“Do Canadians really use the word ‘eh?'”

“Yes, they do.”

Welcome to one of OMNI television network’s flagship shows, Your New Life in Canada. Produced in English, Punjabi, Cantonese, and other languages, it offers a taste of Canadian lifestyle, culture, and language to newcomers to Canada and covers everything from how food differs in Canada to what work environments are like in the country. Keep watching the Rogers Media network, and you’ll see anchors talking current affairs and local news in Mandarin, Vietnamese, or Tagalog, or even a broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada in Punjabi. The glitz and the glamour of Canada’s linguistic diversity: that’s OMNI’s shtick.

Canada’s multicultural media isn’t a topic that appears much in mainstream news. But in November, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) will gather a large group of media broadcasters in Ottawa to decide the future of multi-ethnic and multilingual media in Canada. The topic in question: which media network will be granted a special broadcasting licence, regarding section 9(1)(h) of the Broadcasting Act, worth millions of dollars. (For the sake of clarity, we’ll refer to it as the 9(1)(h) licence.)

The tussle for winning this speciality licence for ethnic media has been simmering since the CRTC took strict action against Rogers Media this year. In 2017, the CRTC awarded the 9(1)(h) licence to Rogers Media for OMNI. This licence makes possible the broadcast of certain diverse channels—including the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), CBC News Network, CPAC, and Accessible Media Inc. (AMI) TV— to millions of Canadians as a mandatory service, in an effort to improve access to media programming in languages other than English and French. A majority of 9(1)(h) licence holders are non-profit organizations that seek to serve the regional and national audience through a publicly funded television network. But the Quebecor group and Rogers Media are two for-profit corporations that have been awarded 9(1)(h) licences to air as a broadcasting distribution undertaking (BDU)—meaning Canadians pay a certain fee for TV or digital media services for a certain number of TV channels. As a result, these channels are considered taxpayer-funded.

Now, the CRTC is changing its tune over the Rogers deal, restricting its licence after 2020. The commission is asking the rest of Canada’s television producers to bid to replace Rogers— but the company is pledging not to go down without a fight. In the end, it has spoiled a process intended to diversify content across the country. Ethnic media has become a game of money and power—and it has largely gone unnoticed in mainstream Canadian media.

***

The 9(1)(h) Act came about in 1991 to promote multilingual media for the multi-ethnic Canadian population. According to the section on BDU, the criteria for assessing the value of a certain service include whether the programming safeguards, enriches, and strengthens “the cultural, political, social and economic fabric of Canada; is drawn from local, regional, national and international sources; [and] includes educational and community programs.” There is another criterion, one that’s key to this article: that the programming “reflects and contributes to Canada’s linguistic duality and ethno-cultural diversity, including the special place of Aboriginal peoples in Canadian society.” (Twenty percent of Canadians use a language other than English and French at home, according to Statistics Canada.)

In 2017, Rogers received its licence from the CRTC for its OMNI Regional channels. The mandatory carry of OMNI as a digital basic service awarded to Rogers Media—one that is publicly funded—saved the network. Two years prior, Rogers Media shuttered multiple stations across Canada, citing unprofitability. The new 9(1)(h) licence was supposed to ensure a steady stream of revenue for OMNI’s newly rebranded regional feeds in B.C., Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, covering all regions of Canada. OMNI Regional broadcasts news and current affairs stories about local communities across Canada, programming considered critical to many communities. These regional broadcasts also carry multilingual and multi-ethnic programming of national interest.

But based on the criteria laid out by the CRTC, issues around Rogers’ use of the licence arose. In 2017, Unifor, the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, and the Urban Alliance on Race Relations filed a complaint against Rogers Media for using Mandarin and Cantonese newscasts produced by Fairchild TV, an outside contractor. Under OMNI’s licensing agreement for basic distribution, Rogers Media is supposed to produce and broadcast original content for the local communities where it operates. OMNI’s BDU application was approved for developing a regional feed model—with four regional feeds broadcasting from the west to east coasts.

