The decision to disband the orchestra—formed in 1938 when radio orchestras were common—comes down to dollars and cents, a CBC executive in Vancouver said Thursday.

“We know for example that for a concert that we fund through our CBC Radio Orchestra, we can extend our reach to three by doing it through other musical organizations,” said Jennifer McGuire, executive director of CBC English Radio.

In other words, it’s too expensive to fund classical music, since nobody listens to it except old fogies and you can’t compete with the private sector that way. Needless to say, this decision has many people—not least the musicians—ticked off. From today’s Globe and Mail:

“It is a travesty that this decision has been made. It’s a travesty that the government continues to cut the funding to the CBC. But it is also a travesty that bureaucrats that occupy the top echelons of radio don’t have the guts to stand up for this orchestra,” said violist Andrew Brown as he emerged from the meeting, receiving an impromptu standing ovation from other musicians who had gathered in the hotel’s lobby.

“Just bafflegab,” said Brian G’froerer, who has played principal horn with the orchestra for 30 years, when asked how CBC executives Jennifer McGuire and Mark Steinmetz had responded to the musicians’ concerns inside the meeting.

Google Calculator is pretty nifty, and able to handle some rather complex high-level (i.e. English-like) syntax. For example, it handles 1.190 CAD per litre in USD per gallon quite nicely, to let you figure out just how much that tank of gas you bought this afternoon cost (the answer, if you can’t be arsed to click on the link, is about USD$4.55—that’s what you get for having high oil prices combined with the recent woes of Alberta oil companies), compared with what they’re paying in the States (more than a dollar less, on average, per gallon). And Google Calculator is pretty awesome for this sort of thing.

But try stringing together several conversions, and even though it gets the parentheses right, it still utterly fails. The calculation 1.19 CAD per litre per 16 litres should parse as 1.19 $/L x 16 L, which reduces to $(1.19 x 16), but the calculator fails utterly on the calculation. Just look at the ridiculous answer: 75,111.0894 USD/metres to the sixth power! U.S. dollars weren’t even mentioned, and metres to the sixth power?? Now I truly understand what they mean by ‘a higher plane of existence’.

The argument, apparently, is that such rescues are expensive, and that the person who needs to be rescued should have to foot the bill. This is actually a rather imprecise formulation: as I understand it, the city’s contention is that the party responsible for the costs should be the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, which, as the only licencing authority for motor vehicles and their drivers in the province, would pass the cost on to the insured driver. This idea has apparently been floated before as part of a plan to increase the revenue of the West Vancouver fire department, but the council is apparently serious about it this time.

Surely there are other, better places where the city could look for money rather than from the wallets of people who have just been in life-threatening accidents. In fact, I think I can come up with a few off the top of my head. Seeing as how West Vancouver is one of the most affluent cities in the country, perhaps they could consider attempting to cut government waste, increasing government efficiency, and possibly—gasp!—enacting a modest tax hike to pick up the cost? (Actually, the best commentary I heard was on CBC Radio One today: someone proposed a sliding scale for rescues from burning buildings: $1000 if you want to be rescued from the first floor, $2000 for the second floor, and so forth.) It makes absolutely no sense to penalize innocent people, charging them a thousand dollars to get extricated from their smashed car, especially when they were not at fault. Emergency services—especially emergency rescuing—should be provided to all people without a price tag attached. This is pure and simple greed combined with a silly refusal to consider efficient and reasonable solutions.