French-Language Programs

The Beginning Years 

     Radio broadcasting as a medium of social communication appeared in Quebec and Canada in 1922. The federal Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries established a new code of communications and created a new category of licenses, known as "private commercial broadcasting licenses." Many enterprises in Quebec and Canada applied for and obtained broadcasting licenses. During the month of April, the federal Minister of Maritime Affairs granted about 20 broadcasting licenses, including the French-language station CKAC (La Presse) as well as CFCF (Marconi, Montreal), CFCA (Toronto Star), CHCB (Marconi, Toronto), CJSC (Evening Telegram), CJCG ( Winnipeg Free Press), C]CA (Edmonton Journal), and CJCE (Vancouver Sun).

     The creation of radio station CKAC in 1922 by the major French-language newspaper La Presse created the link between the technological dimension and journalistic expertise. This harmonious fusion was made possible by the founder of CKAC, Jacques-Narcisse Cartier, an expert technician as well as a seasoned journalist with experience in Montreal and at British and American newspapers. Cartier-pilot in the Royal Air Force, collaborator with Guglielmo Marconi and technician at Marconi stations in Nova Scotia and New York, personal friend of the Radio Corporation of America's (RCA) David Sarnoff, technician at Telefunken, and a businessman and corporate leader who would later take the helm of two major Montreal newspapers-represented the spirit of initiative that a French Quebecker could bring to the avant-garde technologies of his time.

     Radio's early use of live music led to links between radio and all the musical groups, vocalists, composers, teachers, and hosts who formed the core of Montreal's very active cultural life. Cartier was a musician himself, a pianist and organist; his social milieu included musicians and contacts with the designers at the Casavant organ manufacturing company. This is why, in December 1922, Cartier had a Casavant organ installed in the CKAC studio. In spring 1923 Raoul Vennat, musicologist and importer of music, began a weekly series of concerts in which musicians and singers performed the most recent works of French music. In 1923 an operetta, "Les Cloches de Corneville," was aired with an orchestra of 25 musicians and a choir of 38 singers. In 1925 CKAC offered a series of live piano lessons given by Emiliano Renaud, a teacher of international reputation back from a career in New York. In 1929, Arthur Dupont negotiated an association with the American Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) network. This was done to connect CKAC into a circuit of concerts aired live by a group of American stations, which CKAC then joined in 1930 when it created its own symphony orchestra. Creation of the "Quatuor Alouette" allowed for original harmonizations of international folkloric music to be broadcast on the radio. In 1933 Dupont, now the program director at the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission, arranged for the airing in Canada of live opera from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which had already been broadcasting on American stations for two years. Quebec-crafted songs were introduced to radio by Lionel Daunais, who had a regular broadcast of French-language songs at the CCR and who regularly hosted L'Heure provinciale at CKAC, a cultural and educational biweekly magazine financially supported by the Quebec government. It became the model for educational radio; over ten years, it broadcast close to a thousand scientific and cultural lecture programs. But L'Heure provinciale was also a privileged forum for introducing musicians, singers, and other Quebec artists who became regularly featured artists on radio and in the theater in the decades that followed. All the great artists of this period got their start on radio. The group that best symbolized this socio cultural dynamic was without a doubt the operetta troupe of the "Varietes lyriques," founded by Charles Goulet and Lionel Daunais, whose artistic activity would span 30 years, integrating artists from Quebec as well as singers from Europe into their productions.

     But Quebec radio also wanted to be an information service from its very beginnings, as expressed by Cartier in 1925 before a committee of the federal parliament in a statement on "the true role of radio in the life of a people." He was thus developing a strong position that La Presse had presented in an editorial as early as May 1922. For Cartier, radio had a triple mission of information, education, and entertainment.

     From the beginning, CKAC systematically integrated information programs, news bulletins, and entertainment, or "magazines." By 1925 Cartier established a tradition of live reports from the scene of major political and sports events: hockey (broadcast from Boston, because the Montreal Forum refused to give its permission) and, more importantly, the federal electoral campaign of October 1925, during which Cartier and Dupont, with the collaboration of the Marconi Company, developed a mobile unit for live reports and covered electoral assemblies all over Montreal and the medium-sized towns across the region. News programs became more elaborate by the beginning of the 1930s, despite the prohibitions of the Canadian Press agency. As an alternative, Dupont negotiated an association with CBS whereby he received news bulletins that were then translated and aired in French.

