It is the Canadian debate that never ends.

What do we want or expect from our public broadcaster?

The national argument over the CBC is woven so deeply into the country’s consciousness it is as quintessentially Canadian as making love in a canoe, three-down football or double-doubles at a drive-through.

Starting Monday in a hearing room in Gatineau, Que., we’ll go through this all again.

The CRTC will begin 10 days of hearings on the CBC licence renewal, the first such set of hearings in 13 years.

Although the CBC’s licence is not in question, the public broadcaster’s future and its ability to deliver on its mandate with depleted resources is very much in play.

Thousands lined up for their chance to air their grievances before the commission.

The hearing will deal with the CBC’s overall strategy in a fractured media landscape, its regional and northern services, its compliance with access to information requests, and its desire to begin advertising on Radio 2 and Espace musique.

No matter what the CBC argues, a large percentage of Canadians will oppose its goals. It’s in our DNA. The CBC already has iconic status as the country’s favourite whipping boy.

Even after exacting its pound of flesh with a 10 per cent funding cut announced in last spring’s budget, Conservative MPs can’t help themselves.

In the last week alone, Alberta MP Peter Goldring, a Conservative who now sits as an independent, questioned whether the CBC was for or against Canada and said its corporate headquarters was the heart of evil in this country.

Saturday night, Joan Crockatt, the Conservative candidate in the Calgary Centre byelection and one-time political commentator on the network, suggested the CBC should be further defunded because it is a purveyor of porn.

These hearings could hinge on three contentious issues.

The CBC wants flexibility, a little slack, from the CRTC so it can adapt to changing consumer needs.

It wants those ads.

But, says Ian Morrison of Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, “the 800-pound gorilla in the room’’ is the public broadcaster’s rights to Hockey Night in Canada, which come up for renewal in 2014. The rights are expected to draw strong interest from Rogers and Bell Media.

(Full disclosure, I earn some income from Bell Media but none from the CBC.)

According to the advocacy group, Hockey Night in Canada accounts for a third of the English television network’s audience share and more than half its advertising revenues.

“If they lose hockey,’’ Morrison says, “it would send the CBC into a death spiral.’’

Nonsense, says the CBC, in its final pre-hearing brief, accusing Morrison and his organization of having “lost their way.’’

It flatly states it does not intend to lose the rights to hockey, but if it did, it could adjust its programming schedule.

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Over the next three years, CBC loses 10 per cent of its government funding, a gap that Morrison says becomes 16 per cent when inflation is factored into the equation.

The move to radio advertising is simply a way to generate revenue and deal with $115 million in funding cuts from its $1.1 billion budget, the CBC maintains.

The corporation also lost a $47 million fund known as the Local Programming Improvement Fund.

Private broadcasters oppose the move because they feel it would only further dilute the existing and shrinking commercial revenue market, while others at the CBC and be only a matter of time before the corporation returned, requesting commercial advertising on Radio 1.

CBC says Radio 1 advertising was never contemplated.

“The bottom line is that the corporation is facing a severe corporate-wide financial hurdle and it needs advertising . . . to help it address this overall financial challenge.’’

Public broadcasting, on average, receives $87 per capita worldwide, with Canada now ranking third from the bottom of the 18 countries surveyed, ahead of only New Zealand and the U.S.

Canadian government funding equals $34 per person. In Norway, the comparable figure is $164 per person, in the United Kingdom, the BBC subsidy is $111 per person, but its funding has been frozen through 2016-2017.

If the CBC was funded by just the average of the western nations surveyed, it would have a budget of $2.9 billion.

This is a leaner, hungrier network, aiming to continue to provide its unique service in Canada’s north, its broadcasts in native languages, its Canadian documentaries.

Keeping it out of the CRTC straitjacket of quotas could allow it to adapt to a changed media market every company, private or public, on every platform, must grapple with.

But it won’t end the debate.

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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