Paul Tietolman, Nicolas Tétrault and Rajiv Pancholy came on the scene a decade and a half ago and promised to revolutionize AM radio in Montreal. The critics were skeptical, saying their pie-in-the-sky dreams weren’t realistic and their promised radio stations either wouldn’t materialize the way they promised or wouldn’t succeed financially if they did.

Those critics were right.

This week, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission approved the sale of their company, 7954689 Canada Inc. (TTP Media), to Ronald Richards Realty Inc., for a total value of about $822,000.

While the stations they promised are on the air — CFQR 600 AM in English and CFNV 940 AM in French — they aren’t nearly what the group had promised in 2011.

Here’s what led to this.

Upheaval on AM

Tietolman and Tétrault first emerged in the spotlight in 2010, after Corus announced it was selling its Quebec radio stations (including Q 92, CKOI, 98.5 and CKAC) to Cogeco for $80 million. Convinced they could do a better job, Tietolman and Tétrault made an unsolicited counter-offer for $81 million, which Corus quickly rejected.

Their plan was to not only reinvigorate those radio stations being sold (plus one in Sherbrooke that Cogeco hadn’t agreed to buy), but to revive AM stations at 690 and 940 that Corus had shut down earlier that year.

But the deal was already done, and Corus had no interest in an after-the-fact bidding war. The sale to Cogeco went through.

The next year, another opportunity emerged. Cogeco, with financial backing from the Quebec government (which was about to begin the replacement of Quebec’s busiest highway interchange at Turcot), applied to reactivate those AM radio stations as all-traffic stations. The CRTC asked if anyone else was interested in AM stations in Montreal, and surprisingly there were several who said yes, so it launched a call for applications.

Two of them were from Tietolman and Tétrault, now joined by wireless industry executive Rajiv Pancholy.

Tietolman wasn’t some rando off the street. His father Jack Tietolman started CKVL radio in 1946 (that station would eventually become the Info 690 that had shut down the previous year) and later its sister FM station CKVL-FM, which would eventually change its callsign to CKOI-FM.

Tétrault, a real estate agent and former city councillor, and Pancholy, the former CEO of Microcell (Fido), would be partners in the company and provide most of the financing.

The promise

When they appeared before the CRTC in 2011, Tietolman, Tétrault and Pancholy, now TTP Media, brought along some industry veterans to show they meant business: Steve Kowch, the former program director at CJAD and CFRB, Yves Guérard, the former president of Radio Mutuel, and Jim Connell, a veteran announcer who was the last guy on air at 940.

In light of CJAD cuts in the previous years, particularly overnights and weekends, and what some saw as poor weekend coverage of the local impact of Hurricane Irene by CJAD and CBC Radio, the group promised it would spare no expense on news.

“940 Talk will be ready and able 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to be there live for our listeners when unexpected events, disasters and storms threaten the health and security of our listeners,” Kowch told the commission.

They also promised some secret sauce that would revolutionize radio. They kept this close to the vest, but it conveniently answered the obvious question of how they could be successful when Info 690 and 940 News had failed with what seemed like the same business model.

The CRTC was impressed with TTP Media’s proposal, but remained skeptical. Instead of giving the group two clear channels at 940 and 690, they gave 690 to TSN Radio, which asked to move from 990 to improve their signal, gave 940 to TTP Media’s French station, and encouraged them to apply for another frequency for the English one. (TSN’s old 990 frequency was given to a project called Radio Fierté by Evanov Radio. Cogeco withdrew the application for the French station when, citing “unacceptable delays“, it flipped CKAC 730 from sports to traffic. Cogeco’s English application was denied because Cogeco refused to consider other frequencies, and despite $1.5 million a year from the Quebec government, they eventually decided not to reapply.)

Despite saying there was no other viable frequency and that their application was two-stations-or-none, TTP Media came back with an application for 600 AM, the old CFCF/CIQC frequency, using the former transmission site in Kahnawake. That application was approved in November 2012.

They said they could be running within a year.

Spoiler alert: This didn’t happen.

The delays

Instead, a series of excuses delays pushed back the launch date for years. In 2012, when Bell’s proposed purchase of Astral Media raised competition concerns in Montreal, Tietolman expressed interest in buying CJAD. (When Bell said they would probably sell TSN Radio instead, Tietolman said he would take that too.)

