OTTAWA — Canadians are about to get a third 24-hour English-language cable news channel, and it’s one that plans to shake up the industry.
The CRTC approved a five-year licence for Sun TV news service Friday — referred to by critics as Fox News North — to go into direct competition with CBC’s News Network and the CTV News Channel.
The federal regulator’s green light was considered a sure thing after Quebecor Inc. (TSX:QBR.B) dropped its request for a special licence that would have required cable and satellite carriers to offer the service.
The Category 2 competitive licence that it was granted means Sun TV will need to negotiate with cable and satellite carriers for a place on their line-up.
Last summer, Quebecor officials argued that failing to be designated as a must-offer channel like the CTV and CBC news services would doom the enterprise.
But the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission had previously ruled that no such licences would be issued because it was dropping the category next September.
In a news release after the announcement Friday, Quebecor chief executive Pierre Karl Peladeau betrayed no sense of disappointment about receiving the less desirable licence.
“Today marks the dawn of a new era for Canadian news media,” Peladeau said.
Sun TV head Luc Lavoie said he expects the channel will begin airing some time in March, with a combination of hard news and what he called “straight talk” featuring well-known and controversial personalities.
He said the news format involving anchors would air between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day, after which the broadcast would shift to an opinion and commentary format featuring conservative firebrand Ezra Levant, Corus radio talk host Charles Adler and others.
Lavoie bristled at the characterization of the channel as Fox News North.
“If we are ever even remotely as successful as Fox News has been so far, we will be delighted. As for the rest, I think it’s totally ridiculous,” he said.
He noted that Sun TV has signed a contract with CNN, not Fox, for international content.
Lavoie did agree that the station will be “populist, blue-collar, irreverent and if one wants to go that way, right wing.”
In his release, Peladeau said the new channel will aim to “challenge conventional wisdom and offer Canadians a new choice and a new voice.”
The enterprise has been controversial from the very beginning, in part because Quebecor’s initial pick to head the operation was Prime Minister Harper’s former communications director, Kory Teneycke, known for his combative personality.
Teneycke’s subsequent statements made it clear the new station would tilt decidedly to the right, triggering the advocacy group Avaaz to launch a petition to stop Quebecor from obtaining a Category 1 licence. Teneycke abruptly resigned in mid-September, about the same time Avaaz called for a police probe over interference with its online petition.
Lavoie, a long-time spokesman for former Tory prime minister Brian Mulroney who has been working for Quebecor since leaving the political arena, was picked to step in to fill Teneycke’s role.
In a speech in Ottawa last month, Peladeau announced he was dropping his request for a preferred licence, while lashing out at his critics, calling some of the charges “shocking” and “off the wall.”
In particular, he denied he had a “secret deal” with the prime minister to offer favourable coverage to the government, and said it was simplistic to call the new station right wing.
He said the station would resemble the Sun newspapers owned by Quebecor in Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton, which while on the right of the political spectrum, were also “populist, irreverent, sometimes provocative.”
For all the controversy, CRTC chairman Konrad von Finckenstein said granting the licence was almost automatic. He said Category 2 licences are routinely granted unless they are in protected genres, which news is not.
And he denied there had been any pressure on the CRTC to change its policies to grant Sun TV a special must-offer licence that would have given it a head start on viewership.
“Nobody in the government spoke me about this at the official or at the political level,” he said. “We welcome (Sun TV) because we welcome a diversity of voices, we want to see as many voices as possible.”