Radio Waterloo a fascinating film
Last month I mentioned the world première of “Radio Waterloo,” a documentary that tells the story of “the advent of community radio in Canada as told by the people who struggled to create it.”
I missed this once-only public screening, which was part of the Deep Cut Film Festival in Kitchener. But I finally got a chance to see “Radio Waterloo” this week, and talk with its creator, Rob McKenna.
The film is now available for anyone to stream, free of charge on YouTube through radiowaterloo.ca/history/
It’s a lengthy piece — almost two hours. It was late in the evening and I was feeling drowsy when I started watching. But it grabbed my attention immediately, and held it through to the end.
“Radio Waterloo” tells an intriguing story that includes the origins of both CKWR FM 98.5, the first English language community radio station in Canada, and CKMS 107.3, which began as the third student-run radio station in Ontario.
The roots of these projects story go back to the 1960s, when a group of university students formed a “broadcasting club.” One of the offshoots was Radio Waterloo, which at one point served both U of W and WLU, which was then still Waterloo Lutheran University.
The idea of producing a documentary emerged after McKenna, a veteran DJ and newish board member of CKMS, found a filing cabinet full of archival footage related to the station.
As he went through the material — more than 40 hours of it — he started doing interviews with people from near and far who have played key roles in its development over time.
With its reputation for innovation and for starting things, it makes sense that Waterloo was in the forefront of the development of community and campus radio in Canada.
The mystery is how and why, after such a promising beginning brimming with possibilities, we keep dropping the ball on these and other projects like them.
“We” in this instance means the University of Waterloo (the WLU connection was brief ), the student body as well as the administration, and the community at large.
Both the CKWR 98.5 and CKMS 107.3 are still very much alive — as the film shows, miraculously, given all the challenges they’ve had to face. What a long, strange and rocky road it has been — 40 years for CKMS, 45 for CKWR.
For CKMS, the critical turning point was 10 years ago, when the station and its supporters lost a student body referendum that left them without funding and forced them to leave the campus setting.
This follows the precedent set by CKWR, which left the campus and became a community radio station in the early 1970s. After a number of Waterloo locations, the station ended up in Kitchener, in the east end, near the Rockway Community Centre.
The documentary ends just as the CKMS project moved to its current location, in the Boehmer Box building at Duke and Breithaupt in downtown Kitchener, late last year.
The outlook is hopeful. The people steering CKMS appear to have a good sense of where they’re headed. The decision to become, in effect, a broadcasting co-op seems to have been a good one.
With a grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation, CKMS is expanding its capabilities to include video streaming this spring.
Which is great, but it is audio, radio’s primary dimension, that appears to be on the rise.
With everything related to journalism, broadcast, print and online, in flux at the moment, the possibilities are endless, especially the often neglected field of meaningful local and regional journalism.