Cabin Radio's FM licence application in limbo, CRTC stays quiet

Why can't you hear Cabin Radio on an actual radio?

It's a question to which the Yellowknife-based media company doesn't have an answer.

Cabin Radio applied to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for a commercial FM licence in August of 2019, but the application has yet to be approved or denied.

CRTC's website says a broadcasting licence application process normally takes eight to 18 months.

For Cabin, it's taken more than three years.

What's the holdup? It's not entirely clear. The CRTC declined to speak about it.

"The issue is before the commission and a determination has not yet been made, therefore we are not in a position to speak on the issue or respond to your questions," said a CRTC spokesperson via email.

COVID-19 caused delays, says CRTC

According to publicly available documents, the CRTC says the pandemic is partly to blame.

In a CRTC "broadcasting notice of consultation" related to Cabin Radio's application, dated Nov. 12, 2021, the commission said it relies on the economic performance of a given market when determining whether that market has room for a new station.

COVID-19 created "significant declines and other uncertainties" in a number of radio markets, reads the notice. The CRTC said that for some applications, only pre-COVID data was available, and relying on this data would produce "unreliable market assessments."

For this reason, the CRTC said, it put a number of applications on pause until the relevant data was available.

Cabin's was one of those applications.

In the notice, the CRTC conceded that Cabin's file had been "effectively on hold for some time," and that they would expedite it.

But that was more than a year ago, and Cabin's editor and part-owner, Ollie Williams, said since then there has been no noteworthy development.

Williams didn't want to speak in much detail about Cabin's application.

He said he wants the CRTC to evaluate it purely on "the merits that we have put forward and the arguments that are in front of it."

But "yeah," he said, "in any industry, I think it's worth asking whether it's appropriate for a small business to wait more than three years for a licence."

'We are from Yellowknife'

Cabin Radio is a news website and an online radio station that broadcasts non-stop, seven days a week.

Williams and four other Yellowknifers started the company in 2017, and despite its small size, Cabin has become a significant player on the northern media field.

Its website says Cabin gets hundreds of thousands of page views a month.

But the goal has always been FM radio — to bring more music, and Cabin's brand of jocular, hyper-local news and commentary to Yellowknife's airwaves.

"We are from Yellowknife," said Williams, noting that the owners either grew up in the city or have lived there for a long time.

"We feel as though we're good at understanding this community and we're good at reflecting the community back to it, and we think we lift the community up," he said.

"We think we provide a platform to celebrate the community around us, as well as providing a platform that holds people to account."

It takes a lot of time and money to put together an FM licence application, said Williams.

He said he didn't have an exact dollar figure at hand, but that "collectively, we have invested many tens of thousands of dollars" to get Cabin where it is today.

In 2020, Up Here magazine reported that Cabin had put nearly $30,000 into its CRTC application, and that it will cost another $100,000 for the transmission equipment.

Yellowknife a saturated market, say competitors

As part of the application process, the CRTC put out a call for comments on Yellowknife's ability to support another radio station.

Two organizations submitted interventions: Courtenay, B.C.-based Vista Radio, which owns True North FM (CJCD-FM in Yellowknife and CJCD-FM-1 in Hay River); and The Native Communications Society of the NWT, which runs English and Indigenous-language programming on CKLB Radio.

Both argued that another another FM radio station could eat into valuable ad revenue in Yellowknife's small market.

True North and CKLB are two of Yellowknife's six FM stations. The others are CBC/Radio-Canada stations and Radio Taïga, a French-language station.

In Vista's submission, President Bryan Edwards wrote that a new FM station in Yellowknife would have a "serious negative impact" on CJCD, "undermining the station's already limited revenue base and thereby, impairing its ability to continue to offer high quality local programming."

Edwards wrote that CJCD's profits declined 24 per cent over the five years preceding the pandemic to "just a few points above breakeven in 2018." COVID-19 put further financial strain on the station.

He wrote Yellowknife does not, and will not in the near future, have the capacity to sustain a new radio station.

In its submission, CKLB wrote that another FM station would "dilute the limited radio advertising market in Yellowknife," and would put "additional stress on the viability of the current stations in the market."

CKLB wrote that public health messaging during the pandemic "artificially buoyed the ad market," and asks the CRTC to wait until COVID's "devastating effects to business" are fully understood before adding another station.

The heads of Vista Radio and the Native Communications Society declined CBC's request for an interview.

For Williams, getting Cabin on the FM dial is about making sure people in Yellowknife have access to a "plurality of news."

"That's what's important," he said. "Bringing what we know is good, robust coverage of the North, both in news and entertainment form, to a broader audience."

But for now, they wait.

If Cabin does get an FM licence, said Williams, they'll put up a transmitter "like rats up a drainpipe and be broadcasting as soon as we humanly, possibly can."