For the first time since it launched in 2014, Evanov’s radio station in Hudson/St-Lazare west of Montreal has gone through a rebrand.
Starting Monday at midnight, Jewel 106.7 (CHSV-FM) is Lite 106.7 Hudson’s Lite Favourites (its first song under the new format, for the record, was Baby Baby by Amy Grant). The change coincides with an identical one at The Jewel in Ottawa, which also becomes Lite 98.5, kicking off with Lionel Richie’s All Night Long.
The midnight brand switch was a bit anticlimactic, with just the new station ID:
Recorded by Gary Gamble, Director of Operations for Evanov Communications, the announcement said that after reviewing comments from listeners who wanted “a vibrant radio station in touch with today, playing the best music from timeless artists past and present” (I’m sure they phrased it like that, too), it was rebranding “to build on the success of Jewel 106.7 and maintain our lite sound.”
Two other Jewel stations in eastern Ontario, CKHK-FM 107.7 in Hawkesbury and CHRC-FM 92.5 in Clarence-Rockland, switched to Hot Country at 9am after the morning show. (Their social media pages have already changed, leading to some comments from confused fans.)
It sounded like this:
The announcement on the Clarence-Rockland station noted that people who still wanted to listen to the Jewel-style light pop can still tune in to the Ottawa station on 98.5. Steven Lee Olsen’s Hello Country kicked off the new brand.
As I explain in this story for Cartt.ca, there are minimal changes to staffing as a result of this rebranding. All four stations keep their morning teams, including Ted Bird and Tom Whelan at Jewel 106.7. The biggest programming change is that the country stations will bring in nationally syndicated Casey Clark at midday and Bobby Bones in the evening.
I spoke with Ted Silver, Evanov’s program director for the four stations, about the change, and he explained that for Jewel/Lite, it was a matter of “following the curve” so the stations can better target the core audience of adults 45-54. “The audience we were appealing to 10 years ago is 10 years older,” he said, and have aged out of the demographic that can be sold to advertisers effectively.
Silver, a former PD at Montreal’s Q92, says Lite should be similar to what people listened to at Q92 before it became The Beat. Jewel listeners won’t feel alienated, it’s more of an evolution than a drastic change. But there will be less focus on the 70s and more on the 80s, because it wants to attract people who were in high school in the 80s.
Jewel’s remaining stations in Toronto, Brantford and Meaford will keep that brand, which is more entrenched in southern Ontario, Silver said. Evanov also has a Jewel station in Halifax, but the CRTC just approved its sale (along with its Hot Country sister station) to Acadia Broadcasting.
The Hudson station doesn’t subscribe to Numeris ratings, but does get some data from a company called StatsRadio. It estimates the station’s audience at 140,000 listeners, “not bad for a little suburban radio station,” Silver said. (That number is probably exaggerated — Jewel 98.5’s weekly reach in Ottawa as measured by Numeris was less than half that.)
Late last year, I was asked by my editor at Cartt.ca to write a feature story about branding in commercial radio, to be tied to the CRTC’s review of its commercial radio policy. That story ended up turning into a 10-part series for the website called The Future of Radio, in which I talk to some radio industry executives about how and where things are going.
Here are links to the individual stories (for Cartt.ca subscribers), and below are some point-form comments about the things I learned through this project:
I spoke to several radio executives for about an hour each for this series, and each conversation was quite insightful. Thanks to them for agreeing to take part:
Troy Reeb, Executive Vice President Broadcast Networks, Corus Entertainment
Steve Jones, Senior Vice-President Radio, Stingray
By design, I’ve spoken to people high up at larger national and regional broadcasters, and these stories reflect their views, but those are far from the only voices that deserve to be heard about radio. As the CRTC process continues (replies are due this week), we’ll hear more from groups that are critical of the big players.
The lessons
Some of the things I heard from several radio executives during our talks:
Radio brands are boring for a reason. They often include the frequency and the format, or some generic branding like Kiss or Move or The Beat. You need listeners to be able to remember your brand when they fill out radio surveys by Numeris (which is how it’s done in all but the five largest markets).
Creating common brands allows for synergy. But it’s not always about common programming. It’s also about saving money on things like imaging — those station ID jingles and promos. When you only have to design a logo or website once for multiple markets, you can save money but also invest more to get better quality and share those costs across multiple stations.