Some consumers aren’t happy about the programming either, claiming that dependence on outside sources has left them with stale content. One viewer from Surrey, B.C., whom we’ll call Harpreet, says OMNI’s recent programming has turned his family off of the network. “There are no shows that interest me,” he says, particularly of OMNI’s Punjabi programming. “Most of them have been taken from somewhere else—old shows from another network. Shows we have seen 10 years ago.” That sentiment is echoed online, where little is posted about programming aside from interviewees promoting their appearances on the channel. Of these posts, one outlier exists. It’s a tweet by a stand-up comedian from Toronto: “Fun fact: OMNI is a shitty TV channel in Canada,” it reads.

OMNI’s practices have even been questioned by its own media workers who have demanded a more stringent set of conditions regarding the licence. Jake Moore, president of the Unifor Local 79M, which represents OMNI journalists and media workers in Vancouver and Toronto, noted in a press release that the basic distribution licence should work toward delivering local news. Howard Law, Unifor’s media director, also pointed out that Rogers Media shouldn’t be handed a blank cheque if it doesn’t retain the licence.

Nigel Barriffe, president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and part of the coalition that has raised concerns about Rogers Media’s skewed practices, says the “CRTC had given the licence to Rogers without holding them accountable. It has everything to do with money… They aren’t struggling with funding. This isn’t about helping them survive. They bid enough to be able to do this. It is the right thing to do.”

Laith Marouf, policy consultant at the Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC), claims Rogers also tried to back out of producing more original content in-house at OMNI Quebec—an issue at the heart of the concerns raised against the corporation. “After agreeing to air 14 hours per week of original content from Quebec as part of their licensing conditions to obtain the 9(1)(h) licence, OMNI applied to modify the condition to 14 hours per month, claiming they had made a clerical error during their licence renewal hearing,” he says. “The CRTC rejected their claims and request for condition modifications.” (Marouf is also a project consultant at Independent Community Television [ICTV], an applicant that is competing against Rogers Media for the 9(1)(h) licence. It also isn’t the first time ICTV has raised issues with CRTC licensing: the company filed a complaint in 2015 against Vidéotron’s community channel in Montreal due to noncompliance with regulatory requirements of the CRTC; the CRTC ruled in favour of ICTV’s complaint.)

“We initiated the request to amend the licence in an effort to clear up confusion around the condition of licence for the independent ethnic service ICI,” Colette Watson, senior vice president of television and broadcast operations at Rogers Media, told This in response to the allegations. “While 14 hours weekly is the commitment we made as part of OMNI Regional licence, the intent was not to create onerous licence requirements for this small broadcaster. OMNI Quebec has met its weekly commitment of 14 hours per week and that is what we continue to deliver.” Rogers points to collaborations with regional broadcasters, such as ICI Montreal and Fairchild TV, to produce the content, and will make original content a priority should the licence be renewed. Critics, however, say this is an unfair practice that violates the terms of the CRTC’s 9(1)(h) agreement.

The CRTC wasn’t completely convinced by Rogers’ arguments, instead initiating a call for new applications for the licence and restricting Rogers’ licence until 2020. A recent Globe and Mail report, featuring an extensive interview with Watson, failed to mention why the CRTC decided not to renew Rogers’ licence. Meanwhile, the corporation had grown its profits by more than one-third to $425 million as reported at the end of its first quarter in 2018.

When it comes to promoting inclusivity and diversity in programming—the chief concern for critics of the Rogers licence—some say there’s plenty of work to do internally to improve matters. According to one former OMNI employee, who has asked to remain anonymous to protect their identity, “no one from the ethnic community is part of the executive team at OMNI. They do have an advisory council that suggests ideas, but it doesn’t make any decisions.” Watson denies this. “The reality is quite the opposite and we’re extremely proud of the diversity we have on the OMNI team, both in front of and behind the camera,” she tells This, citing multiple employees; those mentioned in her response, however, are part of the editorial leadership team, and not from the executive board.

