Its seven-year strategic plan, unveiled last week, is a master stroke: at once both visionary and prudent, aware as much of the technological as of the political realities that confront it, and based on the time-tested premise that the best defence is a good offence. It is not the only way of reinventing the CBC, but it is a good one, and deserves a much more respectful hearing than the raspberry it was given by the Heritage Minister, Sheila Copps, the day after its release.

I say this as someone for whom the CBC's fate, at least as regards its English-language television network, is a matter of relatively minor importance: not because it does not make the odd good program, but because the case for public funding of television, though once compelling, has more or less disappeared. When viewers have hundreds of channels to choose from, and, more important, when they can pay directly for each channel and even for each program, there is no longer the obvious market failure that, in the age when there were only three or four over-the-air broadcasters, might have called for public intervention.

But I recognize that many people still cling to the public broadcaster model. And of course one would not wish to see the people who work at the corporation needlessly unemployed. And so the question becomes how to ensure a future for the CBC that makes the best use of available funding -- or, better yet, allows it to escape from dependence on public funds altogether.

For what is abundantly clear is that the corporation cannot continue as it is, in the old, flagship-broadcaster model -- not with an average audience share on English TV that is already less than 10%, and heading for 5%. It is often said that the CBC cannot be "all things to all people," but certainly it cannot be all things to a very few people. As the number of channels proliferates and audiences fragment even further, the CBC could look forward only to a future of unending decline, even if the federal government were inclined to increase its funding, which it is not. From the government's standpoint, the question of why, in the fabled 500-channel universe, so much public money was being aimed at one particular point in the firmament would become inescapable.

That is what is so exciting about the corporation's new strategic plan. Rather than sit and wait for oblivion to overtake it, or vainly hope to persevere on the same course as before, the CBC is proposing a revolution: six new specialty television channels, to go with its existing lineup of four (two broadcast and two cable), plus two new radio networks. The idea, as the corporation's much-maligned president, Perrin Beatty, puts it, is to turn the CBC from a single, flickering supernova into a "constellation" of services. More prosaically, the new channels would extend the CBC's "shelf space" in the market, improving its chances of attracting viewers to its wares.

Is there a danger, as Ms. Copps and others have already warned, that this might be spreading the CBC's resources too thin? There would be, if the new services were to be funded out of the same parliamentary appropriation as the old. But the CBC claims they would be self-sustaining, generating as much new revenues as they added in costs.

Maybe that's unrealistic, but what's significant is that the CBC is even suggesting it. For if the new channels can operate without public funding, so, in time, could the old.

How? A working model is already present, in the form of Newsworld. That is, the new CBC services should be offered to the public as pay or pay-per-view channels. In the short run, this might still be compulsory, part of the basic cable and satellite package. But everyone understands that the day is coming when viewers will be able to "pick-and-pay" for only the channels they want.

Indeed, far from telling CBC to, in effect, stick to the knitting, Ms. Copps ought to offer the corporation a deal. In return for its reorganization as a multi-channel broadcaster, the CBC's parliamentary appropriation would be wound down to zero. What would that mean for the main network? It obviously couldn't survive as a single, general-interest pay channel: Not enough people would pay the requisite fee for a station they might only watch once or twice a week. But it could be unbundled into several additional networks -- Sportsworld, say, or Artsworld -- each at a correspondingly lesser fee, and so migrate to pay in stages.

So, bravo, CBC. Or should I say: CBC, meet Bravo.