Expect more blending of syndication and local. For small-market stations, it just doesn’t make financial sense to have local announcers 24/7. In some, it doesn’t even make much sense to have a local morning show. So big broadcasters are taking a well-produced syndicated or national show and blending it with local news, traffic and weather. We’re also seeing popular morning shows from some markets being edited and repackaged to be used in other markets in the evenings.
Moving toward a Canadian radio star system. Both Bell and Corus have created national overnight talk shows for their talk stations, replacing syndicated U.S. programming like Coast to Coast, and other broadcasters are looking at doing their own thing instead of bringing in foreign shows. If they’re going to spend money anyway, they reason, why not spend it on some of their own talent, and give them a larger national audience?
The peak hour is getting later. It’s hard to say how much of this will be reversed when we fully emerge from the pandemic, but the peak hour for radio has shifted from about 7am to 8am as people who aren’t commuting don’t have to get up as early. We’re also seeing more listening throughout the day, instead of people abruptly dropping off once their car is in the office parking lot.
Radio will follow the platforms. Most broadcasters have kind of given up on trying to create their own digital ecosystems. Instead, they’ll adapt their content to whatever platform people are using. They’ve started up podcast networks, combined forces on the RadioPlayer app (with Bell as the notable exception), and signed up to work on smart speakers. They’re posting to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and whatever else will come next.
AM is not the future. It’s not dead yet, and AM stations still rate well in some markets, but the broadcasters aren’t betting on its future. There are no more AM stations in Quebec outside Montreal. Where bandwidth and regulations permit, stations have switched from AM to FM across the country. CBC is replacing low-power AM transmitters with FM ones. And the big players want to be able to move their AM stations to FM as well without having to give up their FM music stations. As a transition measure, HD Radio transmitters in large markets have allowed the big guys to simulcast AM on FM HD, but that’s not a long-term solution, because…
Neither is HD Radio. After the disaster that was Digital Audio Broadcasting in the 1990s and early 2000s, broadcasters are hesitant to adopt HD Radio, the technology principally used in the U.S. After a few years of experimentation, there isn’t much hope for its future, for the same reason as DAB failed: A lack of receivers. HD Radio still isn’t as common in cars as it should be, and receivers outside of cars are just about nonexistent. There’s potential for the technology for niche ethnic stations (and some ethnic broadcasters are using digital-only channels for single-language programming) but it’s nowhere close to mainstream. The fact that it’s confusing as well — to tune to CJAD 800 you have to go to 107.3 FM HD Channel 2? — doesn’t help. By the time this might get fixed up, or a new digital technology emerges, it will be easier to deliver audio programming over the internet. (Shout-out to radio broadcast manufacturer Nautel, though, which proposed a very unworkable national network of HD-only stations that would have channels in multiple languages.)
But maybe smart speakers. There was a noticeable uptick in smart speaker listening as people stayed home during the pandemic (and realized they don’t have other radio receivers at home). There was a big worry that as people went toward internet-based devices for their audio needs, they might choose things like Spotify over local radio. So there’s a big effort to ensure smart speakers tune to radio first.
Don’t expect a Canadian Spotify. I asked several of the executives, if they’re getting all this unfair competition from Spotify and Apple Music and the rest, why don’t they just launch competing platforms? The answer is they lack the scale to make it profitable. The technology wouldn’t be difficult to implement, but even with tariffs that the music industry has mocked as laughably low, Spotify and its peers struggle to make money, and there isn’t much hope a Bell or Rogers version would be more successful. Quebecor is trying with its QUB Musique app, and Stingray has several streaming music channels, but otherwise everyone is sticking with radio, even digital-only radio channels (which, because the user does not control the playlist, has a different tariff scheme).
The industry wants more consolidation. One issue brought up in filings to the commission is its limits on local ownership — currently 3-4 stations depending on market size, and no more than two on any one band in any language. The CAB has proposed a new formula that would allow some broadcasters to own up to half the stations in a market. Bell wants to eliminate ownership limits completely. Allowing AM stations to move to FM is an excuse given, but others say radio needs to have fewer owners to be more competitive. (The change isn’t just supported by the big guys, but several smaller owners also agree with consolidation because it means more potential buyers for their stations, which increases their value.)
Paperwork is a big problem. Both large and small broadcasters spend a lot of human resources just meeting the CRTC’s reporting requirements. In some cases, they’re necessary, like providing annual financial statements or lists of songs they have broadcast. In other cases, they’re redundant or of limited use. Some broadcasters proposed ways of cutting the paperwork burden, but many told me they just wish the CRTC was itself more efficient, processed applications more quickly, and wasn’t such a bottleneck in plans to launch, acquire or change stations.