Rogers Media has since made some controversial decisions for OMNI, closing local stations in Vancouver and laying off a large number of journalists across the country. The CRTC took notice of these shutdowns, both by Rogers and other networks, and has enforced a policy requiring a 120-day notice before closing a TV station. Local community media is, after all, essential to the prosperity of millions of Canadians outside of urban areas—and such cost-cutting measures only hurt them.

***

The 9(1)(h) licence Rogers Media now holds will be up for grabs in 2020, and though OMNI is still in the running, there are seven other media networks—large and small—also vying for it. Bell Media, Ethnic Channels Group Limited, Telelatino Network Inc. and Asian Television Network International Limited, Amber Broadcasting Inc., Independent Community Television Montreal, Corriere Canadese, and Multicultural Described Video Guide—all major players in the third-language media industry—hope to get their hands on the licence.

Some applicants provide an option that’s similar to what already exists. Bell Media, a large corporation in direct competition with Rogers, has requested that they be allowed to contract productions of national interest to independent production companies rather than producing them in-house. But others show promise for change that would be welcome by unhappy viewers: According to the CRTC’s instructions the broadcasters are supposed to produce content in at least four languages—Italian, Punjabi, Mandarin, and Cantonese. ICTV’s TELE1 and TELE2 plan is the most ambitious, with 45 languages as part of its broadcast. ICTV is also the only applicant that has proposed content in Indigenous languages.

Meanwhile, Rogers Media has started a robust public relations campaign on Twitter with the hashtag #supportOMNITV and a website to gather support letters. The public support is critical for Rogers Media to save its licence at the hearing, slated for November 26. “We have mandatory carriage on the basic service of all television distributors, which has allowed us to provide programming to over 40 different ethnic groups in over 40 different languages, and to continue offering our third-language newscasts in Italian, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Punjabi,” the Support OMNI website reads. “Now, we are at risk of losing this mandatory distribution which will mean closure of the service.” The website does not state why CRTC is reconsidering OMNI’s licence or why it could lose it.

“We believe OMNI Regional is the clear choice for Canadians and we look forward to demonstrating that to all stakeholders in November at the public hearing,” Watson says of Rogers’ strategy moving forward. “We received close to 5,000 letters of support for the renewal of our service— far exceeding the support received for other applications.” This could not independently verify these claims.

***

According to data from consumer marketing company Statista on BDU subscribers across Canada, the households receiving basic distribution through various services such as Dish or IPTV declined to 76.2 percent in 2016, down from 83 percent in 2009. Still, the reach is great, and allows diverse communities to consume programming that speaks to their realities.

In times when the local and community news media industry is facing extreme challenges, this CRTC licence could strengthen civil society institutions in Canada. As Harpreet notes, from a viewer’s perspective, multicultural media in this country “should [uphold] Canadian cultural values. The network should be sensitive about translating and transmitting the cultural and social issues of the ethnic community into broader Canadian society.”

When mainstream English- and French-Canadian media are facing its biggest challenge in decades, OMNI’s case highlights a different story: a certain brand of multicultural media is thriving in Canada thanks to taxpayers’ money. But what does creating silos of media representation do to media produced in languages other than English or French? The mundane affair of a broadcasting licence might appear to be prosaic, but perhaps one overused quote by a famous Canadian might help us understand the gravity of the situation: “The medium is the message.”

Check back for updates on the story after the CRTC decision this November.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Daniel Villar Onrubia.

The CRTC’s in the news again, this time for proposing that journalists can lie, as long as no one gets hurt.

Last week the CRTC asked the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council to review its ban of unedited version of the Dire Straits’ 1985 song “Money for Nothing.” The 25-year-old hit, which has since started climbing on iTunes, was banned from Canadian airwaves after a complaint over its use of the word “faggot.”

