Julie McLaughlin

As a kid, Nicole Hergert would go out for breakfast with her parents every Sunday. Afterwards, they’d listen to Stuart McLean on CBC Radio. “We’d get in the car and The Vinyl Cafe would be on, and I remember that we would get home and we would sit in the car until The Vinyl Cafe was over,” says Hergert, 27. “Even though we were home, we wouldn’t get out of the car. We would just stay and listen until it was finished.”

Many Canadians have similar CBC memories. Rich memories. When I was a kid, classical music on CBC radio was a constant at my grandparents’ house. At home, I’d watch The Raccoons and The Friendly Giant on CBC-TV. And later on, when I was in journalism school, we students dreamed of one day getting jobs at the Ceeb. If you got into CBC, you were set. Best job in the biz, we thought.

Turns out we were wrong. CBC plans to lay off 800 people, about 10 per cent of its workforce, to help make up for a massive $171 million budget shortfall. For many CBC employees, job security is nonexistent. (Full disclosure: I fulfilled my j-school dream and worked for CBC Calgary as a “casual” radio reporter in 2007. Casual employees — and CBC has many of them — aren’t guaranteed a minimum number of work hours, and I split when offered a full-time job at this paper.)

There’s no question that CBC has its share of internal woes. Yet it consistently puts out solid content with its ever-thinning ranks. Listen to the informative, hard-nosed interviews on As It Happens. Locally, the Calgary Eyeopener does a masterful job of covering our city. Then there’s the reflective Ideas and Jonathan Goldstein’s wry WireTap; the list of brilliant shows goes on and on. And don’t forget about cbc.ca, arguably the best news website in Canada. CBC does a great job with limited resources, and in many markets including Calgary, CBC Radio One is the top station. They’ve earned it.

And yet Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government just stands there and watches as CBC — owned by the people of Canada — slashes programming and jobs yet again. Meanwhile, the Conservatives are looking at ways to help Canada’s lumbering debt-ridden media behemoth, CanWest Global. “They don’t want their fingerprints on weakening a popular institution,” says Friends of Canadian Broadcasting’s Ian Morrison. He suspects the Conservatives are doing indirectly to CBC what they can’t do directly. “I think [Harper’s] sort of standing back and letting something bad happen that he doesn’t want to take the blame for.”

When CBC announced its plan to cut back classical music programming on Radio Two last year, people were ticked. Angry listeners organized rallies in cities across the country, including Calgary. So why have there been no rallies showing support for CBC after this latest round of cuts?

I recently posted that question on Twitter, and within an hour of asking the question, a group of us had organized a “save the CBC” rally for Calgary. It’ll be Friday, April 17 at 4 p.m. outside the CBC Calgary building (1724 Westmount Blvd. N.W.). If you’re a fan of the Ceeb, come out and show your support. The ratings show that Canadians value CBC, but obviously the Canadian government isn’t getting the message. We have to make it clear before it’s too late. CBC has been continually bled of its talent and resources over the last two decades, and unless Canadians show strong support for the public broadcaster, it’ll keep getting cut like this until there’s nothing left.

We’ll be there to remind the government that CBC is valuable, that it’s not just another channel on the radio dial. CBC is woven into the lives of many Canadians, whether it’s wistful memories of hearing The Vinyl Cafe in a parked car or waking up to Jim Brown sticking it to some politician on the Calgary Eyeopener. Bottom line: our country is diminished without a strong CBC.