Measuring the Decline of the CBC: Discussion about Novel Brings up Question of Who Listens Now, "Late Nights on Air," and Who Cares?

The book tonight at the Atwater Library is Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air. A winner of the 2007 Scotia Bank Giller Prize, it takes place in the mid-1970s in Yellowknife, and the main characters are all involved in the CBC station there. Television is just about to arrive in the North with a vengeance, one of the main characters who sounds a little like Peter Gzowski might have, had he took to drink after his unhappy sortie into television, and implicit in the whole book is the importance of radio, particularly the kind of close-to-the-community radio that the CBC used to be.

I'm looking forward to the discussion, but as I prepare for it, I keep thinking about the diminished place that CBC radio has in our lives now. The local programming keeps getting less and less intelligent, the news is more superficial, the cultural shows are mainly a joke (Shelagh Rogers, Eleanor Wachtel and Ideas are the exceptions) and the less said about Radio Two the better.

The quality of the CBC used to be one of the defining things about Canada. Its programming was intelligent, sometimes funny, and always relevant. It tied the country together, and informed people from all backgrounds. I can't imagine anyone wanting to write a novel 30 years from now about CBC radio today. Who cares about it? Who will care? Very few, and that is exactly what the current government is working toward, as it overrides the CRTC on broadcast license and other matters, and refuses to provide adequate support for public radio.