CBC layoffsNational Post

All that is keeping more consumers from “cutting the cord” is the relative difficulty of finding and displaying web-based versus traditional television, but the gap is rapidly closing. Let Apple or Google figure out a better interface, and it’s over: in a few years, maybe two, there will not be such things as networks, or cable, or even television, as a separate device. We will no longer watch programs on a defined schedule, or scroll through a menu of channels. Most likely we will pick from a screenful of icons, delivered on demand. It isn’t just the CBC, in its present form, that no longer makes sense. The whole thing doesn’t make sense: CanCon, the CRTC, the subsidies and protections for private networks, any of it.

Is anyone prepared for this? Has anyone a clue of the kind of change that is about to overtake them? The private operators at least have the threat of bankruptcy to spur them on: some may even hope to survive. But the CBC? Lacroix’s bold rhetoric aside, the tendency in any such large organization is to lag behind the curve, always fighting the last revolution. To bureaucratic inertia, add the narcotic effects of public funding: not enough to save it, but just enough to doom it. And even if the CBC were of a mind to remake itself, its government masters aren’t. Politically, it’s just not worth the risk.

So the likelihood is that the CBC will go on like this, drifting and declining for years to come. Like Canada Post, like Via Rail and the other stranded assets that litter the public sector, it will limp on, purposelessly, through successive “action plans” and “reinventions,” for no reason other than that no one can be bothered to do anything else — and because no one expects them to. In a politics without ideas, under a government without ambition, that’s what we’ve learned to accept.