There were also plenty of things that weren’t surprising. Broadcasters want lower quotas (dropping CanCon to 25% of songs from 35%), interest groups want quotas maintained. Big broadcasters want fewer regulations for themselves and more for their foreign digital-only competitors.
And, despite everything, everyone believes that radio has a future. Because otherwise they wouldn’t be in the game.
Unfortunately, the top five names doesn’t tell us that much. Liam and Olivia have been popular for a while now, and the top five doesn’t change that much year to year. Some journalists go a bit further and look at the end of the list for more unusual names (misspellings, mashed-up names, or words you wouldn’t think of as names), which can be amusing if you can avoid making fun of a name in a language you don’t understand.
Fortunately, Quebec’s open data website has full datasets of first names used since 1980 for boys and girls, so how about we do some more interesting number crunching?
Rather than just look at the most and least popular, I decided to see if I can suss out some trends. So I took the full data set, with almost 400,000 first names, and added a column calculating how many times they were used in the past 10 years versus the past 40 years. Normally this would be about 25%, but many names have gotten much more or much less popular.
A few caveats about these lists:
The database only goes back to 1980, so names that had already fallen out of favour by then won’t show up.
I’m assuming the database is correct. There may be errors here throwing off the results.
The lists are separated by gender because it’s two different data sets. In several cases names have gotten less popular because they’re traditionally associated with the other gender. Combining them would take a while and probably crash my computer.
For data entry cleanup reasons, I’ve excluded compound names from these lists (whether they have a hyphen or a space separating them) as well as names that are in the database as just one letter (which I assume are initials incorrectly coded as names). I’ve also set minimums for the number of times a name has to be used to weed out outliers.
Since the database does not include accents, I have not included them here.
Noémi Mercier hosts the first episode of Le Fil on March 29.
In the lead-up to its launch on March 29, Noovo (formerly V, formerly TQS) hyped that its new daily newscast called Le Fil would be, above all else, different.
Different in how it told stories (longer, more in-depth), different in what stories it would tell (younger, more diverse), and different in how it presented itself (two Black anchors, a more industrial-looking studio).
After two weeks of watching these programs, I can conclude that it’s definitely different. In some ways that are good, but in many ways the difference is a stark reminder of how few resources are being put into news-gathering at the network, even though its new owner Bell Media has extensive English-language resources across the country, francophone journalists at radio stations across Quebec, and lots of money.
Rather than being an alternative newscast to TVA and Radio-Canada, it might be more fair to say Le Fil isn’t even in the same league, and isn’t trying to be.
History
A recap of what led to this: TQS, founded in 1986, was the first television network to try to compete directly with the duopoly of Radio-Canada and TVA in Quebec. It was owned by the Pouliot family, who also owned CFCF (CTV Montreal) and CF Cable.
Its newscast, Le Grand Journal, promised to be different, but looking back seems very generic — an anchor in a studio, tight two-minute packaged news reports with reporter voiceover, and weather and sports.
TQS would eventually be bought by Quebecor, but then sold because Quebecor bought Videotron, which owned TVA. Cogeco and what was then Bell Globemedia bought TQS in 2002 (with Cogeco as the controlling owner) and injected money into its news operation, but by 2007 Cogeco gave up and pushed the network into bankruptcy.
It was bought by Maxime Rémillard, a film producer and distributor, who disbanded the entire news operation and renamed the network V. Rémillard convinced the CRTC to drastically reduce the network’s local and news programming requirements in order to keep it alive, and tried various cost-effective ways of doing the bare minimum of news programming, with forgettable newscasts like Les Infos and NVL that were outsourced to other companies.
Rémillard’s massacre of the news operation was heavily criticized, but it worked. V stopped bleeding money and managed to survive.
In 2019, Rémillard agreed to sell V’s five stations (Montreal, Quebec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières and Saguenay) to Bell Media for $20 million, and Bell promised to bring back newscasts to get the CRTC to approve the purchase. The CRTC approved the deal last year and brought in higher local programming requirements, with each station needing to broadcast five hours a week of local programming and two and half hours a week of “locally reflective” programming. Next year, the local programming requirements for Montreal and Quebec City go up to 8.5 hours a week.
