By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC on Wednesday granted Cabin Radio an FM licence to serve Yellowknife and the surrounding areas, ending a long battle with a regulator that once said the market could not sustain another commercial station.
Cabin Radio’s licence to operate at 93.9 MHz will expire on August 31, 2031. It will have 24 months to launch.
“Cabin Radio’s proposal, which received broad local support on the public record and at the public hearing, meets the Commission’s requirements concerning commercial radio,” the CRTC said Wednesday. “Approving Cabin Radio’s proposal will add a new voice to the Yellowknife FM radio market and will contribute to greater programming diversity and ensure access to essential news and information.”
The online radio station, which has been lauded by supporters for its critical reporting during the pandemic and the 2023 Northwest Territories wildfires, proposes to broadcast 126 hours of local programming each broadcast week. It also proposes 10 hours of spoken word, including one hour of local news and 15 minutes each of national and international news.
“We always had faith that Cabin Radio would come through this rigorous process and we could successfully demonstrate the merits of our application,” Cabin Radio told itself. “That faith mostly came from the incredible support shown by the population of Yellowknife and the NWT. Thank you for helping us reach this point.”
The company said its online stream will remain. “A launch date for the FM service has yet to be confirmed,” the company said. “Cabin Radio said it needs time to ‘ensure all the hardware is in place and technical requirements met.’”
Established in 2017, the radio station has operated exclusively as an online outfit and has grown to an audience of more than 8,000 unique daily listeners in a city of 20,000 residents.
But since its inception, it had felt there was room for another commercial FM station in the capital city. The market is also served by several non-commercial stations, including the CBC/Radio-Canada’s CFYK-FM and CBNY-FM, Médias ténois’s CIVR-FM, and CKLB-FM, an Indigenous radio station operated by Native Communications Society of the NWT.
In August 2019, Cabin Radio applied for the coveted FM licence. That application was denied by the regulator in February 2023 on the grounds that the market could not support another station that would pose a financial threat to the only commercial FM radio station in the city, Vista Radio’s CJCD-FM.
Two commissioners dissented, but that was just the beginning. The denial was also met with outrage from figures in the Northwest Territories government, including an MLA who called the decision “mindboggling” and a finance minister who made it a mission to raise awareness of the issue.
In the meantime, the company both resubmitted its application to the CRTC and filed a challenge to the denial in the Federal Court of Appeal. It argued that the regulator erred by squarely focusing on economic reasons for the denial.
The court application would not go anywhere because, about a year after the denial, the CRTC would open another proceeding and accept applications for a new FM station to serve the market.
“Cabin Radio’s new application reveals that circumstances have changed since its original application,” the CRTC said at the time. “Specifically, the COVID-19 pandemic and the wildfires in the Northwest Territories have highlighted the importance of having increased access to radio content in the north.”
Cabin Radio had faced resistance from Vista Radio, which pleaded with the CRTC to deny the licence because the larger player said it has experienced declining revenues for years, and having a competitor would make its circumstances more difficult.
In fact, Vista Radio, which received intervenor support for its reliability, applied for a new licence this time around as a competing application to Cabin Radio. It said the city’s market could only support another station operated by itself because of improved synergies and shared costs.
It proposed 126 hours of local programming each broadcast week, with 10 hours and 28.5 minutes to spoken word programming, including two hours and 50 minutes of local news and 25 minutes each of national and international news.
But the CRTC, which said the market could only support one additional commercial station, didn’t find the application as compelling: “Notwithstanding Vista’s proposal to broadcast more news programming than Cabin Radio, the Commission finds that the local programming – including news programming – to be broadcast by Cabin Radio on its proposed station would better reflect and respond to the needs of the local Yellowknife community,” the commission said.
The CRTC also gave a nod to Cabin Radio on its pitch to provide a platform for emerging, French-language and indigenous artists.
“The station promises to bring Yellowknifers hit music from the past 60 years alongside northern and Indigenous music on a daily basis, plus a broadcast version of its online news service, which has won national awards,” the station said.
“Most importantly, every single decision will be taken in the NWT. The songs are chosen here. The voices come from here. The ads are sold and created here. The owners live here,” it added.
“And finally, we can say we’re on the dial here.”
