GATINEAU — While renewing the broadcasting licence for Bell Media’s AM radio station CKGM Montreal (TSN 690) today, the Commission denied Bell’s request to reduce the amount of local programming the station broadcasts each week.
TSN 690 wanted to cut its local programming from 96 hours to 63 hours per broadcast week. The sports station’s condition of licence regarding local programming dates back to 2013 when the Commission approved Bell’s acquisition of Astral Media’s broadcasting undertakings, which included Montreal radio stations CJAD, CHOM-FM and CJFM-FM Montreal. Bell already owned CKGM Montreal, and in approving Bell’s acquisition of Astral Media’s stations, the Commission granted an exception to the common ownership policy for the Montreal radio market.
To ensure the TSN Radio station remained a sports station, Bell agreed in 2013 to accept conditions of licence to ensure at least 96 hours of programming broadcast each week would be devoted to local programming. Most AM stations don’t have such mandated hours of local content as part of their CoLs, but this is a special case.
“[T]he Commission considers that the station’s condition of licence relating to local programming was an important factor in the approval of an exception to the common ownership policy. By authorizing at this time the requested amendment to this condition of licence, which was imposed in 2013 to mitigate the impact of the exception to the common ownership policy, the Commission would substantially reduce the mitigation measure put in place to justify such an exception. Therefore, the Commission is of the view that reducing CKGM’s local programming requirement is not appropriate,” the Commission writes in its decision today.
However, the Commission did approve another request from Bell to delete CKGM’s condition of licence relating to over-and-above Canadian content development (CCD) contributions. As part of the Commission’s approval of the Astral Media purchase in 2013, Bell had agreed to devote $245,000 over the next seven broadcast years ($35,000 per broadcast year) to CCD initiatives that would benefit the radio sector, with an emphasis on emerging artists from Montreal’s English-language minority community. Given that this over-and-above CCD contribution requirement has now been fulfilled, as of the end of the 2019-2020 broadcast year, the Commission has deleted this condition of licence from CKGM’s new broadcasting licence.
The Commission has renewed CKGM Montreal’s broadcasting licence from March 1, 2021 to August 31, 2027.
