MONTREAL – Cogeco Diffusion-owned CKAC will be rebranded as Radio Circulation 730 starting early Tuesday morning, with programming now dedicated to traffic, road work, and weather in the Greater Montreal area.
In addition, sister station 98.5 FM will become “Montreal’s super station for opinion, news and sports”, and include select sports programming from CKAC such as Montreal Canadiens, Alouettes and Impact game broadcasts.
The radio division of Cogeco Inc. said Friday that the move was made in order to honour the agreement struck in May between Cogeco Diffusion and the Ministère des Transports du Québec on a French-language and an English-language dedicated traffic radio stations to serve the Greater Montreal area. Cogeco Diffusion then submitted applications to the CRTC for broadcasting licences for AM frequencies 690 kHz and 940 kHz, which it says have been unused since January 2010.
While the CRTC pledged to review the applications “without delay”, Cogeco said that “sudden and unexpected opposition” from its Montreal area competitors Bell Media, Astral Media Radio, and Tietolman-Tétrault Média “forced” the CRTC to schedule a public hearing for October 17, 2011 in order to study the licence applications. Cogeco Diffusion said that “(t)his unforeseen situation is causing unacceptable delays and uncertainties in deploying the project to bring the two traffic radio stations to air as agreed with the MTQ”.
“This opposition to our project from our competitors came as a surprise since none of them had shown any interest in the AM 690 kHz or AM 940 kHz frequencies since Corus ended Info 690 and 940 News operations in January 2010”, said SVP Richard Lachance, in a statement. “We did not make the decision to change CKAC’s vocation lightly. However, in our opinion, we made the best choice given the circumstances, because the people of the Greater Montréal area have a crying need for continuous information about traffic conditions and road work. It was urgent that Radio Circulation go live early in September.”
With the launch of Radio Circulation 730 confirmed, Cogeco Diffusion said it has withdrawn its application for a French-language traffic radio station on AM 690 kHz.
