Asking CRTC to review French-language station licence, not political: Moore

Heritage minister James Moore says a decision asking the CRTC to review a rejected licence application for a French-language radio station in the Ottawa region is not motivated by politics. Nor, he adds, is it an attempt to influence the regulatory agency.“I am not trying to certainly direct any ultimate decision by the CRTC but my responsibilities as minister of official languages, is to make sure that minority communities in this country feel that their needs are being addressed by all government agencies including the CRTC,” Moore said Tuesday in an interview with Canadian Communications Reports.The application to operate a French-language community radio station in the Ottawa region was filed in August 2007 by Radio de la communauté francophone d’Ottawa (RCFO). But in a decision rendered on Aug. 26 this year, the CRTC, while noting that there is ample room for a French-language radio service in the region, turned down the application on the basis that RCFO did not make a compelling business case. At the same time, the CRTC also denied licences to seven other applicants, among them an application for a community-based campus French-language station.On Sept. 25, RCFO wrote to Moore asking him to intervene and on Nov. 21, the minister wrote to the CRTC requesting a review of the application. In the letter to the CRTC, the minister seemed to take issue with the fact that the CRTC rejected the RCFO application, while at the same time approving licences for two English-language stations in the Ottawa region.Since it won some ridings in Quebec in the 2006 election, the Conservative government has been trying to woo francophone voters with promises of a larger stake for Quebec at the national table. In a campaign speech delivered in Quebec before this year’s election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to make formal the rotation of CRTC chairs between English and French-speaking Canada. Last June, the government asked the CRTC to initiate a public hearing on broadcast services offered in minority-language settings, an additional cost which CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein said last month amounts to more financial challenges for the commission.The Conservatives failed to make further progress in Quebec in the Oct. 14 election, where a hard-fought breakthrough didn’t materialize. They retained 10 of Quebec’s 75 seats, while the rest were won by the Bloc Quebecois and the Liberal party.RCFO president Lucien Bradet also dismissed the suggestion that Heritage’s move was designed to appease French-language Quebeckers, saying the CRTC has obligations under the Official Languages Act to ensure fair service to Canadians.“We believe that we were wrongly denied that and that’s why cabinet said to CRTC, start all over again,” he says.Bradet also took issue with the CRTC’s insistence that the licence was denied because of lack of a compelling business case, saying a community radio station should not be compared to a station run by large established companies.“We are in the business of a non-profit organization. We don’t want to make too much money. We want to make money to survive and to grow, but not millions of dollars to send back to Montreal or Toronto. They compare us to the big guys. We cannot compete with the big guys. They have to take a different approach and they don’t seem to be taking that approach. That’s the reason why we are concerned,” he says.Bradet says the CRTC’s business case justification caught him by surprise, saying the issue didn’t even come up during their May 13 hearing with the commission.“During the audience that lasted for two hours, there was not a single question about that,” he says. “If the official reason was the weakness of our business case, why didn’t they ask us a simple single question? That mystifies us—that tells us something, they have no good excuses."The community radio station would cater to an estimated 200,000 French-speaking audience in eastern Ontario. RCFO urged the CRTC to reconsider its decision, alleging it discriminates against this demographic.“If it is not bias, it’s totally ignorance, and if it is not ignorance, it is bad taste, something of that nature,” Bradet says of the decision.

Asking CRTC to review French-language station licence, not political: Moore

News | 12/04/2008 3:03 pm EST

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