National Post (National Edition)
PIRATE RADIO
Politicians flock to pay their respects to B.C.’s Radio India — though it uses U.S. towers, due to lack of CRTC sanction
In a second-floor office buzzing with immaculately dressed Sikh men, its walls jammed with community awards, Maninder Gill vowed that when the CRTC comes for him, they will need to “drag him” from his desk.
Mr. Gill, the director of one of Vancouver’s most well-known pirate radio stations, will fight them all the way to the Supreme Court. If the regulator starts harassing his advertisers — as it has threatened — he’ll just drop his advertising rates.
Then he’ll call in his listeners. They are many.
“I can get 50,000 people easily, they can fill the roads, they can protest, if they come to shut us down,” Mr. Gill said.
Radio India — a provider of Indian-language programming to Metro Vancouver’s 250,000 Indo-Canadians — is what is politely known as a “crossborder” radio station.
Although its studios are in Metro Vancouver, the station is broadcast via radio towers in Washington State.
The country’s most powerful politicians don’t seem to care that Radio India is an outlaw operation. Mr. Gill has been photographed with three B.C.
premiers and future prime minister Stephen Harper, and he’s the proud owner of a Diamond Jubilee Medal. When Radio India opened its new headquarters in 2004, thendeputy prime minister Sheila Copps cut the ribbon.
In a single one-hour period on Thursday, the station was visited by both NDP MLA Harry Bains and Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal — both of whom had dropped by to lend their voices to a Radio India telethon for a local charity.
“Tell them what Radio India does for the community,” Mr. Gill told the politicians as he led the National Post on a tour of his studios.
And it’s not just Radio India. Of five Indian-language radio stations operating in Vancouver, three of them snuck onto the AM dial by way of U.S.based transmitters. Vancouver’s backdoor Indian-language radio empire has blossomed into one of the region’s most influential media voices. But now, in what may be the most quixotic CRTC mission of modern times, the regulator has vowed to shut them all down.
For the most part, residents in northern Washington state
have stopped noticing the mysterious radio towers looming over their communities or wondering why their 90%-white region has such a crystal clear selection of Indian programming.
If an American ever tried to build a radio tower on Canadian soil and use it to beam unregulated content into the United States, it would probably only be a matter of hours before Ottawa brought the hammer down. But in America, people do not look kindly on the government shutting down a radio station.
“As long as they’re following the FCC’s rules, there’s nothing to stop these folks from doing what they’re doing,” said Mark Allen, CEO of the Washington State Association of Broadcasters.
In Canada, they get a rougher ride. In mid-August, the CRTC formally called all three Vancouver pirate stations —
Radio India, Radio Punjab and Sher-E-Punjab — to a hearing in Gatineau, Que. The stations were offered a chance to make their case before getting slapped with “cease and desist” orders.
Cross-border radio stations have always been a thorn in the side of Canada’s broadcast regulator. In Kingston, Ont., 102.7 FM brands itself as Kingston’s #1 Hit Music Station, despite broadcasting out of Cape Vincent, N.Y. Montreal’s “#1 Hit Music Channel” — 94.7 FM — is beamed in via 50,000 watt transmitters from Chateaugay, N.Y.
In B.C., the CRTC seems to have been spurred into action by complaints from the province’s licensed South Asian broadcasters.
“I’m being affected directly by these stations, so I complain,” said Shushma Datt, the owner of two licensed Indo-Canadian stations, and a vocal
opponent of the pirates.
Ms. Datt is widely acknowledged as the godmother of Indo-Canadian broadcasting in Canada. A veteran of BBC’s London bureau during the 1960s, in 1987 she started Rim Jhim, Canada’s first Indo-Canadian radio station, on a sub-carrier frequency. Then, after 20 years of trying, in 2005 she was granted an AM radio station that she has recently rebranded as Spice Radio.
She has always played by the rules: She meets her Can-Con quota, broadcasts in a “minimum of 17 different languages” as per CRTC’s ruling and is forbidden from having a single program in Chinese. Still, she was recently disciplined by the CRTC because she couldn’t meet her mandatory $60,000-ayear payment into Canadian Content Development.
Despite this, Ms. Datt says she has never once considered the temptation of going pirate.
In fact, she bristles at the question.
“I am a Canadian,” said the Kenyan-born immigrant. “This is the only country where I’ve felt at home.”
By broadcasting from a foreign country, and in languages that most Canadians can’t understand, Vancouver’s crossborder stations are relatively free to feature some of the most controversial content in all of B.C.
In Radio India’s case, the station’s loose-cannon style has even erupted into full-blown violence. In August 2010, Mr. Gill allegedly shot a man in the leg in the parking lot outside a Sikh temple. A few weeks later, persons unknown opened up on the broadcaster’s house with machine guns. The temple shooting is set to go to trial next year, but Mr. Gill has maintained that he was merely defending himself from Sikh militants who objected to his station’s anti-terrorism stance.
There is no denying that Radio India is a hugely influential member of Vancouver’s Indo-Canadian community.
“Radio India is one of the places you bring your message to your constituents, whether it’s buying ads or getting interviewed,” Mr. Bains told the National Post.
On Thursday, their telethon was expected to raise $10,000 in only a matter of hours. All day long, dozens of turbaned pensioners filed into the second-floor studio to throw down $50 and $100 bills for the cause. Mr. Gill claims they have raised $10-million for charity in 10 years.
Radio India and Sher-E-Punjab have tried to go legit in the past, going to the CRTC with exhaustive applications detailing their financial statements, listenership, coverage area and even including independent surveys of Indo-Canadian radio listeners and reams of support letters from government, charities and local corporations.
Still, both stations were rejected by the CRTC this year and in 2005.
Mr. Gill will attend the CRTC hearing in October, but he said the “only way” they’re ever going to shut down Radio India’s radio signal is by giving them space on the Canadian dial. “If they want me to come under CRTC regulation, give me the frequency,” he said.