Corus Entertainment, which owns Global TV, specialty channels like Showcase, YTV, History, W Network, Home and Flavour, and radio stations in Ontario and western Canada, is dying a slow death.

It’s currently awaiting received CRTC approval for a plan that would dilute its stock enough to hand 99% of its equity to its debt holders, which means the Shaw family giving up control of the company to private equity, whose main focus will be the bottom line.

The transaction has become necessary because of Corus’s very heavy debt load. According to its most recent financial report in June, the company has more than a billion dollars in debt, and its total liabilities exceed its total assets by more than 50%. It’s spending more than $10 million a month just on debt interest payments. The proposed deal would cancel $500 million in debt in exchange for 99% equity, which effectively values the company at $505 million.

As recently as 2017, Corus’s market capitalization was over $2 billion. Now, because of the dire financial situation and pending dilution, Corus stock is trading at 3.5 cents and its market cap is $6 million.

While the deal would go a long way to bringing Corus closer to a break-even point, the company will probably continue to struggle going forward unless something dramatic changes.

How did we get here? Who caused this once great company to get to this point? Turns out there’s plenty of blame to go around if you’re trying to find people to point fingers at. Here are my prime suspects:

The Shaw family

You really have to start at ownership. Corus Entertainment was created in 1999 as a spinoff of Shaw Communications. Shaw founder JR Shaw controlled both companies, but Shaw Communications had the telecommunications assets and Corus had the media assets. Both operated with separate boards of directors, but because they were effectively controlled by JR Shaw, the CRTC treated them as one organization for the purposes of its common ownership policies.

At first, Corus thrived. It made various acquisitions, specialized in children’s programming, and built a radio network.

Things got more complicated in 2010 when Canwest Global went under and its TV assets including Global TV were sold to Shaw. Now the Shaw family owned two independent companies that each controlled television assets.

So it made some sense in 2016 when they announced that Shaw Media’s assets would be sold to Corus for $2.65 billion, with the proceeds being used to finance Shaw’s acquisition of Wind Mobile (later renamed Freedom Mobile).

But in hindsight, that transaction looks rather convenient for the Shaw family. Because five years later, Shaw was sold to Rogers for $26 billion, a deal that, because it included minimal broadcasting assets (just the video-on-demand and community TV licences associated with Shaw’s cable TV operations), would be more easy to get approved by the CRTC. The commission doesn’t have the authority to block telecom acquisitions, and its common ownership policies can’t prevent transferring community TV licences.

The Shaw family had an 11-figure payday, while Corus was saddled with more than a billion dollars in debt.

I want to be clear that I’m not alleging anything illegal here. There are rules about related-party transactions and while some people may have considered $2.65 billion overpriced for Corus, it doesn’t look outrageous compared to the $3.38 billion Bell paid for Astral Media eight years earlier.

But it seems to have worked in the family’s favour, even if it means owning a company so indebted it’s being essentially surrendered to the bank. If the Shaws had instead spent some of the billions it got for the Rogers sale on investing in Corus, maybe things would have been different (or maybe we’d be in the same boat but with lots more money gone down the drain).

Regardless, they were the ones in charge, and their decisions ultimately led to where Corus is now.

The CRTC

The CRTC gets a bad rap for a lot of things unfairly. People blame it, for example, for the Shaw-Rogers merger, when it had little power to stop it. Instead, it was the Competition Bureau that failed to stop it (though not from lack of trying).

But if there’s one criticism that is very much deserved, I think it’s the commission’s bias toward the status quo. Given the choice between a policy change that will radically disrupt the industry and one that will help preserve its current players, it will tend toward the latter.

It’s an understandable bias. Disruption can be costly, even if it results in a better state of affairs eventually. There are a lot of groups involved in the Canadian broadcasting industry and a lot of jobs depend on predictable business models.

But it results in policies often being more reactionary than forward-thinking. And Corus was the victim of one of these.

In 2016, faced with the question of how to support funding for local television news, the CRTC decided with little warning to screw over community television and let cable companies redirect much of their funding to affiliated local TV stations instead. Community TV in larger cities disappeared as a result, and smaller communities’ budgets were severely cut, as Rogers redirected Rogers TV funding to Citytv stations, Bell redirected TV1 funding to CTV stations, Quebecor redirected MAtv funding to TVA stations, and Shaw redirected Shaw TV funding to Global stations.

