Paul Gorbould’s weblog about life, the media, and everything.

The pits…

CBC employees in both Toronto and Vancouver are on the brink… but not in the way you think.

Massive construction projects are underway in both locations. In Vancouver, a huge redevelopment project is underway. CBC sold its staff parking lot for $34 million, so a developer can build two highrises “on a TV theme”, including a promenade that lets the tourists stare in at the newsroom workers beaving away. Live webcam image below:

Live webcam image of CBC Vancouver construction

There are some great Flickr pix of the construction also online.

Here in Toronto, construction has begun on the RBC Centre, the first of two massive buildings that cozy up to the Canadian Broadcasting Centre (as blogged here earlier.) I’ve created my own Flickr set for this construction, since it’ll be inconveniencing me until 2010.

The paranoid among us might have nightmares that one day some unsupportive government might opt to simply shove both buildings into these deep holes, throw a shovelful of dirt on them and get rid of the public broadcaster forever. But that’d be crazy. We have a proud tradition of a death by a thousand cuts to uphold.

I must admit to having such impure thoughts twice in the past, however. Back in the early nineties, when I started here, I had pause to wonder when the broadcasting centre was surrounded by a fleet of mobile shredding trucks marked “Shred It.” (Wish I’d taken a photo… CBC Watch would have loved that one.)

And another time, the north side of the building was completely redecorated as an American TV station for the filming of a Tom Arnold movie. Approaching the building from the subway, all you could see was signage for a (fictional) private network, leaving employees to wonder if they’d been privatized while they slept.

I should probably just relax. Still, it’s hard not to gaze into the abyss.