Bell must also spend 5% of V’s revenues on local news. In 2019-2020, V brought in $35.7 million, which was about half of its expenses. This would mean about $1.8 million a year minimum on news.
Enter Le Fil.
Structure
Le Fil is a series of newscasts:
Le Fil 17h: An hour-long newscast at 5pm weekdays, hosted by Noémi Mercier, a long-time journalist who had been seen mainly on Télé-Québec before joining Noovo.
Le Fil 17h30: Though billed as a separate newscast, it’s more of a regional cutaway for Noovo’s owned-and-operated non-Montreal stations (Quebec City, Saguenay, Trois-Rivières and Sherbrooke). About 15 minutes total not including a commercial break, each region’s newscast is anchored out of Quebec City by Lisa-Marie Blais, who comes from LCN but was part of TQS in the last days of Le Grand Journal. For Montreal viewers, Mercier continues to anchor with more local segments during this time. After the regional cutaways, the regions come back to Mercier who does a signoff opinion/analysis monologue.
Le Fil 22h: The 10pm half-hour newscast is hosted by Michel Bherer, who spent 13 years at Radio-Canada but also worked at TQS back in the day. It consists mainly of a selection of stories that were presented at 5pm. Regional cutaways, also hosted by Blais, begin at 10:10pm. (They’re not posted online, so I haven’t seen their content.)
Le Fil Week-end: Two hour-long shows that strangely air at 9am on Saturday and Sunday, respectively, and mostly repeat stories from the week, sometimes with fresh introductions. The shows include an original feature interview near the end. They’re hosted by Meeker Guerrier, who previously worked at Radio-Canada and since last fall has been a regular columnist on Bell Media radio stations and RDS.
For all of them, the structure is pretty simple: five-minute blocks, either packaged reports, often introduced by the journalist, or perhaps an in-studio chat with a journalist or a columnist.
Contributors include big names like La Presse columnist Yves Boisvert and freelancers like fact-checker Camille Lopez and U.S. politics watcher Valérie Beaudoin.
Laid-back news
The biggest difference between this newscast and a mainstream one is how it tells stories. Rather than a standard two-minute heavily narrated package including B-roll of people walking and ending with a reporter standup, these packages are about five minutes long, adopting a slower pace, and let their subjects do a lot of the talking. Almost like a mini documentary. Many packages include music, to further accentuate that feel. The reporters are also present, but more casual and engaging in how they talk to the camera.
There are “live” chats between the anchor and the reporter, either in studio, or via double box, and I notice the reporters tend to be introduced by first name only.
The rough edges can be seen in the reports, which often show technical issues that I have difficulty just dismissing as first-week flubs or COVID-19 compromises. Subjects in interviews often don’t have a microphone on them, leading to poor-quality audio. This probably wouldn’t have been an issue if they hired both reporters and experienced camera operators who would be more concerned with those technical aspects. Many reports are done entirely by the reporters alone.
Diversity
The other big difference Noovo highlights in its approach to this newscast is diversity — not only of its staff, where two of four anchors are Black, but of the story subjects. They spend more time talking about issues facing young people, racialized communities, Indigenous communities. I don’t know if they’re necessarily covering these issues better than their well-funded competitors, but that’s where they’ve decided to put their focus.
Being a brand new operation, most of their journalists are pretty young, and so much of this focus on different types of stories may come naturally.
Look and feel
Michel Bherer next to the window in the Montreal studio.
Reporter Audrey Ruel-Manseau on the side of the anchor desk in Montreal.
Lisa-Marie Blais at the Quebec City studio.
Lisa-Marie Blais and Alexane Drolet in Quebec City.
I suppose Bell Media was trying to get away from the standard TV studio look with its design for the studios in Montreal and Quebec City. It’s very industrial, like you might expect for a tech startup or something. White-painted brick, exposed metal conduits, a light wood desk, coloured lights, vertical screens. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they were going for something new and cool, but it comes out to me looking a lot like moderate-budget community TV.
The graphics are better. Bold white text on dark blue backgrounds for the most part. Overlays are squarish on the side rather than going along the bottom.
No weather or sports
Despite being built by the same company that runs CTV News, there’s very little of the usual building blocks of a newscast. There’s no weather report, no sports highlights (Bherer briefly gives out the final score at the end of the night when the Canadiens play), no market numbers, no entertainment news, no stories from foreign news services, and no ambulance-chasing fire and car crash briefs.
