The CBC had been charged with setting up a public service television system following the study carried out by a wide-ranging royal commission on the arts, letters, and sciences, which reported in 1951. This procedure followed the tradition of an earlier royal commission on radio, which had recommended establishing a public broadcasting corporation along the lines of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) model and had led to the creation of the CBC in 1936. However, radio in Canada developed during the 1930s and 1940s under “mixed” ownership, with public and private stations coexisting in a single system and competing for advertising. This model was to be repeated in television. While the CBC would enjoy a virtual monopoly for most of television’s crucial first decade in Canada, private commercial television appeared in 1960. As of 1961, CTV, a national network linking private television stations, was on the air competing vigorously with the CBC.

The 1950s were critical in setting the tone for Canadian television, in both English and French. Distinctive Canadian news and current-affairs formats were developed, and, in French particularly, popular dramatic serials known as téléromans were established. Hockey Night in Canada, programmed in both official languages, became a national ritual that continues unto this day. In contrast, as in most other television systems, some important genres, such as live theater, remain strictly in the memory of the aging.

The basic legislation governing Canadian broadcasting was rewritten in 1958, following the election of a Conservative government friendly to the interests of the private broadcasting industry. Responding to a long-standing demand of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters (CAB), an independent regulatory authority, the Board of Broadcast Governors (BBG) was created, removing the regulation of private broadcasting from the responsibility of the CBC. Shortly thereafter, the BBG began to license private television stations.

Meanwhile, the CBC faced a series of political crises. On the English side, attempts by the government to interfere with programming led to massive resignations among current-affairs staff in 1959. In the same year, a strike by French-language Radio-Canada producers paralyzed the French television service for more than two months and became an important symbolic reference point for the emerging Quebec nationalist movement.

During the 1960s, news and information programming continued to be a source of friction both within the CBC and in the corporation’s relationship with the government. The unorthodox weekly program This Hour Has Seven Days, which rated the highest audience “enjoyment index” of any CBC show, provoked an internal management and authority crisis that eventually toppled the CBC’s senior management while redefining Canadian television journalism. During the same period, French service news programs infuriated the government by paying serious attention to Quebec separatist politicians and issues, and in 1968 the law was rewritten, albeit with little effect, obliging the CBC to “contribute to national unity.”

While the CBC led the way in Canadian programming, private television was slowly and steadily carving a place for itself, building an audience by consistently offering the most popular U.S. programs, competing with the CBC for the broadcasting rights to Canadian sports classics such as professional football’s annual Grey Cup Game and emulating the CBC’s successes in news and current affairs. By the late 1980s, the CBC’s share of the Canadian television audience was down to around 20 percent in English and 30 percent in French.

The issue of maintaining a balance between Canadian and U.S. programs was tackled by the regulatory authority early on. Beginning in 1960, Canadian television broadcasters were required to offer 55 percent Canadian programs. (In 1970 the regulation was stiffened to 60 percent in prime time.) Canadian-content regulations remain a controversial and ongoing issue in Canadian television up to the present. Aside from the philosophical question surrounding the legitimacy of intervening in audience “choice,” the effectiveness of content quotas in bringing Canadian programs to the screen and getting Canadians to watch them has been a subject of continual debate. Since the 1960s, however, there has been a general consensus that without Canadian-content requirements, commercial broadcasters would have no incentive to produce Canadian programs when they could acquire U.S. exports for as little as one-tenth the cost. A more recent development has been the establishment by both the public and private sector of a number of television production funds in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to the rise of a Canadian independent production industry by increasing the pool of available capital and making it easier to get airtime. The notion of what constitutes “Canadian content” has also evolved over time.

The 1968 reform of the Broadcasting Act replaced the BBG with the Canadian Radio-Television Commission, or CRTC (which became the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in 1976). The CRTC spent most of the 1970s developing a regulatory framework for the rapidly expanding cable industry, which had emerged in the 1950s as community antenna television serving remote areas. By retransmitting signals picked out of the air from U.S. border-town transmitters (for which Canadian cable companies paid no license fees until 1989), the Canadian cable industry built an attractive product for the Canadian television audience, which quickly developed a taste for the best of both worlds. To paraphrase the 1929 royal commission on broadcasting, Canadians wanted Canadian programming, but they wanted U.S. programming too.