Meanwhile, the group was already looking to expand, proposing to launch a French sports station at 850 AM, in light of CKAC’s change of vocation. Though that application was approved in 2013, the group never went through with the station.

It also threw its hat in heavily contested openings for FM stations in Toronto and Calgary, failing to secure either.

The biggest cause of delay at first was the most understandable: using 600 kHz instead of 690 meant having to change their transmission site plans, and for space reasons they ended up switching sites and leasing the former Corus transmission site in Kahnawake. Still, modifications were necessary to the tower to have it work on 600 AM (after it had, ironically, been modified to switch from 600 to 690 with the launch of Info 690), and some of those modifications were weather-dependent. There was also what Pancholy later described as an “arduous process” for negotiating the new lease, with Cogeco, the land owners and the Mohawk Council of Kahnawake, that took much longer than anticipated.

But the delays dragged on for years. Normally, the CRTC gives applicants two years from a decision approving a licence to launch a radio station, and allows up to two one-year extensions. In November 2015, with time running out for the 940 station approved four years earlier, the CRTC deviated from its own policy (and its previous extension letter) and gave them another year.

With weeks to go before the deadline to now launch both stations, suddenly there were signs of life, social media posts from the transmission site. And then a signal appeared on 940. TTP asked for more time for 600 AM, and once again the CRTC deviated from its policy and granted them until the following June. Again, they rushed the station to air right at the deadline.

The forever-almost radio stations

The stations were on the air, but these weren’t the 24/7 news-talk operations the group had promised. They were the opposite of that, zombie juke boxes without a voice. The CRTC hadn’t made 24-hour news-talk (or even any news-talk) part of their licence conditions, so there wasn’t technically a violation of licence here, though it certainly seemed like going back on their promises.

Still, would what was essentially a pair of AM transmitters attached to an iPod Shuffle be acceptable? The group promised it was only temporary and real programming would start soon.

During these long delays, the three partners became more difficult to reach. Tietolman kinda disappeared, and when I was able to get a hold of him he said he didn’t want to speak for the company. Pancholy got busy with other work, including accepting a job as a telecom CEO in India. And Tétrault soured, at one point hanging up on me when I called him and blocking me on social media. (It later emerged he was going through a bankruptcy process, that resulted in him losing his realtor licence for a while.)

The trio stopped appearing together in public, and rumours spread of a falling out between them. Tétrault was active on social media (mostly about politics) but there wasn’t much talk from any of them about their stations, except when he was looking for investors.

In 2018, CFNV 940 was up for licence renewal, and the group told the CRTC it would change its focus. Still talk, but about health and wellness instead of news. It later partnered with an online radio station, essentially using their programming. The station, confusingly called CNV, had some on-air talent, with Arcand as the morning man … uhh, Robert Arcand, not Paul. It had former hockey coach Jean Perron and former politician Rémy Trudel.

On the English side, a show finally emerged in 2022, a full decade after the group had received a licence for the station. Jim Connell, who had appeared at the CRTC 11 years earlier, was the host. The show disappeared after a while.

A new owner

Finally, in January 2024, news emerged that West Island realtor Ronald (Phil) Richards had bought the stations and would invest in CFQR’s programming. He was tight-lipped at first about his plans, but acted quickly in implementing them, even though the CRTC hadn’t approved his purchase of the stations.

Since then, the station has come closer to what you hear from any other music radio station. It officially adopted a classic hits format, with a strong bend toward 70s and 80s songs of the easy listening/soft rock variety.

Connell is back on mornings, Don Smooth has the drive-time show, and Kris Leblanc on evenings. And they fill other slots in the schedule with voice-tracked imports like Marissa Lanchak in New York and Jamie Turner in Missouri, who sound like they’re local with local references, until you hear them pronounce words like “Dorval.”

There’s no news department. Instead, the station runs audio headlines from The Canadian Press (or in Connell’s case, just summarizing the news himself). There are no traffic reports.

And there are actual ads airing on the station.

