 CBC's downtown Toronto headquarters. (Veronica Henri/Sun Media)
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While most Canadian media outlets are slashing jobs and other costs to stay afloat in a sea of bad economic news for the industry, the CBC is once again rattling its tin cup for more handouts from taxpayers.
The public broadcaster already covers its costs in large part by siphoning just over $1 billion a year from the public purse.
But apparently that won't be nearly enough to pay the bills in the coming year.
Even before the economic crash last fall, government figures show the CBC had already rung up another $59 million in red ink for the year ending Aug. 31, 2008 -- on top of its usual handout that was 8% higher last year than 2007.
Now the CBC is suffering a precipitous drop in ad revenues as traditional advertisers are themselves slammed by the widening economic crisis.
The whole news industry has been hit equally hard.
Like most major newspaper chains, Sun Media has been forced to reduce its workforce, most recently by 10% in December.
Others are faring even worse. CanWest Global, the nation's biggest chain of TV stations and major newspapers across the country, may be only weeks away from bankruptcy protection.
But unlike private media companies that are having to cope with their own financial crises, the CBC brass evidently continues to operate on the assumption there isn't much a government cheque can't cure.
A draft memo from CBC president Hubert Lacroix, expected to be delivered to his 10,000-odd employees this week, warns: "The combination of a severe slump in our commercial revenues, coupled with rising costs of production, is a menacing test that will demand some tough choices on our part."
While those choices may impact jobs, services and programs, he says, "we are still working away at finalizing plans. Nothing has yet been determined."
Then this: "My conversations with government are still continuing to try to obtain some financial flexibility to help our corporation deal with these budgetary pressures ..."
In case things don't go too well with Stephen Harper and his media-loving Conservative government, Lacroix says CBC brass are already looking at alternatives "including the sale of some of our assets to balance this budget."
The Corp's options that don't involve dynamite are getting pretty thin.
AD REVENUES DOWN
The federal agency has already sucked $77 million from its pension plan, another $34 million from selling Vancouver real estate, and in the past year spent all of its reserves and contingencies.
In his memo, Lacroix does not say how much extra taxpayers' money the CBC is after, only that ad revenues alone for 2008 were 17% less than forecast.
To top it all off, the Corp's latest financial reports warn "cutting costs and generating new revenues cannot give us the resources we need to meet new challenges such as replacing aging broadcasting infrastructure..."
Too bad, so sad, but to paraphrase that old song, maybe it's time to think the whole thing over.
CBC Radio provides unique and valuable broadcasting not available anywhere else on the dial.
But why is CBC TV using taxpayers' money to compete with private broadcasters for commercial programming and the rights to pro sports?
The prospect of job cuts at CBC (or anywhere in media) certainly brings no joy to this corner, least of all among the ranks of its journalists who remain among the best and brightest in the biz.
(Full disclosure: Your faithful scribe has occasionally received nominal appearance fees from CBC.)
But what about the rest of this massive bureaucracy? According to government figures, the CBC employs more people than all of the country's private TV broadcasters combined.
At a time when the financial survival of private broadcasters turns on increasingly scarce ad dollars, it's a tad hard to justify the CBC's using $1 billion of public funds to suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of the same revenue pool.
If the CBC is looking for sympathy from taxpayers, its senior execs have been doing the agency no favours.
EXECUTIVE EXCESS
Over the past year, Sun Media has reported on enough examples of excess in the CBC executive offices to make the average taxpayer want to toss the remote.
Splitting almost $1 million of "performance bonuses" among a dozen senior execs, for example, may be OK in private business, but is downright loopy in a public agency.
In his pending memo to staff, CBC's head honcho Lacroix wisely says he "cannot and will not predict the outcome" of the agency's latest tin-cup rattle to government.
Just a guess the government's reply will sound something like "buzz off."
GREG.WESTON@SUNMEDIA.CA