Aware that the increasingly widespread cable model was undermining its policy to support and promote Canadian content, the CRTC moved to ensure that cable, as well, contributed to the overriding policy objective of delivering Canadian television to Canadians. Must-carry provisions ensured that every available Canadian over-the-air signal in any area was offered as basic service, along with a local community channel. In exchange, cable companies were authorized to distribute the three U.S. commercial networks, ABC, NBC, and CBS, as well as the U.S. public network, PBS. This was, for many years, the basic cable package available to Canadian cable subscribers, and on this basis, cable penetration grew to 76 percent of Canadian homes by 1992.

The CRTC was also charged with putting in place Canadian ownership regulations, limiting foreign participation in Canadian broadcasting companies to 20 percent. As a result, Canadian television today is entirely Canadian owned, with only a handful of operations having any proportion of foreign ownership at all. It has not affected the rise of Canadian media conglomerates along the lines of those known elsewhere, however, and the Canadian television industry is characterized by a high degree of concentration of ownership. The trend since the mid-1980s has been toward the takeover of private television outfits by cable companies. Since the late 1990s, cross-media convergence combining press, broadcasting, and telecommunications outfits has led to the creation of multimedia conglomerates, which in some cases verge on monopoly. The best-known examples are Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE), owners of CTV and the national Globe and Mail newspaper as well as the country’s largest telephone company; CanWest Global, owners of the Southam newspaper chain as well as the national Global Television network; Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest cable company and owner of the Maclean Hunter chain of magazines; and Quebecor, owners of Vidéotron (Quebec’s largest cable company), TVA (Canada’s largest private French-language television network), as well as the Sun chain of newspapers. In 2002 all of these companies were reportedly in financial difficulty due to their ambitious recent acquisitions and attempts to establish themselves in new-media and other Internet-based activities.

An important shift in the ecology of Canadian television occurred in the 1970s, when the CRTC began to license second private stations in large metropolitan markets. Regional networks such as Global (in southern Ontario) and Quatre Saisons (in Quebec) grew out of this policy, which also saw the establishment of independent stations in many cities, including Toronto’s highly successful CityTV. The resulting audience fragmentation contributed to the erosion of the CBC’s audience share. Consequently, it also weakened important arguments that would legitimize the spiraling cost of public broadcasting to the public purse.

Although advertising had always been a component of CBC television, basic funding was provided by an annual grant from Parliament. By the late 1980s that grant had risen to more than $1 billion (Canadian) annually. Advertising, meanwhile, represented more than 20 percent of the budget—enough to be an important consideration in every programming decision, but not nearly enough to take the pressure off the public treasury. The CBC’s dilemma, particularly for services provided in English, has been how to maintain a distinctive television profile while competing commercially, and how to respond to the vast demands of an encompassing mandate in a context of government cutbacks. It has not been an easy process.

Private television, meanwhile, after two lucrative decades in the 1960s and 1970s, also began to experience the financial doldrums of a weak market in the 1980s. As a period of stagnating advertising revenues followed the earlier licensing boom, many private television operations became ripe for takeover, especially by cable companies.

Conventional broadcasters faced a further challenge with the introduction, in 1982, of pay-TV and later, in 1987, of a series of Canadian specialty channels. The CRTC had resisted pressure from the cable industry to allow the importation of the new U.S. services such as HBO that came on the market in the mid-1970s. The commission opted instead to promote development of Canadian services along the same lines. In most cases, such as movies, sports, and rock videos, the Canadian services provide a range of programs similar to those of their American counterparts, but they are Canadian owned, subject to CRTC licensing, and they do offer at least a window for Canadian programs. In some cases, such as the CBC’s 24-hour news service, Newsworld, or the international francophone channel, TV5, the first generation of Canadian specialty services licensed in 1987 represented a distinctive addition to the program offerings.