     In June 1938, in time for the Pete Nationale in Quebec, CKAC launched the first important radio-journal, Les nouv­ elles de chez-nous (Local News), which was hosted until 1954 by one of the best actors and communicators of the period, Albert Duquesne. This was a coup for CKAC, which took a commanding lead over the public broadcaster, Radio-Canada, where the news (mostly foreign and from distant places) was only broadcast late in the evenings. There was a major difference between the translated news items from American or English-Canadian agencies and the network of reporters that CKAC had put in place to cover news across Quebec: important information could also be about the goings-on in Quebec.

Radio Development in Quebec

      By the 1940s the population of Quebec, some 3 million, was served by 30 radio stations, the most powerful of which, CKAC, covered a large portion of the territory as well as the French-Canadian populations of New England. Radio became an essential service for public culture, independent of both political and religious influences. Closely associated with the professional milieus of music and theater, radio brought society a multifaceted and original discourse and an openness to information, values, and models circulating everywhere in the Western world.

     Radio of the 1940s and 1950s was primarily a concert hall as well as a music-hall stage, and it served as an intimate venue for original Quebec singer-songwriters. Radio-Canada took over and became the producer of concerts for large and smaller ensembles. These broadcasts were, of course, aired live. In certain radio music halls, where sketches and songs, humor and editorial comments alternated, the background environment was always that of music played by an orchestra. Even late­ morning variety programs such as Les joyeux troubadours were accompanied by a small orchestra in the studio.

     Radio in this period was also an editorial room for daily news. It was at the beginning of the 1940s that radio became a major source of information. CKAC's Information Service had been created in 1939, station CHRC in Quebec City had specialized in news broadcasts, and in 1941 Radio-Canada created its own Information Service. At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939 Radio-Canada stayed on the air for a month in order to ensure that the news was continually updated, 2.4 hours a day. In 1941 the Canadian Press agency created an affiliate for radio news, Press News Ltd. Journalist Jovette Bernier created a daily humorous program, Quelles nouve/les, as an antidote to the anxieties generated by the daily news.

     Around 1960 the presence of parliamentary correspondents became the trademark of various stations, with slogans such as "the news as it happens" or "news on the hour." Radio also recognized its educational mission. Following the British model, and undoubtedly inspired by educational stations in the United States, Quebec radio proposed a programming schedule offering a broad range of programs geared toward adult education and the development of more advanced students. The resulting university of the airwaves was called "Radio College." However, school broadcasts for students at the elementary and high school levels were not developed as quickly and would only appear in the 1960s.

     Quebec radio was also the proving ground for an important cultural innovation: the invention of an original form of radio­ based literature. Authors of great talent produced original works for the radio medium as a means of experimentation and of reaching a large audience. Unlike other countries (France in particular), where literary broadcasts on the radio consisted mostly of adaptations of published works, in Quebec a body of original works was created. The most diverse forms were used-theater, dramatic serials, historical works, humorous sketches, tales, memoirs, monologues, essays, and poetry. Between 1930 and 1970, half a million pages of literary texts were written for radio by about 1,000 authors. The serial or radio-novel, because of its structure, based on chapters broadcast over many years-often 10 or 20-became a major building block of the collective imagination. Works such as Un homme et son péché, Métropole, Faubourg à m'lasse, Le surv­enant, je,messe dorée, Le curé de village, Madeleine et Pierre, La rue des pignons, La famille Plouffe, Le ciel par-dessus les toits, Nazaire et Barnabé, and many others became daily meeting places for the general public. These radio-novels were works by auteurs, in the full literary sense of the term within the European tradition, rather than industrial productions on the American model.

     Long-running and important series transformed radio into a creative laboratory or a theatrical repertory company for the benefit of the general public. One must note the cultural influence of the following series in terms of their contribution to artistic creativity: Le theatre de chez-nous, Radio-theatre, Radio-theatre miniature, Radio-theatre Ford, Theatre dans 1m fauteuil, J,e radio-theatre de Radio-Canada, and Nouveautes dramatiques. Providing an opening toward the international classical and modern repertories, the very long-running series Sur toutes les scenes du monde introduced the public for over 30 years to European authors writing in many languages (in French translations), to American authors, and to major classical and modern French authors.

     Three humorous works stood out for their literary value: Carte blanche, a satire on society and its traditional culture; Chez Miville, a parody of the ideologies of change of the 1960s; and D'1me certaine maniere, an ironic look at the new currents of thought of the period.

