MON SEP.26,1994 PG: A16
 In a 500-channel Milky Way, the CBC becomes a mere speck on the dial
WHEN no less an esthete than John Crispo says he believes in "the principle" of public broadcasting, when a patriotic Canadian the likes of Pierre Bourgault weighs in on its importance for our sovereignty, who am I to argue? Now: What's that got to do with the CBC?

Let us put aside, in other words, old quarrels: like whether we should spend another billion dollars of public money every year to make television and radio shows. Assume everyone agrees we should. The question that we friends of public broadcasting can no longer avoid asking is this: Is the CBC the best place to spend it?

This has nothing to do with the quality of CBC programming. It is strictly a question of technology. When there were only three or four English-language TV networks, and only one or two of them Canadian, when there was only room on the dial for 12 channels, it might have made sense to concentrate public funding on one network. But when there are, or soon will be, hundreds of channels, dozens of them Canadian, the notion that we should continue to aim it all at one tiny point in this vast Milky Way of choices is simply bizarre.

Whatever the CBC's supporters might wish, there is no escaping this reality. As it is, the network's average share of the English-language viewing audience has fallen to 9.8 per cent; at a given moment, that is, chances are that 90 per cent of the television sets in the country will be tuned to something other than the CBC. What happens when the CBC's share falls, as it must, to 1 or 2 per cent - or less? What exactly would we be accomplishing?

Granted, a larger percentage of viewing households catches the CBC at some point in the day, if only in passing. But even today, the number of people watching the CBC at any one time is usually counted in the thousands, not millions. The CBC likes to say it costs every Canadian "only" 10 cents a day. But in terms of the cost for each viewer, it works out to more like $600 a year. When that becomes $6,000 a year, presumably someone will start to ask whether there might not be better uses for public funds.

That may sound suspiciously like an argument that the CBC should try to draw the largest possible audience. Not so: only that it can't pretend that it does as an argument for public funding. Among the many conflicting claims made by its supporters, the network is supposed to be an instrument of national unity, drawing us all together around the same electronic hearth. But it can't very well do that if nobody's watching. If the CBC is aimed at a broad audience, it isn't getting it, and it isn't going to.

On the other hand, if the CBC's programs are intended for a narrow, specialized audience, or a variety of specialized audiences, there's no reason they should all appear on the same channel, and hence no need for a giant public broadcasting corporation, complete with its own network and its own production facilities, with all the expensive capital investment this implies. (Taxpayers might wish to consult the current issue of Saturday Night magazine for the first true public accounting of the shocking costs of the CBC's new Broadcast Centre in Toronto.)

If we want to spend public money on television programming, in other words, there is a more effective and less costly way to do it than the CBC. Rather than pouring it all into one channel, why not spread public funding across the spectrum, offering direct grants for the production and broadcast of programs on whatever channel they may appear? There's even a working model: Telefilm. Think how much of the funds that now are swallowed by the CBC's bureaucracy could be freed for other uses. Or, if you prefer, think what Canadian literature would be like if the nation's writers were employees of a state-owned publisher.

Oh all right. I don't really think we need to do even that. Public subsidy might once have been justified in television, when it was impossible to charge viewers for the shows they received. That's not the case any more. Those who value a program or type of programming particularly highly can perfectly well pay for it themselves. The old bias to the lowest common denominator arising from broadcasters' dependence on advertising revenues disappears: No matter how small the potential audience, if viewers want a program badly enough, they can have it. They just have to pay more.

That's true, by the way, whatever happens to the CBC. If we're not prepared to dismantle the corporation, perhaps the answer is to turn it into a pay channel.