Bell owns RDS (in fact, the two broadcast out of the same building), so it would not have been difficult to incorporate a sports component, so it seems this was done intentionally. And honestly, it would have been odd to shoe-horn something like sports highlights into this show.
News briefs are often presented on screen with no visuals or only a faded still image to accompany them — literally the text of the brief is presented as a graphic as the anchor reads it. They’ve gotten a bit better at this as the days went on, with some briefs presenting visuals now, but it’s an odd thing to see so much text in a newscast.
One thing I have seen a lot of, though, is vox pops. For a newscast that promises to do things differently, adopting one of the news media’s laziest, most useless forms of journalism — asking random uninformed people on the street what they think of some topic — would be a head-scratcher if we didn’t already know why it’s done. It’s an easy crutch for an uninspired assignment editor.
They’re not in every newscast, but in less than three weeks I’ve seen a handful of them.
Recycling the news
The most glaring way Le Fil saves money is through reusing its content. The 10pm newscast is largely stuff that aired earlier in the day. The weekend newscast is mostly stuff that aired earlier in the week.
Even the regional cutaways involve a lot of reuse. The 15 minutes mean they have three stories. But for most of the regions, the third story is common, regardless of what region it comes from.
So for the Mauricie, Saguenay and Estrie regions, we’re talking about 10 minutes per weekday of actual original local news. Less than an hour a week.
Since Bell has not deemed those three regions worthy enough to even have their own anchors or studios, it’s probably unsurprising that even their local news isn’t that local.
Will anyone watch?
The first broadcasts of Le Fil got just over 100,000 viewers, according to Richard Therrien of Le Soleil. That’s relatively decent, but also a lot of curiosity factor. Later broadcasts got smaller ratings.
Working against Noovo is the schedule — if you want news at 5pm, you can watch TVA. If you want news at 10pm, you can watch either TVA or Radio-Canada. And if you want news at 9am on weekends … well, I guess you have that now, assuming you don’t have LCN or RDI on cable?
I would have liked them to, say, push the late newscast to 11pm and offer some counter-programming in the 10pm hour. Or try to do something more with the weekend news than an hour-long in-case-you-missed-it.
Multiplatform
I can’t say Noovo really sets itself apart by promising its news will be on a bunch of platforms, since everyone is doing that now, but it’s worth noting here. At the moment, there isn’t much along these lines. Packages and newscasts are posted to their website, a few clips are posted to YouTube, and they have Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, and now TikTok too.
A new Noovo Info website is promised to launch later, which will give a better idea of the digital facet of this operation. By then, Bell will probably have found a way to integrate its journalists at Rouge and Énergie radio stations throughout Quebec into the system, and maybe even found some synergies with CTV and CTV Montreal in particular.
Bottom line
So with some aspects still marked incomplete, and taking into account the usual early-day bugs that will work themselves out as everyone gets more familiar with the daily routine, I would rate Noovo Le Fil as … OK.
Noovo doesn’t have the same news resources as Radio-Canada and TVA, which both have all-news channels and close relationships with other journalists on different platforms (Radio-Canada has digital and radio journalists, while Quebecor has the Journal de Montréal, 24 Heures and other platforms for journalism). But Bell has deep pockets, so if it wanted to, it could create a new competitor on that same level.
As a news operation, it’s definitely better than what it replaced. As a newscast on TV, it’s also better, though probably not better enough to become a real threat to the duopoly of Radio-Canada and TVA. (And we’ll see if, down the line, Noovo’s desire to be different will hold or if it will slowly morph into a similar kind of generic TV newscast that its competitors have settled into over the decades.)
Some of its longer-form documentary-style reports might have some success on digital platforms, I suppose, but it’s really unclear what target audience they’re trying to reach here. Le Fil doesn’t have the flash of TVA nor the reporting depth of Radio-Canada, and despite their promise to be more diverse and reflective, I don’t see that many people who don’t normally watch the news flocking to this show.
Which leaves us with the distinct impression that, despite all the hype, Le Fil exists not because Bell wants to shake up the marketplace when it comes to local news on TV, but simply because the CRTC required Noovo produce local news, and this is what they came up with to fill that minimum requirement.
I hope I’m wrong there.
Noovo Le Fil airs at 5pm and 10pm weekdays and 9am Saturdays and Sundays on Noovo.
A professor at the University of Eastern Ontario has been suspended after a student’s complaint that he used the U-word in class. The university has launched an investigation to determine the circumstances of the incident, including figuring out what the “U-word” is.
