By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — Seven years after it convinced the CRTC to allow it to acquire Astral Media, Bell Media wants to adjust one of the promises it made in order to keep an extra radio station in Montreal.
In an application submitted in August 2019 but only published on Friday, Bell asks the Commission to reduce the minimum hours of local programming for CKGM (TSN 690) Montreal by a third, from 96 hours to 63 hours a week.
“To the best of our knowledge no other commercial AM station has a set number of local programming hours or even a local programming requirement,” Bell notes in its application.
The requirement was added seven years ago by the CRTC as one of its conditions for making an exception to the Common Ownership Policy. Astral Media owned three English-language stations in Montreal (CHOM 97.7, Virgin Radio 95.9 and CJAD 800), and adding them with CKGM would have put Bell over the limit for that market. In the first attempt to acquire Astral, Bell proposed turning CKGM into a French-language station, angering its fans. In the second try, it asked for an exception to keep it.
Bell agreed to be required to keep the station’s sports format by condition of licence (it is not proposing to change that condition). It also agreed to a suggestion by then-chairperson Jean-Pierre Blais on the final day of the 2013 hearing that it be required to maintain the 96 hours a week of local programming that it was broadcasting at the time.
But since then, TSN 690 has found itself hampered by the minimum, especially during weeks when Montreal sports teams aren’t active. It said it “can at times require programming decisions to be made that result in Montreal sports fans being deprived of live play-by-play coverage of compelling sporting events.”
As a specific example, it said it couldn’t air game seven of the 2019 Stanley Cup Final because its coverage of the Toronto Raptors’ NBA championship run put it up against the limit of non-local programming. Bell also said it would air more Toronto Blue Jays games if given the additional flexibility.
Bell did not specify what other programming changes would occur after such a licence change, which would mean going from an average of almost 14 hours a day of local programming to nine.
Bell also asked that a condition of licence requiring $245,000 in additional Canadian content development contributions be deleted, as it will have been fulfilled by the end of the 2020 broadcast year.
The Part 1 application is accepting comments until Nov. 30.