But days before Straitgate, the CRTC quietly published an amendment that would punish the broadcasting, through radio or television, of “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

The amendment would replace the current wording, that “a licensee shall not broadcast […] any false or misleading news.”

CRTC sources told the Toronto Star the amendments aim to clarify the regulation, as the current text is open to legal loopholes. The amendment also clarifies “obscene” material as either the “undue exploitation of sex” or a dominant sexual characteristic combined with “crime, horror, cruelty [and/or] violence.”

Tech law expert Michael Geist blogged about the proposal, pointing out one small weasel word: “and.” Once again, the amendment concerns the broadcasting of “any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.”

“It would perfectly permissible for a broadcaster to air false or misleading news,” he wrote, “provided that it not endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.” Geist also noted how much closer the amendment puts us to U.S. regulations.

The proposal comes weeks before the expected launch of Sun TV News in March. The channel generated controversy last fall for its attempt at Category 1 status, making it a must-offer for digital and satellite providers. Critics dubbed the network “Fox News North,” noting references to the controversial right-wing broadcaster in its application.

Before its approval, the channel prompted a scandal implicating Margaret Atwood and eventually George Soros, a rumoured ousting of the head of the CRTC, and an actual resignation from the project head. Although Sun TV generated much unfounded hysteria, hints at Fox News North have been copious throughout the coverage of this proposal.

But not without reason. This month’s shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona made many Americans think twice about overheated political discourse, propagated by many mainstream outlets.

Minutes after news that congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords had been shot, a Palin PAC image of her district in crosshairs went viral, as did clips from enflamed talk radio pundits and savage television “debates.” To quote Pima County sheriff Clarence Dupnik:

“I think it’s time as a country that we need to do a little soul searching because I think it’s the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out, from the people in the radio business, and some people in the T.V. business […] it may be free speech but it does not come without consequences.”

Although many now draw a link to the suspected gunman’s mental health issues, that many Americans automatically thought of their violent news media is telling.

CRTC’s proposed change would make it okay for media to deliberately lie, as long as nobody’s hurt. The results could be ineffective at best. After harm takes place — an assassination, a stampede — it will be hard to find a solid link between one isolated news story and an event.

The reality is that social reaction to media coverage is often cumulative. According to agenda-setting theory, media can’t tell people what to think, but rather what to think about. Media shape the public psyche, not through individual reports but through larger thematic decisions about what merits coverage and how issues are framed.

The CRTC’s proposal is bad for journalism and democracy. Not only does it allow for lower-quality broadcasting, it could divert public attention from wide-ranging media issues by pigeonholing individual cases.

That our broadcast regulators would concern themselves more with public offence than public good is disconcerting. Critics left and right have decried the changes as dangerous for democracy.

If implemented, the changes would take effect in September. If you’d like to speak up, you have until February 9 to submit a complaint.

In 1999, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission took a hard look at the then-burgeoning internet. They then did what many Canadians would consider a very un-CRTC-like thing: they decided not to regulate it.

That may come as something of a surprise, as we tend to think that if the CRTC has a thing, it’s regulating stuff. They are, after all, the people known primarily for “CanCon” rules, the quotas that dictate that a certain percentage of programming on Canadian radio and television is made in Canada.

Yet at the time, the Commission’s logic for not touching the web was twofold. First, it felt that the bulk of material online consisted “predominantly of alphanumeric text,” and thus simply wasn’t theirs to regulate; second, it seemed Canadians were both consuming and making lots of Canadian content just fine on their own.

Eleven years later, the internet is a different place. The big change is that, whether on YouTube or the sites of Canadian TV networks, we are watching millions of videos a day. What’s more, we also have unfettered access to TV and film through online services like iTunes, and, since September, streaming video through the U.S.based Netflix. With this sudden online expansion of our entertainment and cultural choices, it may be time for Canada to not only change its approach to regulation, but the entire CanCon concept itself.

