CKWR receives short-term licence renewal
KITCHENER — Community radio station FM 98.5 CKWR will continue broadcasting until at least the end of this year, thanks to a short-term broadcast licence renewal from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
The CRTC has granted the Kitchener radio station a temporary extension on its broadcast licence to give the agency more time to consider its licence renewal application. CKWR was one of four stations to receive the extension this week. Its broadcast licence was set to expire at the end of August.
Members of the CKWR board appeared before the CRTC last month to make their case for why the commission should renew its broadcast licence after failing to meet several broadcast requirements, including late implementation of the National Public Alerting System, insufficient Canadian content, and failure to submit annual returns to the CRTC from 2013 to 2017.
“I’m excited about the reprieve,” CKWR board member and compliance officer Peter Beacock said in an interview this week, just days after the CRTC announcement. He expects the commission will ask for documentation proving compliance at least once or twice in the coming months, and it will likely conduct at least one more content audit before the end of the year.
In an email to The Record, Patricia Valladao, manager of media relations for the CRTC, said the commission “administratively renewed the broadcasting licence” to Dec. 31 to allow the station to operate “under the same terms and conditions of licence until the commission has released a final decision.”
The station says it was well on its way to being compliant before the end of August, even before the decision was made to extend its licence. It has installed the federally mandated alert system and submitted all back returns to the commission, and programming changes implemented at the station in recent months mean all programs are now fully compliant with Canadian content requirement.
During a weeklong audit in October 2016, commission staff estimated Canadian musical content accounted for only 3.3 per cent of the total broadcast time, well short of the required 10 per cent. It hasn’t been easy, though, with some programmers resisting the change and a multicultural programming schedule that makes it difficult to find sufficient Canadian content.
This is the third consecutive time the station has appeared before the CRTC for noncompliance ahead of its licence renewal. In 2008, the station had failed to provide annual returns for 2001, 2002 and 2004, and in 2013 it again failed to submit annual returns from 2008 to 2010. It received short-term renewals in both instances.
The station has taken steps to fix underlying problems, including replacing most of its leadership, firing an unqualified bookkeeper, and putting renewed emphasis on staff training.
The station is also working on organizational changes from the top down to develop a new policy manual and bylaws, as well as a new broadcast schedule and a revamped approach to financial management.
It believes the CRTC will ultimately hand it a short-term licence renewal of about two to five years to further prove its commitment to revamping the station.