Behind the scenes details

I didn’t write much about Richards’s announcement because nothing had been approved or even published by the CRTC. That changed this week when they approved the transfer without any public process, and at the same time (well, actually a day later after I emailed them about it) published the application to transfer ownership. That application provides some details about what was going on through all this.

As the CRTC decision makes clear, there were actually two separate transactions here, the first one going ahead without commission approval, which is a big no-no.

Some time in late 2023, “faced with the need to increase the investment in programming,” the three partners allowed Richards to buy 49% of the company in exchange for $332,750 and become the company president, taking de facto control. The application says this investment was also needed to restore the company’s balance sheet and “make urgently needed acquisition of systems to correct operating/compliance issues.”

Previously, Tietolman had 15.38% of the company and the rest was shared equally between Tétrault (actually a family trust set up by Tétrault, conveniently just before he went bankrupt) and Pancholy.

Richards set up new studios in Montreal’s St-Laurent borough, and brought the station from zombie music to low-budget music.

“Subsequently, and unexpectedly, the company was faced with developments that challenged the status-quo. Two of the founding shareholders, Mr. Rajiv Pancholy, who is close to being a septuagenarian, and Mr. Paul Tietolman, who is on the threshold of being an octogenarian, had to withdraw abruptly from an active role due to unrelated personal issues,” the application says, without specifying those issues. It said they then “expressed their desire to step down and exit the business.”

Richards expressed interest in buying up the remaining shares and taking full control, and the three partners agreed. (It’s unclear if Tétrault still wanted to keep going with the station, but in the end he also agreed to sell.)

The purchase price breakdown is a bit complex, because for Pancholy and Tétrault it includes “settlement of long-term debt” that they loaned the company over the years — $168,000 for Tétrault and $143,000 for Pancholy. (The application doesn’t make clear how much the two actually lent the company, but it does say the station lost $801,427 since its inception through 2023.)

The company argued that the funds for these loan repayments came from the first transaction with Richards, and therefore it shouldn’t count towards the value of the company if that initial $332,750 is counted. Instead, they said, the actual purchase price was $75,000 paid to Tietolman and $1 each to Pancholy and Tétrault. The CRTC disagreed, arguing the payments were explicitly part of the second transaction and not the first, and assessed the entire $386,002, in addition to the initial $332,750, in evaluating the value of the transaction, plus another $104,000 in debt being assumed by Richards.

Regardless of how you count it, Tietolman, Tétrault and Pancholy didn’t make a lot of money from this station and its sale.

The application helpfully lists the company’s bottom line for each year since it began operations:

• 2011-2015: $307,978 loss
• 2016: $703 loss
• 2017: $86,632 loss
• 2018: $147,273 loss
• 2019: $127,269 loss
• 2020 $71,511 loss
• 2021: $39,197 profit
• 2022: $43,024 loss
• 2023: $56,234 loss
• Total: $801,427 loss

It says that profit in 2021 was because of an intensive communications campaign from the Quebec government during the COVID-19 pandemic (ads asking people to get vaccinated, wear masks, etc.) That tracks with the stimulus other media received during that time.

Tangible benefits

The CRTC application asked that the transaction be exempt from a rule that requires 6% of the value of the transaction be dedicated to “tangible benefits”, going to independent production funds or initiatives. It argued that with the station continuously losing money beyond its first licence term, there was a public interest in exempting it.

The commission pointed to that 2021 profit and said it meant the station had not met the criterion of losing money for at least the previous five years, and so ordered $67,366 in tangible benefits, going to the FACTOR and Musicaction funds, the Community Radio Fund of Canada, and to initiatives of the purchaser’s choosing, the standard breakdown of these benefits.

This decision to require tangible benefits led to dissenting opinions from commissioners Bram Abramson and Ellen Desmond, who argued that the 2021 profit was “clearly a one-time exception” and the five-year rule should be read flexibly rather than strictly.

But since they’re a minority on the … well, we’re never told which or even how many commissioners decide on cases like this … the requirement stands, and Richards will have to shell out a bit more from his pockets over the next seven years.

The future

We’ll see what Richards does with the stations. AM music stations haven’t been too successful in the past, but they’re cheap, so maybe they can balance the books enough to break even. But for those who have been patiently waiting for someone to take CJAD head on, it’s long past time they stop holding their breath.