CKMI-DT (channel 15) is a television station in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, owned and operated by the Global Television Network, a division of Corus Entertainment. The station maintains studios inside the Dominion Square Building in downtown Montreal. Its primary transmitter is located atop Mount Royal, with rebroadcasters in Quebec City and Sherbrooke.
CKMI was established as Quebec City's second station in 1957. Originally a private affiliate of the CBC Television network, it was a sister station to that city's Radio-Canada affiliate, CFCM-TV. It remained a CBC affiliate after CFCM disaffiliated from Radio-Canada and eventually joined the private French network TVA. A series of ownership changes over the years eventually saw CKMI and CFCM acquired by Télé-Metropole, owner of TVA flagship CFTM-TV, in 1989.
Unlike its francophone sister, CKMI struggled to survive for most of its first four decades. This was mainly because it was the only anglophone station in the overwhelmingly francophone city, and its potential audience was barely large enough for it to be viable. In 1997, Canwest bought controlling interest in CKMI and relaunched it as a regional Global station for Quebec with rebroadcasters in Montreal and Sherbrooke. The station moved most of its operations to Montreal that year, though it would nominally remain licensed to Quebec City until 2009. The move fulfilled Global's quarter-century dream of getting a foothold in Montreal. It also gave Canwest's stations enough coverage of Canada that it rebranded its station group as the Global Television Network. The station's local news broadcasts have typically struggled in the ratings, never advancing beyond a distant second place.
History MI-5 in Quebec City The station launched on March 17, 1957, and was the second privately owned station in Quebec. It was licensed to Quebec City and aired an analog signal on VHF channel 5. CKMI was originally owned by Télévision de Québec, a consortium of cinema chain Famous Players and Quebec City's three privately owned radio stations, CHRC, CKCV and CJQC, along with the province's first private station, CFCM-TV. The station's studios were located alongside CFCM's facilities in Sainte-Foy, then a suburb of Quebec City; CKMI and CFCM shared the same antenna, the first setup of its kind in the world for television. This allowed CKMI to sign on several months sooner than would have been the case under the normal engineering practices of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Upon signing on, CKMI became Quebec City's CBC Television affiliate, taking all English-language programming from CFCM. Télévision de Québec had applied for an English-language station when a policy change at the CBC the previous year restricted CFCM to programming from CBC's French-language network, Radio-Canada (now Ici Radio-Canada Télé), rather than selecting French- and English-language shows, as it had done since signing on in 1954. CFCM disaffiliated from Radio-Canada in 1964 when the network opened its own station, CBVT, but CKMI remained with CBC. In 1971, CFCM became a charter affiliate of a privately owned French network, TVA.
Télévision de Québec was nearly forced to sell its stations in 1969 due to the Canadian Radio and Television Commission's (CRTC) new rules requiring radio and television stations to be 80% Canadian-owned. The largest shareholder, Famous Players, was a subsidiary of American film studio Paramount Pictures. The CRTC had additionally denied a 1968 bid to sell CFCM and CKMI to Teltron Communications Ltd. In 1970, the CRTC ordered Télévision de Québec to present a plan for restructuring its ownership in accordance with the law or else it would take bids for replacement licensees. As a result, Famous Players reduced its shares to 20 percent by selling off to three Quebec City firms, allowing Télévision de Québec to keep CKMI and CFCM. The company renamed itself Télé-Capitale in 1972. Télé-Capitale was bought in two phases by La Verendrye Management Corporation in 1979 and 1982; citing a high debt load, the firm sold the businesses to the Pathonic Corporation of Montreal in 1984. The firm then became known as the Pathonic Network in 1986 before being purchased by Télé-Metropole (which changed its name to TVA) in 1989 and 1990.
CKMI faced severe financial problems for much of its history as a CBC affiliate. This was largely because the area's anglophone population was just barely large enough for the station to be viable as a privately owned CBC affiliate; Quebec City, unlike Montreal, is a virtually monolingual francophone city. As early as 1962, during hearings before the Board of Broadcast Governors (forerunner of the CRTC) for a new French-language station in Quebec City, BBG counsel William Pearson described CKMI as one of the most unprofitable stations in the country. During licence renewal hearings in 1972, Télé-Capitale noted to the CRTC that it was keeping CKMI-TV going despite the lack of any path to profitability. This stood in contrast to its French-language sister station, CFCM, which was reported in 1973 to be the most profitable television station in Canada.
