How, then, to receive the news of Robert Rabinovitch's appointment: hand- picked, in a manner befitting a West Island poll captain, by the prime minister; ancient chum of Eddie Goldenberg and John Rae, the prime minister's top political advisors; protege of Gerard Pelletier and Michael Pitfield, Liberal wisemen; senior official in charge of broadcast policy in the Department of Communications, vintage 1975. "New" and "bold" are not words that spring immediately to mind.

To give him his due, the new-old CBC president professes to come to the job without prior notions of how the corporation should proceed. In that spirit of free inquiry, he will no doubt be open to a few pieces of friendly advice.

(No, really.) They are addressed primarily to the English TV service, but apply equally to the corporation as a whole.

One: The old, "flagship" model of the CBC -- the general-interest, mass- audience broadcaster of a generation ago -- is dead. In the days when the average television set could receive but a handful of channels, the CBC might have hoped to capture enough of the audience to fit the mould -- and to justify its parliamentary appropriation. In today's multichannel world, that no longer holds. The CBC's average viewer share is now below 10%; it may soon be less than 5%. The CBC, it is sometimes said, cannot be "all things to all people." But what is certain is it cannot be all things to no people.

Two: If "spectrum scarcity" is no longer a factor, neither is the other defining part of the case for public broadcasting -- the inability of over-the- air broadcasters to charge viewers directly for the programming they provided. It was because of this, a feature of television (and radio's) technological infancy, that private broadcasters were forced to finance their ventures through the sale of advertising time. And it was this heavy reliance on advertising that made television a notorious example of "market failure." Advertisers could not know, and did not much care, how much a viewer wanted to watch a particular show: that is, measured by the price he was willing to pay for it. All they could measure was how many viewers tuned in. Television, then, carried an inbuilt bias toward the largest possible audience: The minority who might desire to watch one show a great deal were regularly outvoted by the majority who glanced at another while they did the ironing. Indeed, the audience was really the product: The programming was more or less a byproduct. Instead of selling programs to viewers , broadcasters sold audiences to advertisers.

Most markets do not work this way. So long as consumers are willing to pay enough for a good or service to cover its cost of production, it is possible to earn a profit no matter how small the market. There is a market for Rolls- Royces, for Faberge eggs, for Rembrandt masterworks, products for which there may be but one buyer or one seller in the world -- as, when it comes to more conventional household purchases, there is a market for every conceivable taste, high or low, broad or narrow. There is no "vote," at least in the sense of majority rule. The minority also rules.

Television was unique in its bias to the mass market. Hence the case for public broadcasting: not as a means of substituting elite tastes for mass tastes, but precisely to ensure that same broad variety of tastes was represented on television and radio as in the local fruit stand. But now, with the advent of cable transmission and addressable receivers, broadcasters can charge viewers directly, per channel or even per program. And so the case for public broadcasting has vanished. Draw a handful of titles from the television listings. I defy anyone to say, on the basis of quality, whether they were shown on private or public television.

What, then, becomes of the CBC? If it is no longer necessary to use taxpayers' money to make television programs, then it shouldn't be done. To argue that the CBC should be maintained at public expense, not in spite of its declining viewership, but because of it, is to say that people who don't want CBC should pay so that those who do don't have to. Certainly CBC television should be weaned off its dependence on advertising, for the reasons cited. But the alternative to advertising is not more public funding.

There is no reason the CBC could not become a pay channel -- no reason, except that on present form, few would pay. Not, at any rate, for what it costs to produce a general-interest broadcast schedule, which they might tune in once or twice a week.

They might, however, pay a lesser amount for a channel more closely attuned to their tastes -- as, for example, cable viewers pay, albeit unwillingly, to subscribe to CBC Newsworld. Now multiply that by several channels, each catering to a different slice of the market -- Artsworld, Sportsworld, etc. -- and you have a vision of the CBC of the future: a multichannel "constellation," each financed from fees charged to viewers.

Indeed, that was the vision Mr. Rabinovitch's predecessor, the much- maligned Perrin Beatty, lately proposed to the regulator in support of the CBC's licence renewal application.

This would be sensible even if public funding were continued: There is no earthly logic in pouring all that money into one solitary channel among the 500 -- or 5,000 -- from which a viewer might soon choose. If the merit of public funding is even tangentially associated with whether anyone actually sees the programs so produced, the odds of catching viewers are considerably shortened by spraying funding across the dial. Oddly enough, the more one is attached to public funding, the stronger the case for dispensing with the CBC as constituted -- that is, as a full-blown broadcaster as well as production house -- in favour of a granting agency, a la Telefilm, whose programs might be seen on any channel.

A CBC broken up into several pay channels, on the other hand, could carry on as a broadcaster, its identity and organization intact. As a transition measure, cable and satellite carriers could be forced to carry the new channels for a time, to give viewers a chance to get to know them. But eventually they would be expected to make the leap to viewer-pay.

The future of the CBC, if it has one, cannot depend on periodic appeals to an indifferent taxpayer, but on a committed relationship with a passionate viewing audience. If the CBC's new president cares about the enterprise he now commands, he will steer the network toward that multichannel future.