Since 1970: More Stations and Missions

     In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of Quebec French-language radio stations more than doubled, from 70 to nearly 1 50. Radio broadcasting was no longer considered by the Canadian Radio Television Commission (CRTC, the federal regulation agency) as a service but as a business to be opened up to free-market competition. The concept of serving the needs of a territory to ensure communication has given way to the notion of markets to conquer, develop, and consolidate. For all commercial stations, radio is first and foremost an enterprise that has to provide a return on investments comparable to that of any other business. Only public radio has escaped this definition, but it is also under attack, forced to restrict its field of action so as not to interfere with the private sector, and every successful program that it broadcasts is perceived by the private sector as unfair competition. The very legitimacy of the public sector meets with such opposition that in Quebec and elsewhere, associations have been formed to bolster public opinion in favor of governmental financing of public radio.

     In Quebec, community radio stations appeared in the mid- 197os. With limited means and relying on financing from associations and on voluntary involvement, they came to reach out to diverse audiences, specialized in major cities and generalized in many of the more remote regions.

     Therefore, during this period, Quebec radio went through not only a fragmentation of its audience, but also a profound modification of the social consensus on the role of radio in society. Private stations, rooted in their networks, closed their news offices, no longer hired journalists, and rebroadcast news bulletins written by a central agency. The content on private radio stations, in Canada as in the United States, became polarized into talk or music-based radio. In both cases, the music aired was imposed by the record companies and by the commercial circuits of the distributors. Radio was no longer an experimental stage for young Quebec artists, but a link in the distribution chain of the major producers.

     Within the domain of talk radio, however, certain stations maintained a format that continued, in a manner acceptable to today's popular culture, missions geared toward information and education. Whether it be through in-depth interviews, exchanges between hosts and audience members, the formula of on-air telephone polls, or commentary on daily events, certain stations kept elements of what had defined the originality of Quebec radio.

     On public radio, this culture of analysis of and commentary on current affairs occupied a privileged niche. Public radio remained, especially in drive time, the most practical medium as well as the most economical.

     Community radio stations reached out to more specific audiences. They also allowed for the broadcast of international news related to countries of origin, especially news not circulated by the major news agencies or commercial stations. Encouraging solidarity within or among specific groups, discussions on social questions, and the expression of more traditional values were the characteristics of many community radio stations. Also, in many regions, community radio stations were the instrument for the dissemination of a regional identity, as well as an experimental stage for nonprofessional creators and communicators.

     During the 1980s a broad range of missions was offered by radio to the variety of Quebec audiences. Young audiences interested in pop culture, young adults at the university level, retired persons concerned by issues related to volunteer work, working audiences seeking to travel efficiently through the city, exhausted listeners seeking calmness-all these audiences could, at any time of the day, find their own type of radio. They could find rock music, classical music, ballads, American music from the Anglophone stations, familiar conversations with the audience, hosts specializing in provoking strong reactions by commenting on current affairs of major and minor importance, religious programs, university courses, and sports-all kinds of sports, live and in rebroadcasts, described and commented upon. Within all these types of content, advertising is in control of the selection of major time slots and their content. It is this very busy landscape, a type of untamed wilderness, that has become the popular cultural environment of Canadian French-language radio for the last few decades.

English-Language Programming

     On the evening of 20 May 1920, singer Dorothy Lutton strolled to a microphone in the Chateau Laurier Hotel in Canada's capital city of Ottawa. Her audience consisted of Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden, the future prime minister William Lyon MacKenzie King, the Duke of Devonshire, and Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Steffansson. The four dignitaries and assorted guests had been part of an audience listening to a lecture on war inventions. Now they were to be treated to Miss Lutton's songs, as were a number of others in and around the Montreal area. The singer's voice was being carried to radio station XWA by telegraph wires. Those fortunate enough to have access to receiving sets were about to hear the first organized radio program to be broadcast in Canada.

     Radio penetration and the consequent appetite for programming characterized much of the 1920s. Regulations were few; facilities ranged from small studios in the back of retail stores to state-of-the-art facilities in big cities. Programs were experimental and erratic. Until the early 1930s, radio licenses remained exclusively in private hands, and the private sector determined program tastes.

     Nearly nine out of ten Canadians lived within ninety miles· of the U.S. border, much as they do today. Large American corporations such as RCA and CBS took an early interest in broadcasting, with the consequence that they had a he.ad start in developing popular and marketable programming. American tastes in programming soon became Canadian tastes. Canadians quickly demonstrated their preferences for popular American programs. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s, NBC's Amos 'n' Andy was the most popular radio program in Canada. In 1925 the Toronto newspaper the Telegram asked readers to report on their favorite radio stations. The first 17 places were filled by stations in Pittsburgh, Schenectady, Buffalo, and New York City. U.S. programs dominated Canadian radio sets, which were seldom tuned to the Canadian National Railways (CNR) network, which began producing dramatic programs, high-quality musical shows, children's programs, and some information programming in 1925.

