By Steve Faguy
MONTREAL — In the last six hours of its licence, CJMS 1040 AM program director Jocelyn Benoit hosted a special show reminiscing about the station’s 21-year history, interviewing various guests and playing country music hits.
Though he promised the station, based in the Montreal suburb of St-Constant, would live on as an online-only stream run personally by him, it was clear this would be more of a death than a rebirth.
A few seconds after midnight on Sept. 1, Benoit was cut off mid-sentence, and the station went dead on schedule.
Except the next morning, it was back on the air like nothing happened, like the CRTC hadn’t refused to renew its licence a month earlier and told it to stop operating by Aug. 31.
Owner Jean Ernest Pierre told Cartt.ca in a brief email that he had received authorization late Monday to continue operating as he appeals the CRTC decision. However, both the Commission and the Federal Court of Appeal say there has been no such authorization.
“Groupe Médias Pam Inc. has sought leave to appeal Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2020-239,” said CRTC communications officer Anne Brodeur. “CJMS has also filed an application to stay the Commission’s decision, which would allow CJMS to remain on the air until such time as the motion for leave to appeal is decided by the Federal Court of Appeal. The Commission is aware of the court proceedings involving CJMS and understands that the Federal Court of Appeal has not yet made a determination on those applications. The Commission is monitoring the situation and will take additional steps if necessary.”
On July 31, after a virtual public hearing in which Pierre was invited to explain its licence compliance issues, the CRTC announced it would refuse to renew CJMS’s licence. It laid out a long history of the station failing to meet licence conditions during all six of its licence terms, particularly conditions related to annual returns and monitoring. The Commission also threatened to pull the licence of Montreal Haitian radio station CJWI 1410 AM, also owned by Pierre, but it was given a two-year licence renewal instead.
The Federal Court of Appeal said an application for leave to appeal was filed on August 31 and a motion to stay the CRTC decision was filed Aug. 28, but “both filings were not accepted by the court as there were some deficiencies with the documents.” As of Thursday, the group had not yet re-filed the applications, but the station remained on the air.
In its court filing, CJMS licensee Groupe Médias Pam argues that the Commission erred in law by taking into account licence non-compliance by CJMS’s previous owner (Pierre bought the station for $15,000 in 2014) and did not show “procedural fairness” by imposing too strong a sanction when it was only the station’s second licence renewal application under the current owner.
The filing cites as precedent similar appeals by Toronto’s CKLN-FM and the Aboriginal Voices Radio network. In both those cases, the court allowed the stations to continue operating temporarily but eventually sided with the Commission and the stations were forced off the air.
In its CJMS decision, the CRTC said “when the licensee acquired the station in 2014, the licensee was informed of CJMS’s previous non-compliance and committed to improving the station. The Commission took this into account when it approved the transaction. It is the licensees’ responsibility to know their regulatory obligations to ensure their stations’ compliance. Given the licensee’s responses to the non-compliance, the Commission doubts that the licensee understands some of its obligations.”
The decision also lays out the sanctions imposed since its first licence renewal in 2006, with short-term renewals in 2008, 2010, 2014 and 2018. “This demonstrates that the licensee does not take seriously the Commission’s regulatory requirements to which it is subject, its conditions of licence or the Commission’s mandatory orders.”
