My father, who was devoted to the church he attended all his adult life, was unsentimental about its possible demise. The church was built in the 1920s, and there was nothing understated about its grey stone exterior, heavy, iron-hinged doors and marble chancel steps.

The stained glass windows were tall and impressive. The communion service was silver, the pipe organ could probably have handled Westminster Abbey, and the gymnasium (!) in the basement was where Girl Guides and Boy Scouts gathered to play Red-Rover and learn knots.

Few people attended church more faithfully than my father. He slipped his offertory envelope into the collection plate every Sunday, served on committees, encouraged his children to take part in choirs and Sunday school. But over the years, as the congregation dwindled, and as the challenges of maintaining so grand a structure became more onerous, he listened with increasing impatience to the various cost-cutting, revenue-producing schemes proposed at the many meetings he attended.

And when it was his turn to speak, he always said, “Sell it. If the building’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, we should get rid of it. We can always join another congregation.”

His fellow committee members assumed he was making a rhetorical point. But he was completely serious. He believed that if a church — however big and beautiful and long-established — was not supported by its own community, all the cost-cutting, revenue-producing schemes were doomed to failure.

Not only that, they were entirely beside the point. If the church was not fulfilling its essential mandate — drawing people together — there was no point in having one.

I think of my father often these days when I think of the CBC, especially now that advertisements have begun on CBC Radio 2. In fact, CBC pretty much lost our household five or six years ago with the format change to Radio 2.

We went from having CBC on almost all the time to having it on regularly only as an alarm clock: an effective one, actually, since the music on Radio 2 Morning usually gets us out of bed and away from the radio as fast as would a program devoted to fingernails on blackboards.

When Radio 2 was transformed a few years ago, I remember actually being hurt by the fact that a broadcaster that had been so much a part of our lives was entirely indifferent to my complaints. Obviously, my demographic was one CBC had decided to write off. Although I couldn’t help but notice that they seemed to lose our children at the same time.

No younger hands are turning the radio back on in our house now that we’ve turned it off.

There are still gems, of course, on Radio 2. And since it does not get nearly the attention it deserves I’ll single one out.

Laurie Brown’s late-night show, The Signal, is imaginative and intriguing. Almost always, Brown features music I don’t know but am happy to learn about. The Signal is exactly the kind of intelligent, adventurous, non-commercial program that should be on CBC Radio 2 in my view. But CBC has made it abundantly clear in recent years that my view doesn’t matter.

Radio 2’s relentless self-advertising, its trite programming, its embarrassing attempts at hipness and its conscious, opportunistic dumbing-down don’t inspire me to rise very enthusiastically to its defence now that cutbacks have forced it to take on advertising.

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And here, with the same sadness that my father felt about his beloved church, I take his point. If the CBC is not supported by its own community and if it can no longer do what it is supposed to do, the time has come to be unsentimental about its inevitable demise.