The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias wrote an excellent* column Tuesday on the CBC lockout.

Here's the key part:

It was obvious that, as threatened for weeks, early yesterday morning CBC management had locked out about 5,500 Canadian Media Guild members who put together the programming that millions of Canadians have come to rely on.

Now their biggest production is the one they're mounting on the streets: a show of solidarity, steadfastness and steely determination to hold the union line on limiting the number of contract workers CBC can hire.

CBC's ability to have "final determination" on hiring contract workers is the main issue in this dispute, one that promises to get very ugly before it gets resolved. That's if it gets resolved before workers, facing mortgage payments, start crossing their own picket lines.

So make no mistake: The workers' show is an act, and probably a short-lived one. That despite an 87.3 per cent strike mandate last month.

According to conversations with CBC employees now pulling picket duty for their $200 weekly pay, many voted to support a strike because they believed it would frighten management. They thought they could withdraw their services when they felt it would do the most damage: next month with the new fall season ready to roll.

But management's timing was better: a long six weeks before the fall season begins and even longer eight weeks before the much-vaunted return of Hockey Night in Canada.

Strikes -- when the issues are strongly held points of principle or more likely, about who's running the show -- are tests of toughness and resources ... and the ability to inflict pain.

By imposing a lockout now, the CBC has trumped the CMG when it comes to inflicting pain. If this dispute is still cooking along come mid to late October, strikers will have had almost two months of pounding the pavement already before the weather turns cold.

Strike pay goes up as the dispute lingers, but if even if people are getting, say, $360 per week, that's barely enough to cover a two-bedroom apartment in the downtown/ west side of Toronto (which explains why so many CBCers live east of the Don Valley :) ). There are a lot of CBC couples, which means both people might well be trying to survive on strike pay.

CBC has some managers whose one great skill in life is Machiavellian scheming. They may have gambled that permanent staff aren't willing to accept a lot of economic pain so future hires can have a better shot at a permanent job themselves.

While I obviously liked Antonia's column (she offered some follow-up on her blog), it missed a few elements.

A CP story by writer John McKay fills in the gaps nicely (a similar article from the Globe is With lockout, depleted CBC struggling to stay timely):

... The most noticeable change has been the absence of any apparent effort to mount a management-produced television newscast, relying in prime time and over the supper hour on imported feeds of the BBC World News service.

Newsworld has been limited to one-minute roundups of Canadian news read by managers before handing things off to the BBC.

"That's certainly the plan right now," Jason MacDonald, the CBC's official spokesman, said Tuesday of the news programming from the public broadcaster, although another publicist suggested it wasn't the network's original plan.

"The BBC as lockout-breaker. It's a very interesting model," said Ian Morrison, spokesman for the independent media watchdog group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting. ...

Media observers said Tuesday they're stunned the CBC hasn't tried to provide any kind of news package from non-union staff or from all the incoming feeds that are available in any broadcast newsroom.

Patricia Bell, head of the school of journalism at the University of Regina, said the situation is even worse for radio, especially in places like Saskatchewan, where there are few alternatives to CBC Radio. She adds that managers have been shipped to Toronto to keep the central operation going.

"Who are they going to send (to cover news)?" Bell asks. "I just don't think they planned."

Bell noted that David Kyle, one of her school's graduates and a Regina-based CBC manager, was reading national radio news from Toronto on Monday night.

That leads to a host of interesting questions. Can the CBC afford to cut off limbs in order to keep the head alive during this dispute? Do they have enough managers to keep the CBC's skeletal service going for months on end?

If this does go on for months, what will be the long-term impact on the CBC? Having a more structurally nimble workforce with no audience to program for isn't an optimal outcome, in my view. But maybe public broadcasting executives see things differently.

But to end the strike quickly, the CMG needs the public onside, and they've done a poor job to date of selling their message. Their website is pathetic when compared to the CBC's.

As Zerby noted:

CBC has a fancy-shmancy website here, with all the corporate spin. Today it took out yet another full-page ad in many Canadian newspapers. (Hmmm, who is paying for this?) Over on the union side, not much -- especially considering all the talent that could be put to better use producing propaganda rather than modelling "Locked-out'' posters.

* I still would have thought it was excellent even if she didn't tip the hat to me for the I Love Radio link; a credit that should have rightfully gone to Barry Reuger -- which is my fault.