How the CBC brought television to Canada's far north by flying tapes around
From 1967, remote northern Canadian towns got television by aeroplane. The CBC recorded four hours of black-and-white programmes a day in Calgary, flew the tapes to a small transmitter, aired them, then passed them on to the next community. Larger places saw shows a week late; the smallest waited almost a month.
That scheme, called the Frontier Coverage Package, began with stations in Yellowknife, Lynn Lake in Manitoba and Havre-Saint-Pierre in Quebec, and Whitehorse joined in November 1968. On 5 February 1973 the larger centres switched to live colour pictures beamed down from the Anik satellite. Oddly, northern viewers still watched on either Atlantic or Pacific time, because the national schedule was built for those two feeds, even though the audience lived across four other offsets.
The corporation itself grew out of a 1920s argument: should Canadian radio follow the commercial American path or a public British one? Powerful United States stations were already easier to hear in many Canadian homes than local ones. In 1929 the Aird Commission recommended a national public system, and campaigners Graham Spry and Alan Plaunt pushed for it as a way to keep control of Canada's airwaves.
The railways had shown that national radio could work. Canadian National Railways ran CNR Radio for passengers from 1923 to 1932, and in 1933 a new government commission bought its stations and studios for $50,000. That commission gave way to the CBC on 2 November 1936. For its first two decades the CBC both broadcast and regulated its private competitors, a double role that ended in 1958. A separate French-language radio network followed in December 1937, and today the English side is called CBC and the French side Radio-Canada.
Budget pressure later reshaped the network. On 31 July 2012 the CBC switched off roughly 620 analogue transmitters, leaving 27 and saving about $10 million a year; the corporation said only 1.7 percent of viewers lost access, since most already relied on cable or satellite. Its main radio networks have carried no commercials since 1974.
Source: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