Though always contentious, the need for CanCon in our culture’s most dominant medium, TV, has compelling evidence behind it. Except for Hockey Night in Canada, the top 20 most-watched shows in Canada are all made in America. Though there are many reasons why, money is the big one. The pilot episode for ABC’s Lost was widely rumoured to have a budget of around $12 million. That’s as much as or more than many Canadian dramas get for an entire season. The disparity in financial backing—and, consequently, in cultural influence—is often stark. Legitimate debate rages over whether regulation is the best way to solve this gap, but the dominance of American media is likely to increase following the arrival this September of streaming-video service Netflix, allowing users to watch movies and TV shows on their PCs or, with the right equipment, TVs. The growing service already has 15 million subscribers in the U.S., and the company has become so well-known that even Ottawa-based Zip.ca has for years advertised itself as Canada’s Netflix.

But because Netflix delivers content over the web, it’s not subject to any CanCon regulation by the CRTC, and is under no obligation to deliver Canadian content. Similar services from Apple, Microsoft, and Sony are also free to sell and rent whatever they please. Because it’s relatively easy to license Canadian content, and because Canadians will watch it, most services do launch with some Canadian shows and music. But as more and more of these services spring up, Canadians will have increasing access to online broadcast channels untouched by CanCon requirements.

The answer, it would seem, would be to regulate them. When the CRTC initially chose to leave the web alone, it did so because it felt the market was doing an adequate job of protecting Canadian interests. But a decade later, market economics have done what they always do: they created a link between capital and cultural clout, and wealthy American giants like Netflix and Apple will soon have even more influence over what we watch.

What’s more, if media is the fodder for the conversations we have on Facebook and Twitter about the contemporary moment, it’s hard not to talk about those ubiquitous American shows. If you want to chat about body issues, it’s Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks you talk about. The web is a global conversation, and in a world in which U.S. cultural production is everywhere, American culture often becomes our shared reference point.

But even amidst this changing landscape, regulating the web is not the answer. In fact, the cyclical relationship between web hype and pop culture means that regulation is far less effective than relevance. CanCon was effective in a world with a few limited TV channels to choose from; the nearly limitless bandwidth of the web has changed the game.

To become more present in Canadian culture, Canadian media must provide its own fodder for online chatter, links, and debate. What this means is that rather than regulating the delivery system, we need to fund homegrown arts and culture to ensure the internet pipe into every home is filled with high-quality Canadian content.

Forget the free-marketeers’ response that “Canadian media should stand on its own two feet.” We need to acknowledge that the web has expanded our cultural choices well beyond Canadian borders. For Canadians to have and keep our own points of reference that speak to our own issues, we must fund them so that, placed side by side with American or British counterparts, there is no reason to click away.

Fortunately, this path has a precedent. Recent examples from television like Corner Gas and Being Erica prove that when Canadians are given high-quality programming from their own backyards, they will flock to it. In the face of the web and massively expanded competition from across the world, Canada must continue to invest in its own cultural industries if it too wishes to be part of that global conversation.

CRTC: making a tangled mess of broadband policy?

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced today new rules for how internet service providers are allowed to monitor, control, and throttle your internet access. After years of ponderous thought on the issue of how much control ISPs can wield over their customers’ web access, the CRTC has ceded the issue to the internet providers themselves, deciding that “transparency” is a suitable substitute for regulation. Now, with 30 days’ notice, ISPs get to set the rules and enforce them, and it’s up to the public to complain about oversteps and unfair consumer practices. With proven, repeat-offender oligopolists like Bell, Telus, and Rogers in charge, what could ever go wrong? Reports the CBC:

“It approves all of the throttling practices that ISPs currently engage in. It requires consumers to prove something funny is going on and consumers don’t have the means to figure out what ISPs are doing and they don’t have the resources to bring that to the commission’s attention,” said PIAC counsel John Lawford.

