It is time for a word or two about the “labour disruption” at the CBC, which it is not. The phrase, along with a couple of others being used by the fill-in on-air bodies carrying on a semblance (however weak) of CBC broadcasting does not accurately define what is taking place.

It (or they) are negotiating devices designed to create the impression that it is the employees of the public corporation who have occasioned the shredded schedules on radio and television and that is not true.

What we have here is a lock-out, which is simply a strategic device designed to bring the employees to their knees in supplication to get their paycheques back.

It is also a strategic device that will inevitably create more erosion in the culture and essential values of the CBC and further shake up the already shaky morale within the people who bring us the programs we pay for in part with our tax dollars.

Let me declare myself before I go further. I have carried on some sort of relationship with the CBC for most of my adult life — as a salaried employee, a member of the Board of Directors, a programming executive in charge of a network department (Variety Entertainment), a freelance on-air commentator (until CBC producers retired me), a producer-director-interviewer, and as a trainer of CBC journalists (likewise involuntarily retired).

And let me also declare that the Randy McAndrew whose credits run after the PEI portion of Canada Now is my award-winning camera operator son.

That said, I must tell you that in all those years, with all that varied experience behind me, I still cannot figure out why upper level CBC management does the dumb things that it constantly does.

Like this lockout, for instance.

Like the alpha embryo grey shark, which devours its fellow embryos within the mother’s womb until only it is left to carry on the species, CBC management seems determined to embark on a suicide mission to destroy its own culture until only the top bureaucrats are left to carry on.

You will note that there is no intent on the part of management at the CBC to put themselves on short term contracts without company benefits, which can be cancelled on a whim, without recourse or apology to the contractee.

The genius who now directs the CBC from his Ottawa aerie is one Robert Rabinovitch (yes, it rhymes with sonofa…….). He is the gent who declared a few years ago that local broadcasting was dead at the CBC and cancelled supper hour news shows across the country.

That action sparked a national uproar, especially in places like PEI where CBC journalism has traditionally occupied a special place and in the past has set standards of journalism above other media outlets, especially that of private radio and television.

The local shows were partially returned, as part of a national program, sans identity and with vastly reduced resources to adequately cover their provincial beats. It was a typical response of an Ottawa bureaucracy: give them back a little cake, but only enough so we can say we gave them something … so they’ll shut up.

Rabinovitch has been assiduously dismantling the CBC-that-was, the one that was a world leader in all phases of broadcasting and revered as such by other networks. That is what he was hired to do when the Liberal government decided we could no longer afford a CBC with the resources it needed to carry out its parliamentary mandate.

In the Rabinovitch era, the CBC functions like a badly run private broadcaster. Standards are dumbed down until they no longer mean anything at all. Voices are heard on the air which never should be heard in public at all, with the inevitable howlers in pronunciation because there is no time for anyone to check, nor any second ear having a listen.

News items are sloppily written, with execrable grammar and syntax, and put out for public consumption without a semblance of rehearsal.

The Rabinovitch way is an approach that amounts to an attack on professionalism. It is an “anything will do ” approach to the craft of journalism.

It is not the fault of the individual employees. It is the fault of a supine management at the CBC, whose only interest is in preserving their own sinecures, at the expense of the very organization from whom they receive their paycheques.

But here’s the thing: it is not their corporation. It is ours. It belongs to the people of Canada. We are the shareholders, and we have the right to expect a first class public corporation.

That’s the difference, you see. That word …“public.” That implies a different underlying set of values, and a different definition of social responsibility to the public shareholders — to the nation itself.

We have learned that corporate values, with their concentration on shareholder payoff at any cost, are not to be trusted. We now know all the nonsense about … convergence … mergers … downsizing … and outsourcing for what it is: a way to increase corporate profit taken at the expense of the public the corporations purport to serve.

We now know that it creates a world without social responsibility — without humanity.

That is what the management propaganda really amounts to — a defence of CBC management’s tactic of locking out its employees and shutting down its programming, and an attempt to smear the union representing the people who actually turn out the programming, day after day while management writes memoranda on this and that.

There’s a fundamental difference, you see, between the underlying philosophies of management and programmers at the CBC.

Anyone working on a program makes a decision about their program based on whether the decision will be good or bad for the program. The excellence of the program is the baseline. The program commands individual loyalty.

In CBC management, managers make decisions based on whether their decisions and loyalties will enhance their management career within the hierarchy. The excellence of the programs is irrelevant to individual decision making. No bureaucrat will make a decision that might harm a career within management.

That is why top CBC management wants “them” — the often troublesome people who actually do the work — on short term contracts. It is so they become eminentlydisposable, to be let go “without ” cause.

It is because this public corporation, this not-for-profit service to the people of Canada, is philosophically bankrupt and without any sense of social responsibility.

Last I heard, CBC management was refusing to sit down at the bargaining table to argue with its employees unless it surrendered its life and deathposition and agree to allow CBC management the unfettered right to contract out any and all programming jobs — do away with as much permanent staff as it can get away with.

Corporate Canada has pretty much succeeded in creating a culture where many must work at two or more part-time jobs, just to put food on the table, without health or other benefits and without any pension at the end of a working life — the brave new wave of corporate social irresponsibility.

That what is perhaps our most prominent and important public corporation would now seek to join that gang, gives the word reprehensible entirely new scope and dimension.

It is the CBC employees who should lock out their management — permanently.