‘We’ve already been cut to the bone. We’ve already tightened our belt,’ says Calgary-based CBC-TV reporter Carolyn Dunn

CBC Calgary plans to cut staff, drop a local television show, shrink a weekday radio program and reduce local live music recording to help make up for the national public broadcaster’s crippling $171 million budget shortfall.

After CBC’s request for a loan was turned down by the Canadian government last month, the broadcaster laid out plans to cut about 800 full-time jobs (about 10 per cent of its workforce) across Canada, largely because of declining ad revenue. For CBC Calgary, it’s the second big cut in as many years; last year, the broadcaster uprooted its Calgary Newsworld operation. “It’s just really disheartening,” says Carolyn Dunn, a Calgary-based national reporter for CBC-TV. “We’ve already been cut to the bone. We’ve already tightened our belt…. We’re very lean, and we provide a whole lot of content with actually not that many people.”

Details about news cuts won’t come out until later this month, but CBC has said 80 people in news will be laid off countrywide. “Certainly people are worried for their colleagues, they’re worried for themselves,” says Dunn. CBC employees, she adds, are constantly living with uncertainty. “It’s become part of our working reality to wonder when the next cuts are coming.”

Diane Humber, acting managing director of CBC Calgary, says “we could certainly be looking at changes to the number of people doing news” in Calgary. In the meantime, CBC plans to lay off three full-time Calgary radio staff, cancel Living Calgary on CBC-TV and halve noontime provincial affairs show Wildrose on Radio One from two hours to one, Humber says. As well, CBC Calgary will record fewer performances for Canada Live.

Humber says the Calgary Eyeopener, CBC Calgary’s flagship morning radio show, is “not affected” by the cuts, nor is the afternoon show, The Homestretch. “As difficult as it is that people are leaving, we’re going to try our very best [to ensure] that the audience still gets what they’re paying for as consumers of a public broadcaster,” says Humber.

Lise Lareau, national president of the Canadian Media Guild (the union representing CBC employees), says local programming will inevitably suffer. “When you cut back on the news operation, what’s left are the more predictable stories, more institutional stories, more close-to-downtown-Calgary stories,” says Lareau. “There’s less room to take chances and investigate, go a little bit outside the city and do that little extra research that makes for good programming as opposed to just what’s written on the press release.”

The cuts have renewed discussion about CBC’s funding model. Currently, CBC is funded annually by the federal government, but its budget hasn’t increased with the cost of living and has thus decreased in real dollars. “Governments before Harper were problematic as well,” says Lareau. “The relationship is broken between the government of the day and the CBC.” Lareau and Dunn agree the government should ditch the annual funding model and instead, fund CBC in chunks of at least seven years, tying the money to the cost of living — a recommendation made by the federal government’s heritage committee last year. “We’ve all been through many rounds of cuts because of this annual funding dance, and it’s horrible,” Lareau says.

Another unknown is CBC’s plan to sell some of its assets to raise $125 million. “What assets are going to go?” says former CBC broadcaster Marc Chikinda. “I would speculate that a lot of CBC real estate is going to disappear. And then where do the stations go?” (CBC spokesperson Jeff Keay says the broadcaster is considering “a number of things” to raise the $125 million, including a real estate “lease-back arrangement.”)

An online “save the CBC” petition calling on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to give the broadcaster a loan has garnered more than 90,000 signatures. Dunn hopes Canadians will show their support for CBC and recognize its national value, especially in troubled economic times. “No time is more appropriate to have a robust public broadcaster than right now,” says Dunn. “…Until people don’t have a robust media community anymore, they really won’t know what they’ve got until it’s gone.”