“There’s a lot of fine-grained double-speak here. There is no requirement for any of it.”

NDP digital issues spokesman Charlie Angus, who last year introduced a net neutrality private members bill to the House of Commons, also criticized the framework.

“Basically the CRTC has left the wolves in charge of the henhouse,” he said in a statement. “ISPs have been given the green light to shape the traffic on the internet toward their corporate interest. This decision is a huge blow to the future competitiveness of the internet.”

The real kick in the teeth is that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is apparently poised to introduce a set of net-neutrality-positive laws into Congress as early as tomorrow, and last week two congressional reps introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, which would catapult our neighbours to the south far ahead of Canada in terms of ensuring broadband availability and openness.

A map of internet traffic produced by the Opte Project. Licensed under Creative Commons.

For seven days in July, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission met in Gatineau, Quebec, to deliberate on the future of the Canadian internet. Until this summer, the CRTC took an essentially laissez-faire approach to the web: it was too new and too poorly understood to start carving out rules to govern it. But the World Wide Web turned 20 years old this year—about time to put away childish things and, in true twentysomething style, have a little identity crisis.

The CRTC commissioners slogged through plenty of arcane technical detail during the hearings, but the overarching issue was Net Neutrality: the principle that the networks we use to retrieve information treat all that information equally. When you look up a website, the phone company’s job is to deliver that website to your screen without regard to what it says, or in what format (text, audio, video). The network is neutral. In the same way, public streets are “neutral”: all cars have to follow the same rules—paying more for a Mercedes doesn’t entitle you to ignore stop signs.

On the internet, this egalitarian notion has been under sustained assault for years now by the telecommunications giants, frustrated that they haven’t yet perfected a way to bilk their internet customers to their satisfaction. Bell, Rogers, Shaw, and Telus, the cozy oligopoly that sells almost all internet access in Canada, claim they need to be able to discriminate between different types of data. All bits are not created equal, they say—text is easy to deliver, video is resource-intensive—so in order to make the network viable for everyone, they need to be able to block, throttle, or limit access for the heaviest users. Fair enough: resources aren’t infinite, so the need for some limited portion control is understandable.

But watchdog groups see a deeper problem here: Rogers, for instance, sells internet access and also owns TV stations and magazines. Why not privilege Rogers’ content on Rogers’ network? If that means slowing everyone else down a bit—say, access to This Magazine’s website will be slower—well, no hard feelings, it’s just synergy. Under such a scenario, small players will always be disadvantaged, lacking the cash and influence to pay off the network gatekeepers. And being able to block some information online implies the ability to inspect all information—a privacy nightmare.

The CRTC will reveal its findings and its next steps this fall. The technical details are complex, but the principles are simple: our lives—as friends, as consumers, as citizens—are increasingly lived online, and ensuring that our opportunities for communication are fair and equal is too important a task to leave to corporate interests for whom discrimination is more profitable. There is probably no easy solution to the net neutrality question. But there is a correct one.

Washington-based TV anchors Marash and Fakry of the Al Jazeera English language network. Photo by Jason Reed/Reuters.

In late 1996, in a tiny peninsular emirate on the Persian Gulf with a total surface area barely larger than Toronto and Montreal combined, an experiment began. At the invitation of Qatar’s head of state, a small group of former BBC Arabic journalists relocated to the capital, Doha. They had been left jobless when their London-based employer’s Arabic station folded (due to an editorial scuffle with its Saudi funders), and they needed work. This group of journalists became the nucleus and precursor of what was to become the most ambitious and costliest single broadcast project in history—the Al Jazeera television network.

When it first began, few outside the Arab world noticed the daring and confrontational newcomer to the regional satellite scene. The station drew the attention of viewers because of its explicit and overt criticism of power in the region and its tackling of taboo issues—from government corruption and lack of democratic institutions to women’s rights and homosexuality. Al Jazeera carved a niche for itself and gathered a loyal following for its incisive coverage, volatile debate shows, and extensive investigative reporting.