“We took swift action to protect students from offensive academic material,” university president Goby Jasyrundy said in a statement. “We intend to fully investigate this incident, and invite the student in question to meet with our special panel to tell them what the U-word is and why it is offensive.”
Initial Google searches and checks with Urban Dictionary and the Scrabble Dictionary suggest the U-word may be an antisemitic slur or possibly a degrading term for people from Uruguay, but neither would seem to apply to this context.
“What’s important is that students learn in a safe environment, free from racial slurs or ethnic slurs or sexist terms or maybe just a word with too many consonants?” Jasyrundy said.
“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he continued before apologizing for using the B-word.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television is struggling to figure out how it can stop an automated system stuck in a recursive loop that is creating thousands of new Canadian Screen Awards nominees every day.
The academy had wanted to expand this year beyond its usual 141 categories into something “a bit more comprehensive,” spokesperson Oscar Nisansakagunu said Wednesday. “With the help of artificial intelligence and blockchain, we created an algorithm that generated new nominees for us, but … things got out of hand.”
People at the academy noticed something was wrong when the algorithm reported an error message indicating it was running out of disk space. By that point, more than 3.9 million Canadians had received nominations in 1.2 million categories. Within a month, it is expected all Canadians, and at least 10% of the world’s population, will have been nominated for at least one award. Within two months, 30% of the world’s computing power will be devoted to creating Canadian Screen Awards categories so more people can be nominated for them.
Plans are still being finalized as the academy does not know how many awards there will be in the end, but the expectation is that the awards will be given through a series of daily broadcasts starting May 1, with about 3,500 awards being given out every evening at a rate of about 23 per minute.
Schitt’s Creek creator Dan Levy leads the nominations with 94,310.
Saying its financial future is under threat and it doesn’t know where it will find the money to pay off news producers for its use of their content, Facebook Canada launched a GoFundMe campaign so its users could chip in to help.
“It’s embarrassing to have to do this, but we have no other choice,” Facebook Canada VP Dory Paenga-wh?wh? said in a heartfelt post announcing the campaign. “If you believe in the future of Canada’s news business, we implore you to contribute what you can.”
Facebook has been under fire recently for brazenly making money while other people make less money, and recently it acknowledged things need to change. “The lack of subscriptions to Canadian media outlets is as much your fault as it is ours,” Paenga-wh?wh? said in her post, “so it’s incumbent upon you to help make that right. For the price of a cup of coffee a day, you can help pay for a journalist’s cup of coffee.”
Perks offered to those who contribute to the GoFundMe campaign include being listed on a thank-you page and access to that feature where you can see who looks at your profile.
Quebecor is expanding its QUB-branded streaming empire, which includes talk radio service QUB Radio and music streaming service QUB Musique, to include a new soft-talking brain-tingling channel called QUB ASMR.
Following in the footsteps of successful YouTube streamers, QUB ASMR proposes to “leverage QMI’s media resources to provide a euphoric information environment that will stimulate the brain both mentally and physically,” explained Dab de Yebrir, one of the new hosts brought on to the service, as host of the new show Rubix QUB.
Among other programs QUB ASMR proposes are a daily show where philosopher Mathieu Bock-Côté soothingly explains how Quebec’s cultural heritage is under constant threat from immigrants and anglophones while slowly scratching a piece of felt, and another featuring Richard Martineau just whispering “hein?” over and over directly into a microphone for an hour.
QUB ASMR will be free to Videotron Mobile customers and $5 a month for everyone else.
Fed up of poor working conditions, low pay, lack of respect and literally being abandoned on the street, Montreal’s orange traffic cones announced on Thursday they have been certified as a bargaining unit and will attempt to negotiate a collective agreement with the city.
Though salaries will probably be a sticking point, union leaders say their primary focuses are working conditions and mental health.
“Our cone members are out there 24/7 in the most unforgiving weather,” said Greeneye Onerah Tokha, a member of the bargaining committee. “And despite their unwavering dedication to their jobs, all they get from people is frustration and hate.”
Among the proposals are winter coats, more frequent shift rotations and paid sick and family leave.
The city said it is willing to negotiate, but that coning remains an essential service and it will not accept putting non-cone citizens at risk.
Rogers is continuing to innovate as it begins the second half of its 12-year $5.2-billion rights contract with the National Hockey League. Today, it announced a new premium service for Rogers Ignite and Rogers Wireless customers called NHL GameVote™, which gives them unique new ways to influence gameplay.
