Source : Victoria Times Colonist

A lobby group is calling on the federal government to commit $250 million more a year to revamp the CBC, after a poll suggested more than 80 per cent of Canadians want a renewed national broadcaster.

Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is urging Ottawa to make the CBC, now celebrating its 50th anniversary, more accessible and more community oriented.

The group says years of budget cuts have undermined the public broadcaster's ability to meet its mandate.

"We have detected a real concern on the part of the public, and also of members of Parliament of all political stripes, about the way the CBC is retreating from or ignoring local markets," group spokesman Ian Morrison said in an interview.

"There is an early warning in this poll that CBC isn't looking after its backyard, its grassroots, as well as it is its national programming."

Almost 90 per cent of those polled by Ipsos-Reid between Aug. 6 and 11 said they wanted regional CBC services strengthened in their part of the country.

Eighty-three per cent agreed with the statement: "We should build a new CBC capable of providing high-quality Canadian programming with strong regional content throughout Canada."

The poll of 1,100 adult Canadians commissioned by the lobby group is considered accurate to within three percentage points, 95 per cent of the time.

In July, the group wrote to Finance Minister John Manley advising him that the CBC is failing in its mandate to "reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions."

Centralizing CBC operations in Toronto and Montreal at the expense of local and regional programming has "weakened our best means of defending Canadian identity when it is most needed," the letter said.

It recommended Ottawa require the CBC board of directors to develop a business plan addressing the issue and then invest $250 million in expanding its reach and operations.

"There are occasions when good public policy and popular public policy can go hand in hand," said the letter, signed by Morrison.

"Building a new CBC is one of these opportunities."

The group says the CBC is losing ground in the 500-channel universe.

The percentage of Canadians polled who said they derived high value from CBC-TV programming declined to 64 per cent from the 71 per cent surveyed in a similar Ipsos-Reid poll in 1995.

Ottawa slashed about $400 million from the CBC's $1-billion annual budget in recent years.

© Victoria Times Colonist