Now, more than a decade since Al Jazeera’s inception, Canada can no longer afford to shun the world’s first truly global news network—especially one that is both steered and shaped by Canada’s best and brightest.

Undoubtedly, Al Jazeera has generated plenty of debate and controversy. Glorified and vilified in equal measure, it has been described as “radical” and “extremist” by its detractors and as a much-needed “alternative” medium by its admirers. But regardless of leaning and intent, most commentators acknowledge that Al Jazeera represents an important phenomenon in the Arab media.

In North America, Al Jazeera is a household name in part due to its unfettered, and sometimes exclusive, access to key news events, including the early days of the U.S.led wars in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, as well as its status as the destination of choice for videos from Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman El-Zawahiri.

More recently, Al Jazeera was the only global network on the ground in Gaza during the Israeli military attack on the strip between December 2008 and January 2009. It was during these periods that the station solidified its reputation as the go-to source of “alternative” news for the Western media organizations.

Yet, as Al Jazeera’s English-language station (AJE) makes significant strides internationally, beaming into more than 140 million households in at least 100 countries, it remains under blackout in North America.The network’s inability to secure cable providers in the U.S., and the highly politicized battles to undermine its effort for access across the continent, have left it embattled but not defeated. Instead, AJE built its headquarters for the Western hemisphere in Washington, D.C., and expanded its online video capability to reach American and Canadian audiences.

Al Jazeera has come close to broadcasting to Canadian homes before. In 2004, the CRTC reviewed the Arabic network for inclusion on Canadian cable service providers. The process unleashed a firestorm, with critics accusing it of anti-Semitism and hate speech. The station never went to air in Canada.

Two years later, AJE faced the same fate in the U.S. cable market—with the exception of two small providers in Toledo, Ohio, and Burlington, Vt. Burlington became the site of high-profile town-hall debates after the network withdrew from the deal due to viewer complaints, many of which accused Al Jazeera of being “anti-American.” But the city council eventually reinstated the network, saying it offered a unique “alternative” to American programming. It was considered a major victory for the network’s U.S. profile.

Of course, four years make all the difference. While the early battle to include Al Jazeera in the cable offerings pertained to the Arabic language station, which presumably appealed only to the Arabic speakers in Canada, today’s application by AJE targets the entire viewing audience of Canada. While the usual critics of the station are levelling the same accusations this time around, defenders argue AJE is a whole new network.

Of note is AJE’s list of employees, which reads like a who’s-who of international journalism. The station boasts the likes of Sir David Frost, who hosts a regular talk show; Riz Khan, formerly of CNN International and the BBC; Rageh Omar, formerly of BBC; and former U.S. Marine captain and public affairs officer Josh Rushing, author of the captivating autobiography Mission Al Jazeera.

The Canadian contribution is also significant. The team boasts veteran Canadian journalists including Avi Lewis, former host and producer of CBC’s CounterSpin; Brendan Connor, the veteran CBC sports journalist; and Kimberly Halkett, formerly of Canada’s Global Television and the network’s chief investigative reporter. The most recent addition is station head Tony Burman, former editor-in-chief of CBC News.

The station is breaking through the blackout—its online video traffic increased by 600 percent during the first two weeks of 2009 (in part due to Al Jazeera’s exclusive access in Gaza), with 60 percent of these hits coming from the United States. In Canada, the CRTC is currently reviewing AJE’s application. Meanwhile, AJE launched its own campaign website, iwantaje.com, and made its coverage available free of charge online.

If approved, the network has committed to opening its first Canadian news bureau to bring Canadian news to a global audience— which would make it the only international news channel with a news bureau in Canada. Given the shrinking budget of the CBC, and Canada’s nearly invisible global media footprint, Al Jazeera English may be a golden opportunity for Canada to reach the world.