But what about TV stations that weren’t owned by large telecom companies? The CRTC thought of them, and created the Independent Local News Fund, funded by a 0.3% tax on cable TV services and doled out to independent TV stations (it replaced a previous fund meant to support small-market stations). The 0.3% was set by the CRTC based on the fact that it would generate $20 million a year in funding that would be enough to support the independent stations at the time.

The problem is that the policy didn’t account for potential major changes in the market. It was, in other words, assuming that the status quo would continue indefinitely. Or at least for five years until its planned review.

That didn’t happen. Instead, there were two major changes: Bell bought the V network in Quebec, which it rebranded as Noovo, and Rogers bought Shaw and redirected its local news funding to CItytv, leaving Global orphaned. The former change meant V left the fund, freeing up some more money for other stations. But the latter was a big problem.

Because Global was much bigger than V, the net effect of the two changes was negative. It meant the fund either had to increase its revenues or dole out less funding per station, which would have been devastating to the independent stations relying on the fund, like CHCH, CHEK, NTV and independent TVA/Noovo affiliates in Gatineau, Abitibi and eastern Quebec. In fact, using the fund’s formula, Global stations would get a majority of its funding.

Just recently, CHCH cited a 20% drop in funding from the ILNF as part of the reason for its decision to shut down its transmitters in Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury, Ont., and its decision to end Saturday local newscasts.

Faced with this problem, the CRTC did … nothing. When Corus asked for what I’m sure it assumed was a simple administrative decision saying Global stations would be eligible for the fund once the Shaw transaction closed, the commission instead said it would “launch a public proceeding as soon as feasible to review the impact of Corus’s new status” on the ILNF.

That was in March 2022.

By the time it conducted this review and determined that Global was indeed eligible for the ILNF, it was June 2025, more than three years later, and four years after when it said the fund would be reviewed. In the meantime, Global TV stations were the only ones in Canada producing local news without any support from this regime.

(This is probably the most universal criticism of the CRTC these days: It’s frustratingly slow. And that slowness has consequences in a fast-moving market.)

The commission decided that, rather than increase the amount of money cable TV companies would pay into the fund, it would use some of the new money from streaming services under the Online Streaming Act. The streamers sued, and that case is still pending, so funding not just for Global but all independent TV stations in Canada creating local news remains up in the air.

Now, it looks like the federal government is prepared to pull the plug on all obligations for streaming services to fund Canadian programming (undoing a law they put into place just a few years ago), in part to placate a certain U.S. president.

The CRTC has reduced some of Corus’s other obligations to give it financial relief, but it’s not nearly enough to turn the tide.

The federal government

Another reason it’s sometimes pointless to criticize the CRTC is that in the end the commission is answerable to the federal government. The government controls the laws that govern it, the government can issue policy directions, and the government appoints the commissioners. The government also sets its budget. If the government doesn’t like something the CRTC does, it can demand the CRTC review it, order the decision reversed or pass a law to change it. The latter doesn’t happen often, but it is how the government reversed a CRTC decision that allowed Canadian cable TV subscribers to watch American Super Bowl ads, until the new North American free trade agreement made it explicit that the Canadian government must put an end to that.

The government could have stepped in and ordered reconsideration of any of the CRTC decisions that led to Corus’s problems. It could have updated Canada’s competition laws and given the Competition Bureau more power to stop the Shaw/Rogers merger unless more was done to protect Corus. It could have stepped in and found a way to make the CRTC more efficient or ordered it to prioritize the local news funding review. It could have offered direct support to Corus equivalent to what it would have received from the fund. It could have passed a law demanded for years by Canadian media companies to eliminate a loophole that makes ads on Facebook and Google tax-deductible for businesses while ads for other foreign media are not. It could have rethought its Online News Act so the result wasn’t Facebook blocking all news sites and denying them that web traffic. It could have made the Online Streaming Act tougher so the various online streamers couldn’t as easily challenge it in court, as they are now doing.

Instead, it didn’t act. Perhaps due to a laudable desire not to interfere in how the CRTC operates and micromanage its policies. Perhaps out of laziness or different priorities. But either way, it didn’t act and it could have.

Rogers, Bell and Warner Bros. Discovery

In a healthy market, companies are not responsible for their competitors. And there is no obligation to continue a contract past its expiry if that extension is not written in a contract.

But it didn’t look great when Corus, which was using its high-margin specialty services to help prop up its money-loosing Global TV network, was told by Warner Bros. Discovery that their long-standing deal allowing Corus to use brands like HGTV and Food Network was ending and that a new deal had been signed with Rogers.