GameVote™ will allow members to vote on things like which players will engage in the next on-ice fight, which way a video review gets decided, which players are made a healthy scratch and what line combinations to use.
“Hockey fans love to debate how coaches should manage their games and how referees call them, so we’re thrilled to put them in the driver’s seat with this new functionality,” said Rogers spokesperson Devario Ebrill. “If they don’t like a call, now they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.”
In order to not delay gameplay, GameVote™ subscribers will be given a game feed three minutes ahead of its TV broadcast, which Rogers is marketing as an additional perk. And though these decisions will be entirely up to fan voting for now, the NHL has given itself the power to override the vote if it feels it goes against the spirit of the game.
So far, Rogers NHL GameVote™ is only available to Rogers customers, but Ebrill said they are looking at making it a premium feature on Sportsnet NOW+.
Simon-Jolin Barrette, Quebec’s minister responsible for the French language, said Thursday he’s almost completed his word-for-word review of the Larousse dictionary and will be announcing proposed changes to the language in the coming weeks.
“I’m at zéro right now, so should be finally done by the end of the week,” the disheveled minister said as he downed a Red Bull to keep his eyes open. He estimated he would have recommendations on changing the spelling of more than 10,000 words and the pronunciations of about 3,000 more. He also said he plans to have several hundred words deleted, as they are offensive, too English or no longer serve their purpose.
“Soon, we will have a dictionary that truly reflects our society and will set us on the path to a more enlightened future,” he said.
New Larousses would be distributed to families across the province by fall. New bescherelles will have to wait a bit longer as a review of every conjugation of every verb will take some time.
Canada’s largest media company showed its innovative spirit once again today by launching a new system whereby its employees can lay themselves off from the comfort of their homes.
Avril Barbeau, a former employee at Bell’s 103.1 The Bass in Nanaimo, B.C., was one of the first to use the system to self-terminate her employment after 23 years at a company acquired by another company acquired by Bell. “Rather than burst into tears and embarrass myself at the office, I could cry about my life being ruined from the comfort of my own home,” Barbeau said. “It’s a much less painful experience.”
The self-layoff system is controlled through a website, where surplus employees can do everything from schedule a listen-only 90-second conference call where they’re insincerely thanked for their service to hiring a bailiff to come to their homes and confiscate any company-owned equipment. They can also digitally sign non-disclosure agreements and set up automated reminders threatening them if they talk about their layoff on social media.
“We expect self-layoff will do for the firing process in our industry what self-checkout did for the grocery store industry,” said Bell Media CEO Wayne Schusterman, shortly before he was informed he would be retiring at the end of the month to spend more time with his family. “We expect significant synergies with this system that will help us strengthen for the future.”
Bell expects to save several thousand dollars a year in human resources costs, and dozens of HR employees have been invited to use the system as they become redundant over the coming weeks.
Undeterred by almost ten years of inaction, Montreal conspiracy theorists who have branded themselves followers of “CFQR-Anon” say the secret clues they have received send a crystal clear message that a direct competitor to news-talk station CJAD 800 will launch within days, with a large newsroom of dedicated professional reporters and an on-air lineup filled with personalities that have lost their jobs at other Montreal radio and TV stations.
Elver Kawasik, who has been part of the growing movement for most of the past decade, said he looks forward to hearing the voices of Peter Anthony Holder, Barry Morgan, Sarah Bartok, Elliott Price, Heather Backman, Frank Cavallaro, Richard Deschamps, Chantal Desjardins, Suzanne Desautels, Tasso Patsikakis, Patrick Charles, Brian Wilde, Sean Coleman, Jamie Orchard, Barry Wilson, Joanne Vrakas, Wilder Weir and others on the air again, and to experience a radio station that will spend unlimited amounts of money on journalists.
The CFQR-Anon group had gotten excited just after CFQR 600 AM went on the air in 2017 and promised a full launch with regular talk programming within weeks. But Kawasik said the station has just been in an extensive testing period waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Though there have been no announcements about studio space, staff hired or anything else giving signs of life, Kawasik said his fellow patriots should trust the system and be ready to switch their radios once the CFQR saviour has arisen.
“The shutdown of CJAD’s newsroom was the moment CFQR has been waiting for,” he said. “Our salvation is finally at hand.”
