the information about how bad things were." Nobody ever followed up with the obvious question: "If you went into these hearings unarmed with all the relevant facts, whose fault is that? In other words, should you be fired for dishonesty ... or incompetence?"

I agree that decades of parliamentary short-funding has hurt the CBC. Years of urging its people to "do more with less" (as if somehow the laws of physics and nature do not apply to a national radio service); years of labour/management mistrust and non-cooperation; and years of bullying, grinding down, and mistreating its employees has left us a radio service that is a shadow of what it once was.

It stumbles along, forcing understaffed local shows to beg, borrow, and steal scraps from the cutting-room floor of other understaffed local shows or made-in-Toronto pre-packaged crap that has little or no relevance to people living real lives in real places outside the Golden Horseshoe.

I've sat there and stared in disbelief at my radio as one of our local PEI shows ran a series on "How to Select a Personal Trainer", wondering just what a lobster fisher in North Rustico or a potato farmer in Tryon might make of the woes of a poor urbanite, unable to find a decent trainer to help her get her abs in shape.

Worse by far, though, is the extent to which CBC has lost its compass (unintentional PEI pun, that).

The CBC was - and ought to be - the primary custodian/guardian/steward of Canadian culture. My Dad was in the Canadian Armed Forces during the years of the Cold War, and although the Russkies never darkened our skies, he never doubted his role in defending this country. The threat to Canada is far more insidious - absorption by a dominant, proximate culture. And CBC doesn't seem to understand its role as a front line defence against that threat.

So we turn on CBC and get a pretentious, so-hip-it's-painful Saturday afternoon show filled with live concerts from groups like The Pretenders - who may or may not be a good group (music being so subjective), but have certainly never had a problem getting their music played elsewhere on the radio dial. Unlike, say, many Canadian musicians.

We get an entire radio network devoted to music written by dead German guys, and the most vibrant music scene in Canada is ghettoized into a one-hour late Saturday afternoon regional show. East Coast CBC listeners could tell you more about the trials and tribulations of Britney Spears than they could about the best new up-and-coming musicians in BC or Alberta.

It's a mess, and I don't know that it's salvageable now. I'd love to say I applaud more funding for CBC, but I've seen where it goes - plush Toronto offices, a "CBC rate" at the Crowne Plaza in Toronto of over $300 a night, and a corporate ladder that features names that have been entrenched there for years while across the system, good women and men have been laid off as part of the "less" in "doing more with less".

So while I understand your enthusiasm about getting a local show, you might want to view any promises from the CBC corporate offices with a jaundiced eye. Do what CBC employees have learned to do, on those once-yearly visits to the region from some Toronto poobah out to deliver the good word from the Centre of the Universe. Nod, roll your eyes ... and say "Yeah, we'll believe it when we see it."

While I acknowledge all that - and certainly respect the source's experience - it will all depend on the Fed's budget. These past plans failed through lack of will outside the CBC as much if not more than what was going on inside management. It is the promise from the budget that I will be watching. The co-incidence of the CBC's plan and this budger and the need of the Liberals to get a win from the left (given that the right has dried up to its natural state in the 20s% of populatity) I think this may be a different moment than we have seen since Trudeau...and even then it will not be bought with credit but cash on hand. So perhaps I would better say it is the opportunity that I am excited by.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, else what's a heaven for?"

Nothing wrong with feeling hope, me son.

CBC radio has made itself irrelevant in much the same way that I think a lot of journalism has. It's as though the head office people think that they should do what everybody else is doing in another medium or elsewhere e.g. in music videos in california or on TV, or blogging, or even on commercial radio. Sometimes I get the impression that they're trying to reach a new, younger, audience, but their ideas about that audience and their ideas about their own role are so misguided that it is almost always a disaster. It's like they don't know who their actual listeners are and anyway they have contempt for those listeners so instead of relevant and original programming you get to listen to hours of what they think is trendy or what they think you should like. And then because of cutbacks you get to listen to it two or three times a day. You will like this. You will like this. You will like this. You dummies. There's a kind of fatal glibness, I think, behind it all.

As far as I'm concerned CBC radio is the main thing. If they could concentrate on original intelligent foreground programming I'd be happy. If money will make that happen, then they should have more money.
You know, hire some bright people. Give them a budget. Send them to interesting places etc.

How is it that NPR can come across as much more neutral than CBC? I spend most of the workday listening to the public service to the south.

I agree. There seems to be a political agenda at the CBC as well, and it's annoying. I'm a lefty, but I wish journalism could move towards some ideological middle ground. I think journalists should leave politics to the politicians.

And to go back to Nils's point, I think a lot of these problems would in fact be alleviated if the CBC placed greater emphasis on local programming. The CBC needs to decentralise. And it needs to put some trust, i.e., give stable funding back to local and international bureaus.