“If I walk across this road and get hit by a bus, there’s no problem. The scramble will be on. I see them all every day when I come to work. They’re standing on the second floor, looking out the window as I cross the street, wondering, ‘Is he going to make it today?’” Peter Mansbridge

Peter Mansbridge is talking about his future.

We are inside the Avenue Diner on Davenport, an all-day breakfast joint established in 1944. It’s just after 9 a.m. and sunshine invades this time capsule of an eatery, bathing staff and patrons in unforgiving light.

On this morning, inside a sliver of Toronto that feels immune to change, Mansbridge hardly looks like the man who has anchored CBC’s The National since 1988. The wool suits and striped neckties have given way to a black Tommy Bahama sweatshirt and silver chain. His face is not dusted with high-def makeup. The Order of Canada lapel pin is gone, replaced with the crest of a flying fish and, in tiny letters, the word “Relax.”

If you didn’t know this was the face of CBC News, you might guess it belonged to a geologist, Eminem’s great-uncle or the owner of a tackle shop in Hastings.

Then his baritone rumbles to life like a gas generator. Heads swivel and brows lift and even when Mansbridge says something mundane — “I’ll just get a couple of eggs, over-easy, with brown toast and sliced tomatoes, please” — it sounds momentous, like breakfast will be followed by a referendum or Gulf war.

There it is. The voice. A voice that was discovered in 1968 when a CBC manager was at the airport in Churchill, Man. The airport was short-staffed that day, and Mansbridge, then a 19-year-old baggage handler, was nudged toward the intercom, where he made a flight call for Transair.

The CBC manager, like generations of Canadians to follow, oriented to the voice. He tracked down Mansbridge in the dingy terminal. He offered him a job.

The next night, the baggage handler was on the air for CBC Radio.

That was the past. We are here to talk about the future — his future, the future of a network that seemed indestructible in 1968.

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Just about everyone inside the CBC is now in a state of high anxiety. If fear and loathing were airborne contagions, the broadcast centre on Front St. would be under quarantine.

A $130-million budget shortfall, 657 lost jobs and the coming end of Hockey Night in Canada, the network’s biggest money-maker, have ramped up the dread. CBC isn’t just reeling from more cuts, the third round since 2009. It is now gasping for air. Every service, especially television, is getting an emergency X-ray as the broadcaster prepares to perform surgery on itself in a bid for long-term survival.

“It’s tense,” says Mansbridge. “I’ve been there 46 years, so I’ve seen a number of transitions and a number of times when there’ve been cuts and people lost jobs. And that’s never fun. It’s hard. It’s demoralizing.

“But this is different. This one has the most riding on it. We really are at the point where we are trying, not just to reposition, but to almost reimagine who we are and what we are, how we fit in a broadcast landscape that’s changed so dramatically.”

What does this mean for Mansbridge?

“I can safely tell you this,” he says, tapping the tabletop with his left fist. “I’ve made it very clear to everybody that I have no intention of doing this job with a ‘7’ in front of my age. So there is a limitation there on how long I would go, if they even wanted me to go that long.”

He squints toward the window and, with another tap, adds: “Which they wouldn’t.”

I attempt a bit of mental arithmetic. Mansbridge wants to spend more time at home when his son Will is in high school. Will is now 14. Mansbridge turns 66 in July. He signed a new contract in November, with undisclosed terms.

“I don’t have a date in mind beyond what I’ve just told you,” he says, after I start doing the math out loud. “Look, I’m happy to be there. But I serve at their pleasure. And when we signed this contract in November, we didn’t know we were going to lose hockey.”

Mansbridge does not feel in “peril,” to use his word. But in a country with few Craigslist ads for “national news anchor,” he knows there is no shortage of ambitious heirs who’d gladly chew off their toes to inherit his exalted perch.

“We have the luxury of having a lot of people who can step into that job tonight,” he says. “If I walk across this road and get hit by a bus, there’s no problem. The scramble will be on. I see them all every day when I come to work. They’re standing on the second floor, looking out the window as I cross the street, wondering, ‘Is he going to make it today?’”

I nearly spit out my coffee.

Later, when I ask Jennifer McGuire, editor-in-chief of CBC News, about possible succession plans, she answers with Socratic efficacy by interviewing herself:

“Does he want to do it forever? No, he doesn’t. Are we actively having an open conversation about who’s after Peter Mansbridge? No, we are not quite at that point yet. Have we identified potential people who could succeed him internally and externally? Of course. Is that a tomorrow exercise? No.”

There was a time when the face of CBC News was afforded a bit of respect. It was a face that was trusted and revered, not slapped and spat upon. In recent months, though, that face has become a punching bag as detractors have excoriated Mansbridge, accusing him of everything from conducting a softball Rob Fordinterview with Rob Ford to accepting money from the oil and gas lobby for a speech.

“Sometimes I think all of this bugs me more than it bugs him,” says actress Cynthia Dale, Mansbridge’s wife. “What is unbelievable to me is that people would try and call him on his journalistic integrity. That to me is absolutely abhorrent. But Pete has really big shoulders, thank God. He can handle a lot.”

Then there is the obsession with his salary.

With apologies to McGuire (and Socrates), here goes:

Does the CBC receive public funding? Yes. Does the CBC have competitive reasons to not disclose what it pays talent? Yes. Do some taxpayers and senators reject this argument? Yes. Does the Privacy Act trump their rejection? Yes.