The financing of Canadian pay-TV and specialty channels provides an instructive example in the problems such entities have when competing with globally distributed television products in a small domestic market. The regulatory justification for creating Canadian pay-TV in 1982 was to provide an additional vehicle for Canadian feature films, but the actual percentage of Canadian films offered has never been statistically significant. At the same time, weak penetration of the cable market by film channels made such channels commercially unviable. Thus, when the CRTC decided to license a new series of specialty channels in 1987, it chose a different funding formula. This time, cable operators were authorized to provide the new range of services to all subscribers in their territory, and charge accordingly. The discretionary aspect was thus shifted from the consumer to the cable operator, who could calculate the economics of the deal with great precision. The cost to the consumer for each additional service was relatively low, and as rates were regulated, the market mechanism was essentially removed. At the same time, cable operators could still offer the available Canadian discretionary pay-TV channels, which the operators were by now packaging along with a range of authorized U.S. services not considered to be competitors of the Canadian offerings.

Since 1987, then, Canadian cable subscribers in most markets have received a 24-hour CBC news channel (at first in English and, since 1994, in French as well); channels featuring music videos, sports, weather, and children’s programming (in either English or French); and the international francophone channel TV5. In addition, viewers could choose to subscribe to pay-TV movie channels, specialized channels in the other official language, and, depending where they lived, a range of U.S. channels including CNN (but not, for example, MTV, which was a direct competitor of the new Canadian equivalent).

By the early 1990s, combined viewing of all of these services accounted for less than 20 percent of the overall audience share. However, pressure to establish even more Canadian services continued. It was grounded in discussions of the coming “500-channel universe” and the perceived need to maintain the attractiveness of a cable subscription for Canadian viewers and forestall their defection to direct broadcast satellites. Thus, as of January 1, 1995, a cable-ready Canadian household (now up to 76 percent) could receive, in addition to everything mentioned previously, a French-language CBC news channel; arts-and-entertainment channels in English or French (depending on the market); a science channel; a women’s channel; a lifestyle channel; a Canadian country music channel; and a channel featuring old programs. The specific offer and funding formulas have become extremely complicated and vary from territory to territory according to the leeway provided by the CRTC to each cable operator. The initial response from consumers has been laced with confusion and frustration, for despite the concept of “consumer sovereignty” that supposedly accompanies increased channel capacity, the consumer finds that he or she is not really the one who has the choice. In all, between 1984 and 1999, the CRTC licensed six pay-TV and 48 specialty television services and added another 283 digital pay and specialty services in 2001.

In the mid-1990s, Canadian television was struggling to adjust to the new technological and economic environment characterized by the metaphor of the “information highway.” The CRTC’s regulatory regime was under review, the CBC faced increasingly radical budgetary restrictions, and private broadcasters were competing for dwindling advertising revenue. As in other Western countries, the conventional model of generalist television was increasingly in a state of siege. However, Canadian distribution undertakings— still protected from U.S. dominance under the cultural industries exemption within the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—were well positioned in the Canadian market, and, across the range of channels available, Canadian independent productions were finding an audience.

In addition, Canadian television provided some unique programming services in the form of its provincial government–supported educational broadcasters, community broadcasters, and autonomous undertakings run by northern and native broadcasters. Since 1932 broadcasting has been recognized in the Canadian Constitution as being under federal jurisdiction, but in the 1970s an exception was made for provinces seeking to establish educational broadcasters, provided that these organizations operated at arm’s length from their respective provincial governments. This led to the establishment of Radio-Québec (now Télé-Québec), TVOntario, the Saskatchewan Communications Network, ACCESS Alberta (now ACCESSTV and privately owned), and British Columbia’s Knowledge Network of the West (KNOW). Canadian cable and satellite services boast a number of unique not-for-profit services, including a multifaith channel, Vision TV, and the world’s first network entirely owned and operated by indigenous people, the Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN).

Issues surrounding the future of public broadcasting, concentration of ownership, the role of the CRTC, and new media have been at the heart of television policy debates in the early 2000s. Indeed, talking about television continues to be an important aspect of public discourse in Canada. In all its facets, Canadian television has constituted a complex system that, in the spirit of the Broadcasting Act, has been seen as “a public service essential to the maintenance and enhancement of national identity and cultural sovereignty.”