     Canadian stations were more than willing to affiliate with American networks. CFCF joined NBC-the program schedule was top-heavy with musical programming, and CFCF broadcast no news. The station carried only one Canadian network show, Melody Mike's Music Shop. Together, CFRB and CKGW in Toronto, along with CFCF and CKAC in Montreal, turned over one-third of their cumulative broadcast day to American-produced programming. CFRB, affiliated with CBS, joined the network for half its broadcast day. By 1931 nearly all radio comedy and drama was being produced by advertising agencies with business offices in both Canada and the United States. There were virtually non dramatic programs produced in Canada. Only one serious dramatic program appeared on the airwaves during the early 1930s. The CNR historical series Romance of Canada, written by Merrill Deni­son and directed by Tyrone Guthrie, was a harbinger of things to come in Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio drama.

     The late 1920s witnessed a number of significant events in program development. When Canada celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation on 1 July 1927, a number of stations hooked up in the country's first network to broadcast the celebration program. In March 1928 the Department of Marine and Fisheries turned its attention to what Canadians were hearing on Canadian radio and canceled the licenses of a number of stations operated by the International Bible Students Association (Jehovah's Witnesses).

     After its creation in 1936, the CBC enjoyed legal protection as the only national radio network. As a consequence, programming became divided: CBC programming was more national in character, and the private stations designed programs for local tastes. Whereas the CBC broadcast hockey games and live drama from coast to coast, local stations developed talk shows, some local drama, and live dance music programs. In spite of their subservient place in the broadcasting universe, private stations continued to attract huge audiences, built mainly on American imports, such as the Jack Benny Show, Gangbusters, and Green Hornet. After many of these programs had either ceased to exist or moved into television, Toronto's CFRB continued to broadcast Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar into the early 1960s.

     When World War II broke out, CBC Radio joined the war effort with a stream of carefully composed propaganda programs intended to keep up spirits at home. The war effort permeated information, entertainment, and musical programming. The CBC established a second network in 1944: the founding network became the Trans-Canada and the new operation the Dominion network. Most serious programming remained with Trans-Canada stations. In 1947 CBC Radio launched CBC Wednesday Night, an eclectic mixture of music and information aimed at a high-end audience. The Dominion network was established to act as a commercially based programming source for Canadian productions of a lighter nature. It was hoped that privately owned stations would join the Dominion network. The network was a marginal success. With the increasing reach of television, it closed in 1962 and converted its Toronto flagship station to a French language operation.

     Following World War II, the CBC continued in its dual role broadcaster and regulator. Private broadcasters never accepted their subservient role and finally, in 1958, the newly elected federal government of John Diefenbaker revised the Broadcasting Act and removed the regulatory powers from the CBC, turning them over to a new agency, the Board of Broadcast Governors. When the Board began to move into programming questions, the private broadcasters resisted.

     The conflict pointed out a number of weaknesses in the Broadcasting Act, which in turn led to revisions in 1968, when the Board of Broadcast Governors was replaced by the CRTC with a much stronger nationalist mandate. The agency imposed Canadian content requirements on not only television but AM radio as well. Although FM radio did not have to meet specific targets during its formative years, the CRTC dictated how much spoken-word programming had to be carried, as well as news and sports content. Application forms for licenses and license renewals contained pages on which broadcasters had to calculate down to the second each kind of broadcasting endeavor that would be undertaken during a week of programming. Once accepted, the CRTC treated this Promise of Performance as a contract, not a guideline.

     The CRTC was created when broadcasting in Canada was entering the first phases of extensive expansion. FM radio was beginning to erode the base that AM radio had enjoyed since the 1920s. Private radio defined a survival agenda based on local news, popular music, and in some cases phone-in shows.

     The CBC was one of the first organizations to respond to the new environment. Faced with collapsing audiences, the radio service underwent radical programming changes. The new CBC programming was to be based on information on the AM side (now Radio One) and music on the FM side (now Radio Two). Shows such as Morningside (now This Morning), As It Happens, Metro Morning, and others focused on current affairs. The new stereo service offered an eclectic mix of what it now calls "Classics and Beyond." In the early 1990s CBC radio began to abandon many of its AM stations across the country, opting to place Radio One programs on FM channels as well. Private AM stations started to abandon music programming near the end of the 1980s, opting instead for a variety of talk formats, including phone-in shows and all-news or sports formats. Many AM stations followed the CBC lead and abandoned their channels for FM alternatives.