It wasn’t a minor thing. HGTV Canada had existed since 1997 when it was launched by Atlantis Communications (later Alliance Atlantis, then bought by Canwest, which was in turn bought by Shaw and then Corus). Food Network Canada launched in 2000. Cooking Channel, Magnolia Network and OWN were also affected by the deal, though those brands were newer and less entrenched.

But it wasn’t just a name thing. Those channels had lots of U.S. programming that were going to switch to Rogers as well. Programming Corus had to suddenly replace while they rebranded the channels. Food became Flavour, HGTV became Home and the other three channels were shut down, only to be relaunched as Rogers-owned channels.

This distraction could not have been helpful while Corus was dealing with its financial problems. And now on top of all that, Corus now had a new competitor, a competitor using the same brands it had spent more than two decades building in this country.

To add insult to injury, Rogers decided it wanted to bump the Corus channels out of their channel numbers on Rogers cable TV services and replace them with the new Rogers channels using those brands. They argued that Canadians watch HGTV for Property Brothers and Home Town, not Rock Solid Builds or Scott McGillivray. (The two companies fought the matter in court, with Corus eventually prevailing at the federal court of appeal.)

Bell also lost Discovery-branded channels to Rogers (which led to a legal dispute with WBD because Bell argued they were violating the terms of their contract with Bell — they eventually settled out of court), but Bell has deeper pockets than Corus and was able to recover.

Since then, Corus has seen other foreign brands slip through its fingers. Bell got Big Brother and Saturday Night Live. Blue Ant Media took over the Canadian ad sales for Pluto TV. Even personalities like Carolyn Jarvis left for the competition.

And shutdowns have continued. CHQT 880 in Edmonton, CHML 900 in Hamilton. CKGO 730 in Vancouver, Disney Jr., Disney XD, ABC Spark, La Chaîne Disney, Nickelodeon. Layoffs at talk and music radio stations, multiple rounds of cuts to Global News. The shutdown of production at Nelvana studio.

Had Corus been in a healthier position, it might have been able to weather any of these storms individually. But instead, a company that has already cut much of its holdings to the bone has had to cut even deeper, and its competitors are taking advantage.

Canwest

(I’ll remind you here that I was a Canwest employee before The Gazette was purchased by Postmedia.)

When Shaw acquired Global TV and other Canwest assets in 2010, their former owner had already made significant changes that would set the stage for the coming years. Global essentially gave up trying to compete with CTV in eastern Canada, and replaced local production facilities with centralized control rooms and anchors sitting between robot cameras and green screens. I don’t know if sinking more money into these stations would have been a good business decision, but there’s an argument to be made that Shaw was left with a second-rate product from the get-go.

Not that Shaw didn’t try to do something about it. As part of the tangible benefits proposed to get the acquisition approved, it promised to launch local morning in six markets across the country. And seven years after launch, when that commitment expired, Corus kept those shows going, albeit with an increasing amount of national content (and now no real local content at all).

The market

We can argue about how Corus was failed by various bodies that could have saved it, or at least helped it, but the truth is none of this would have been necessary if this was 20 years ago or if Corus was an AI company.

It’s a bad time to be a television broadcaster in Canada, particularly if you own over-the-air stations, a market with negative growth, negative profits, and zero demand for new stations. People just don’t tune in to the 6pm local newscast in enough numbers to satisfy advertisers, especially when those advertisers can more granularly target their audiences on Facebook, Google, TikTok and YouTube.

Specialty television, once a cash cow because older channels were on most people’s subscription packages and newer digital channels had small overhead costs, is also slowly dying, as non-linear streaming options offer more content more conveniently. We’ve seen smaller channels wither and die as even those small overhead costs become insufficient to justify their continued existence.

And while Bell has invested in Crave to help it transition to the next wave, and Rogers has put its money into live sports, Corus doesn’t have much else to fall back on. Even assets that might have a future in a post-traditional-TV world, like animation production studio Nelvana, have been effectively shut down to save money.

So as much as we can complain that Corus could have done this or that to keep itself alive, the reality is that it’s fighting a very uphill battle, one that isn’t going to get easier. This isn’t like the pandemic where you can just wait it out. We’re not going back to a world in which Corus’s assets make money hand over fist again.

Maybe, as sad and frustrating and unfair as it is, Corus’s death is a normal inevitability and nature should be left to take its course, to leave room for something better to emerge. Hopefully.