Days after former mayor Denis Coderre returned to municipal political life, he demonstrated how much of a changed man he is today by announcing Montreal’s two largest political parties — Projet Montréal, led by Mayor Valérie Plante, and Ensemble Montréal, led by Coderre — would merge ahead of this November’s election and present a unified slate of candidates.
“In order to better compete with unregulated foreign municipal political parties, we must consolidate our forces and find synergies,” Coderre said. “Montreal is a small market, and against forces like the Democratic and Republican parties in the States, we can’t compete unless we develop that critical mass.”
The rise of foreign political giants has worried Canadian municipal parties for years now. While the 2020 U.S. presidential election cost an estimated $14 billion, Projet Montréal had a budget of only $1.5 million in its last annual report.
“The Montreal political system must be strong or we risk foreign alternatives taking over,” Plante said at the announcement. “Key to this is maintaining the balance between rights and obligations and ensuring the health, quality and sustainability of local political parties within the global political reality, while continuing to fulfil public policy objectives.”
The merger requires the approval of the chief electoral officer of Quebec and of the party memberships.
There are days you think Canada’s media and telecom industries are about as converged as they can be. And then another megatransaction gets announced that you think couldn’t possibly be approved by the government. And then it is.
Transactions like Bell buying Astral Media, Bell buying MTS, Rogers buying Mobilicity, Postmedia buying Sun Media, and all the other transactions that brought us to this point.
So the news that Shaw has agreed to a $26-billion sale to Rogers maybe shouldn’t come as quite a shock. But as the government professes to be pro-consumer, particularly when it comes to wireless services, can we really expect this deal to be approved?
Here are the stumbling blocks the companies will have to get over:
Freedom Mobile. In Ontario, Alberta and B.C., Freedom is the fourth large wireless carrier, the last surviving one from that era of increased competition after Mobilicity and Public Mobile were scooped up by the big three. Rogers, which is already Canada’s largest mobile provider, apparently believes it can just keep Freedom as part of the deal, with nothing more than a promise that it won’t raise prices for three years. If the federal government is to be taken seriously on wireless competition, it can’t possibly let that stand. It could force Rogers to sell Freedom to some other party (Quebecor? Xplornet? Cogeco? Some random rich guy?), or it could come to some agreement where Rogers sheds just enough Freedom customers to another party, like Bell did when it bought MTS.
Corus. Shaw and Corus are separate companies, with separate boards of directors and different shareholders, but both are controlled by the Shaw family. The CRTC treats them as if they’re the same for competition reasons. The issue here is that, as part of the transaction, the Shaw family gets two seats on the Rogers board. That doesn’t give them control of Rogers, but does it present enough of a competition concern to warrant increased scrutiny?
Cable and satellite. Because Shaw and Rogers have essentially split the country geographically, with Shaw serving western Canada and Rogers serving eastern Canada, there’s not much overlap in terms of wired coverage to deal with. But these are still big companies. Shaw has 1.4 million cable TV subscribers and more than 600,000 satellite TV subscribers, making almost $4 billion in annual revenue on TV services alone. Add that to Rogers’s 1.5 million TV subscribers and $3.5 billion revenue, and you get a company 30% larger than Bell on that front. That’s a change in dynamic in bargaining position when, say, negotiating carriage contracts with TV services. There’s also the fact that if Rogers buys Shaw’s satellite service, that’s one less TV service option for subscribers in Rogers territory. They go from having to choose between Rogers, Bell Fibe/satellite and Shaw Direct to having to choose between Rogers and Bell alone.
Sheer size. Rogers has $15 billion in annual revenue. Shaw has $5 billion. Combined, they still fall short of Bell’s $24 billion, but not by much. No doubt Rogers will use the need to compete against Bell as an argument for approving the transaction, because the only way to fight ownership consolidation is more ownership consolidation.
Jobs. Rogers has promised to create 3,000 “net new jobs” in western Canada as part of the deal. But it also says “synergies are expected to exceed $1 billion annually within two years of closing.” I’m curious what synergies can be achieved without cutting any jobs.
Mobile service seems like the only potential dealbreaker here, unless there are some minor assets that compete directly that would also need to be divested. Rogers would probably be fine ditching Freedom if that was a condition of approval.
Will political and regulatory forces accept such a deal? We’ll have to see. Recent experience suggests they probably will, and companies don’t go through this kind of trouble if they don’t think a deal can succeed. (At least that’s what I’d like to say, but Rogers’ proposed purchase of Cogeco fell flat, so…)
