The CRTC last week approved Hope Channel Canada’s purchase of the English-language commercial religious specialty FM radio stations CJRP-FM Saint John and its transmitter CJRP-FM-1 Rothesay, and CKOE-FM Moncton, in New Brunswick.
The stations currently operate under DARR FM Radio Ltd. and Houssen Broadcasting Ltd.’s Alive FM brand, broadcasting Christian music and programming. DARR FM and Houssen are both owned and controlled by James Houssen, based in Moncton.
Hope Channel Canada is an Oshawa, Ont.-based not-for-profit corporation controlled by its Canadian board of directors. It currently…
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The CRTC last week approved Torres Media’s acquisition of Evanov Radio Group’s English-language radio station CHSV-FM (currently operating as Lite 106.7 FM) in Hudson/Saint-Lazare, Quebec.
With a transaction value of $310,000, the change in radio station ownership requires Torres Media to allocate $18,600 in tangible benefits, to be paid in equal installments over seven consecutive broadcast years, to various content funds, including the Canadian Starmaker Fund, Fonds Radiostar, FACTOR, Musicaction, the Community Radio Fund of Canada, and any eligible Canadian content development initiative at Torres Media’s discretion.
In its application seeking CRTC approval for its acquisition…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers and Corus have agreed to a new distribution deal that ends a long-running carriage dispute that involved several regulatory and court decisions.
Corus wrote a letter to the CRTC last month stating it wished to withdraw its 2024 applications alleging Rogers was giving itself an undue preference by seeking to remove or repackage some of its channels, including Home and Flavour, which replaces HGTV and Food Network, respectively, after the cable giant scooped up the rights to those trademarks and content that summer.
In a reply on Tuesday, CRTC staff acknowledged that…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Telus is asking the CRTC to reconsider part of a July decision that determined Every-Day Computers (Ev-Com) satisfied the spectrum requirement to become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) under the regulated framework — and to scrutinize broadly the spectrum being used to claim eligibility.
Ev-Com filed the initial application in January asking the CRTC to order Telus to provide access to its wireless network under the MNVO regime. But while the regulator ruled in July that Ev-Com did not satisfy all the requirements to get mandated access – namely, that it…
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By Ahmad Hathout
Rogers is claiming in a Part 1 made public Monday that Concord Pacific Development Corp. is forcing it to pay a $300 per-unit fee to access two properties under construction in Burnaby, British Columbia.
The cable giant claims, since July 2024, it has been seeking access to the properties at 5889 Barker Avenue and 4750-4754 Kingsway, but Concord “has consistently refused to discuss access by Rogers to the Properties unless Rogers agrees to pay an upfront per unit entry fee of $300 to obtain Concord’s permission to access the multi-dwelling units after construction is complete.
“Concord has also stated…
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As demand for data, cloud services and high-capacity connectivity grows, the infrastructure supporting Canada’s digital economy is becoming more important than ever.
Canada’s digital future depends on infrastructure that most people will never see.
Beneath highways, across remote landscapes and between major network hubs, fibre optic networks carry the data that keeps businesses, communities and essential services connected. As demand for bandwidth increases, the challenge is no longer simply extending connectivity. It is building the…
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The CRTC sent a letter to the national and regional telecoms this week requesting an update on the progress of the MVNO regime that is four years out from sunsetting.
From Rogers, Bell, Telus and Sasktel, the regulator is asking for a list of MVNO agreements entered into with regional carriers. It is asking the same from Quebecor, Cogeco, Eastlink and Iristel, as well as the areas where these regionals are using the wireless capacity to deliver services, where new radio access networks (RAN) have been deployed, the total capital investment to expand into these new areas, the number of…
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By Ahmad Hathout
The CRTC is allowing telecoms no longer required to contribute to the National Contribution Fund (NCF) to pay outstanding amounts owed over three years.
In February, the regulator updated who pays into the fund that bankrolls telecom builds by increasing the company revenue threshold from $10 million to $25 million. That rule change hacked the number of contributors to the fund by 40 per cent and left unresolved the question of what to do about the amounts these telecoms set aside for collection that weren’t picked up.
At the behest of the CRTC, the fund’s overseer,…
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Co-op can submit reimbursement claims monthly for costs incurred
The CRTC last week approved Access Communications Co-operative’s statement of work for a transport fibre project in western Saskatchewan, for which the community-owned co-op in November 2025 was awarded up to $12.89 million in funding from the commission’s $750-million Broadband Fund.
In its approval of Access’s project plan outlined in the statement of work — submitted to the telecom regulator on June 30 — the CRTC also approved, by majority decision and on an exceptional basis, Access’s requests to submit claims for reimbursement as…
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The CRTC has told Bell subsidiary Maskatel it needs more information before it considers the Quebec telecom service provider’s recent request for an extension of the CRTC-mandated April 2027 deadline to implement a self-service mechanism for customers to make changes to their plans.
Maskatel said in an August Part 1 application the required self-service mechanism can’t be implemented within its legacy systems, which lack modern application programming interfaces and the online capabilities needed to host web-based self-service platforms, it said. Maskatel is asking for more time — up until the end of 2027 —…
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