In the early 1980s, CKMI's newsroom consisted of three anchor-reporters who produced three hours of local content a week. They were the only English speakers at CFCM-CKMI. Unless they were talking among themselves, they spoke French most of the day at work before going to air, reflected in the numerous gallicisms that pocked CKMI's newscasts. Indeed, CKMI's reporters often struggled to find anyone who could speak English well enough to conduct an interview. There were so few viewers that one CRTC licence renewal hearing for the station was met with no public comment whatsoever. At one point in 1981, its highest-rated program attracted only 31,000 viewers, a fraction of the viewership of CFCM's highest-rated program. It was not unheard of for French-language commercials originally produced for CFCM to air on CKMI when it was deemed too expensive to produce a separate English commercial. Despite the difficulties of running an English station in a city that was 97 per cent francophone at the time, Télé-Capitale had no qualms about keeping the station on the air, viewing it as a public service to Quebec City's anglophone community.
Over the years, the station served mostly as a semi-satellite of CBMT in Montreal, with CBC programming taking up 85 percent of the schedule by the 1980s. The only local program on the air by 1996 was a 30-minute weeknight newscast anchored by Karen McDonald, editor and co-owner of the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the only English-language newspaper in the city. Many stories on the newscast, Inside Quebec, were in French because they were supplied by CFCM's newsroom; McDonald, who left the Chronicle-Telegraph to work for the station known as "MI-5" before also returning to the newspaper four years later, recalled that CFCM's reporters did not ask questions in English even when they were interviewing an anglophone. In the late 1980s, the newscast only attracted 5,000 viewers per statistics from the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement; McDonald believed that most of those viewers were francophones.
Becoming a Global station On June 13, 1995, Télé-Métropole and CanWest Global Communications announced a plan that would transform CKMI from a de facto rebroadcaster of CBMT into the third major English-language TV service in the province, providing the first private competition to CFCF-TV. Under the plan, Télé-Métropole and CanWest would form a joint venture, TVA CanWest, that would own CKMI, and it would apply to build transmitters in Montreal and Sherbrooke. CanWest would own a 51 percent controlling interest in the venture. Because of the nature of the Quebec City market and Montreal being one of Global's two major coverage gaps of the time (the other being Alberta, where it had affiliated stations), it was immediately evident that the primary goal of the venture was to get Global a foothold in Montreal, the country's third-largest anglophone market. According to Mike Boone, the television columnist for The Gazette, CanWest would have stood virtually no chance of getting a licence for a Quebec station on its own and joined forces with Télé-Métropole to lend "local clout" to its bid.
Global had spent almost a quarter-century trying to get a transmitter in Montreal. When the network originally launched in 1974 as an Ontario-based network, original plans called for a transmitter in Maxville, near Cornwall. While it would have primarily served Hawkesbury, it would have provided a strong grade B signal to Montreal. However, the CRTC did not approve the Maxville transmitter with the others because it had previously issued a moratorium on new TV stations in Montreal. One columnist noted that language and political considerations meant the CRTC would not entertain such a service before Montreal had three French-language TV stations.
The TVA CanWest deal would take some time to be approved because of another proposed transaction. CFCF and Vidéotron had proposed an asset swap that would have given CFCF control of TVA and TQS while leaving all of Montreal's cable systems with the latter company, and the CRTC announced it wanted to hear that proposal first. That logjam was resolved in April 1996, when Vidéotron acquired all of CFCF with an eye to spinning off its English-language holdings. It would not be until December of that year when the CRTC finally heard the CKMI application. TVA CanWest pledged a commitment of $165 million over seven years on new Canadian programming to the regulator if it won in Quebec City and proposed new stations for Calgary and Edmonton. Ahead of the hearings, CFCF vigorously fought the proposal, claiming any competition would reduce its value and jeopardize its community service initiatives; it called into question any pledge to produce regional programming, with CFCF weatherman Don McGowan noting that Quebec City was "where 42 anglophones live today". A full-page newspaper ad from CFCF blasted the idea of Global being "allowed to slip through the back door" into Montreal, ominously threatening that it would mean "no more CFCF 12 as we know it".
In November, the CRTC ruled against Global's Alberta stations bid. At the hearing the next month, Izzy Asper took the CRTC to task, noting that English-speaking Montrealers were higher-than-average viewers of American stations available on cable. The CRTC approved the CKMI Global bid on February 27, 1997; on the same day, it also approved Vidéotron's purchase of CFCF's business contingent on spinning off the English-language stations and TQS. As a condition of the purchase, CKMI could not air local advertising in Montreal. CFCF and the CBC had claimed Montreal's anglophone population was so small that a third English-language station would cripple their advertising revenue.
Over the course of 1997, changes were made in preparation for CKMI's relaunch. In Quebec City, CKMI would move from channel 5 to 20, to permit the CBC to take over the channel 5 facility for CBVE-TV, a full-time repeater of CBMT. The Montreal transmitter, originally assigned channel 67, was changed to 46. With the addition of CKMI, CanWest's station group, the CanWest Global System, would have over-the-air coverage in every province except Newfoundland. This led CanWest to announce that on August 18, it would rebrand its stations as the Global Television Network.
Global era