Did I ask Peter Mansbridge what he makes? Yes. Did he tell me? No. Was he tempted to punch me square in the mouth? Perhaps. Will this issue go away? Probably not until he is paraded around Nathan Phillips Square with his social insurance number scrawled across his bare chest and copies of recent T4s clamped in his jaws.

Of the recent controversies, Mansbridge seems most baffled by the fallout over the oil speech, which he gave in 2012 at a dinner organized by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

As with all his speeches, he did not provide an opinion on any subject in the news. In fact, the talk was about what he’s learned in his CBC travels and how those experiences help him define our country. He’s given some version of this anecdotal speech many times, including once to the Halifax Chamber of Commerce three weeks ago.

If anyone had called to ask after the oil speech went radioactive in February, Mansbridge would have said: I give about two speeches a month. Some are paid, some unpaid. My CBC overlords approve each one. A significant percentage of my speaking fee goes directly to charity, including scholarships bestowed in five provinces.

So who called to ask?

“The only people who ever tried to reach me were you, the Globe and Mail and a radio station in Hamilton,” he says.

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For a fleeting moment, leaning forward under a green pendant lamp, he looks livid.

“CBC Radio current affairs spent a lot of time attacking me, with none of them ever phoning me,” he says, tapping on the table again. “Not one of them ever called me.”

It’s one thing to be devoured by attack dogs on the outside. It’s quite another to be eaten by your own: “I work in the same building on the same floor with some of those people.”

This raises a question: is there a cabal of insiders who believe it’s time for someone to take Mansbridge to the woodshed? Is the body, thrashing in the shadows of existential panic, blaming the face?

“I can’t imagine there is a soul in here who is anticipating eagerly the day Peter goes,” says Amanda Lang, CBC’s senior business correspondent and co-host of The Lang & O’Leary Exchange. “He is absolutely true to journalism. His instincts on why a story should lead The National are unerring. There are a lot of us who prize that and try to learn from him. To me, he is this place.”

“He really is a reporter, one of the best this country has ever produced,” adds Mark Harrison, executive producer of The National. “It isn’t always appreciated because people see Peter reading the intros to the items and hosting the program. But what they don’t realize is the work Peter has put into those stories and reports.”

“I think the hardest thing for the CBC to replace will be his mastery of the crisis moment — whether it’s election coverage or a referendum or war breaking out in Iraq or 9/11,” says Brian Stewart, CBC’s retired foreign correspondent and one of Mansbridge’s closest friends. “I think he’s the best anchor in the English language on events like that.”

The problem, of course, is that CBC is having its own crisis moment.

The cutbacks announced last month were the latest in what’s become a cumulative tailspin. As one manager tells me, the place is in “constant downsize mode.”

“There are certainly folks here who are working on yet again trying to do things better, faster, smarter, nimbler,” says Heather Conway, CBC’s executive vice-president of English-language services. “Do more with less. Do the same with less. And in some cases, do less with less.”

If this last option spreads to news, what impact might it have on ratings?

The National on CBC’s main network — that is, excluding the more than 375,000 viewers who watch it on cable over three airings on CBC News Network — has an average audience each night of 653,000. Global National pulls in an average 831,000 viewers. And the undisputed market leader, with 1.2 million viewers, is CTV National News with Lisa LaFlamme.

Mansbridge estimates The National’s budget is less than half what it was in 1988. That was the year Knowlton Nash volunteered to step aside, placing the anchor crown on Mansbridge, who was on the verge of signing a lucrative deal with CBS.

“In this country, you don’t say no to this job,” Mansbridge says, when asked why he stayed. “That’s my feeling. In spite of everything, it’s the best job in television journalism in Canada.”

Before we leave his favourite diner, Mansbridge sits at the breakfast counter and makes small talk with the staff. His arms are folded. He is grinning and leaning forward on the Formica surface. He seems oddly curious about the logistics of short order cooking, the vagaries of pancake batter.

It’s a visually jarring scene.

Then again, Mansbridge is all about contradictions: a high school dropout who now holds several honorary degrees, gives out scholarships and serves as a chancellor at Mount Allison University. A celebrity who hates the spotlight. An outsider born in London, England, who served with Canada’s navy. A journalist who is so deathly afraid of losing touch with the real world that he continued to pump gas on the weekends after becoming a reporter in Ottawa.

A man who appears to have the emotional range of a snowman until the cameras go off and, as once happened after a special D-Day broadcast, he wanders across the beach, alone under the clouds, overcome by the sacrifice of others.

He can also be surprisingly funny. When I ask what he’d say about Peter Mansbridge if he were a TV critic, he says, “I’d say, ‘Man, that guy is great!’”

When you spend your entire life on deadline, you develop an acute sense of time. When you stay connected to the real world, you appreciate the passage of time.

After an interview with U.S. President Barack Obama, there was a strange scene. Obama was on his way to a helicopter outside the White House when he suddenly doubled back and raced into the interview room with another man at his side.

That man, one of Obama’s handlers, was a Canadian. He wanted to meet Mansbridge.

They shook hands and the man said, “I just want you to know that my mother loves you.”

The takeaway for the two people who told me this story was “This is the power of the Mansbridge brand.” But there might be another way of looking at it, a way that in part explains why he has activated the exit clock.

“When I started, a young person would stop me and want a picture because they were a huge fan,” he says. “Then it became ‘My mother loves you. I need to get a picture.’ Now the thing that’s starting to creep in is ‘My grandmother loves you.’ So you kind of know the direction this is going.”

He lets out a booming laugh.

A couple of hours later, we say goodbye. He jaywalks across Davenport and is not hit by a bus. On the other side, he checks his BlackBerry and gets lost in the news.