1. Birth of Radio-Television in the Northwest Territories

    For most western societies, television has become a dominant feature of daily routine living. In Northern America as well as in Western Europe, a majority of the population has been familiar with television for forty or forty-five years and lives in large urban areas with a wide range of other recreational activities. Our experience of television has been a gradual one. First because radio was already well-spread but also because it came as an electronic extension of previously existing entertainment outlets such as cinema, circus, theatre or variety shows.
    Things are quite different for the Inuit and the other inhabitants of the Northwest Territories. They live in small isolated settlements with almost no entertainment facilities in comparison with their southern fellow-citizens and many have had television for less than twenty-five years.
    This section is devoted to a historical analysis of the evolution of radio-television in the Canadian North, a process which culminated with the first broadcasting via the Anik A satellite in 1973. Its aim is to offer an overview of the different financial and technical structures the development of radio-television called for in the Northwest Territories (whether in order to meet the expectations of their populations or not). Besides, it shows that this evolution is not isolated but is rather the last instance of a cultural invasion problem which has been recurrent throughout Canadian broadcasting history. The very arrival of television and early stages of experience are exemplified through the study of a small Arctic settlement of the Keewatin district, Rankin Inlet.

A) Pre-Television Radio

    Unsurprisingly, the story of mass communication in the North begins with radio and Canada is indeed one of the pioneer countries in the story of wireless technology. On December 12, 1901, Marconi's telegraphy signal originating from Cornwall reached Newfoundland, thus being the first transatlantic wireless signal. Soon, the first Wireless and Telegraph Act was passed naming the Department of Marine and Fisheries as licensing authority and in 1913 the Radio Telegraph Act included the transmission of voices. Regular broadcasting began in the early 1920s with Marconi's XWA station in Montreal (licensed in September 1919). Its signal could be "heard clearly" as far as Ottawa. XWA was quickly followed by commercial stations owned by large corporations (radio manufacturers, railway companies...) or newspapers.
    Ten years after XWA Montreal, 75 stations (English and French) and 300,000 receiving sets had been licensed in Canada. However, only the larger markets (Halifax NS,Moncton NB, Québec PQ, Montreal PQ, Ottawa ON, Windsor ON, Toronto ON, Hamilton ON, Winnipeg MN, Edmonton AB, Vancouver BC) were concerned. Progressively, a first network was set up by the Canadian National Railways (today known as CN), one of the railway companies (the other being Canadian Pacific). CN's network connected a dozen affiliated stations across the country and three production centres in Ottawa ON, Moncton NB and Vancouver BC. Its programming was distinctively Canadian in comparison with the small independent stations the schedules of which were mainly composed of cheaper syndicated American programs. Forty-four years before the invasion of Arctic airwaves by southern television, Canada was facing a problem that would later re-occur within its territory.
    With the Canadian listeners' discontent growing, the government appointed in 1928 a Royal Commission to :

examine into the broadcasting situation in the Dominion of Canada and to make recommendations to the Government as to future administration, management, control and financing thereof.(1)

    The 1929 report recommended the creation of a nationally owned coast-to-coast network financed by licence fees and government subsidies. Such a network was to be granted enough funds to produce attractive Canadian programs. Unfortunately, Canada had been hit by the Great Depression as well as a changeover in political power and radio broadcasting was no longer a priority.
    The national network eventually came into being : the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Act authorised the appointment of the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission on May 26, 1932. The C.R.B.C., which took over the CN network, began broadcastings to the far north on a regular basis in December 1933 with a now famous program called the Northern Messenger. Yet, according to Doug Kirkaldy(2), "the armed forces had begun broadcasting [in the north] with very low-power transmitters as far back as the 1920s". During its four years of operation, the CRBC offered a quality bilingual service with the concurrence of the BBC but soon came to face a recurrent problem through this essay : the lack of money.
    In 1936, another parliamentary broadcasting committee was appointed. Its recommendations supported the creation of a more powerful corporation following the example of the BBC and reaffirmed the principle of public ownership and control. A new Broadcasting Act was passed on November 2, 1936 creating the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also known as the Société Radio-Canada.

    CBC has certainly been the main actor in the development of both radio and television in the north but also one of the key promoters of the Canadian unity throughout a twentieth century plagued with Quebec's threats of independence.
    Today, the CBC, a crown corporation, is governed by the 1991 Broadcasting Act and subject to the regulations of the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission also called Conseil de la radiodiffusion et des télécommunications canadiennes (CRTC), an independent federal agency that regulates radio, television, cable, telephone and telecommunications across Canada. Identified in the 1991 Act as the "public broadcaster", CBC has a unique mandate:

-be predominantly and distinctively Canadian,

-reflect Canada and its regions to national and regional audiences, while serving the special needs of those regions,

-actively contribute to the flow and exchange of cultural expression,

-be in English and in French, reflecting the different needs and circumstances of each official language community, including the particular needs of English and French linguistic minorities,

-strive to be of equivalent quality in English and in French

-contribute to shared national consciousness and identity,

-be made available throughout Canada by the most appropriate and efficient means and as resources become available for the purpose, and

-reflect the multicultural and multiracial culture of Canada.(3)

    When it was created in 1936, CBC had twofold objectives according to the chairman of the board of governors, Leonard Brockington: "to make it possible for every Canadian to hear CBC's program" and to "offset the American invasion of Canadian airwaves"(4).
     It is worth mentioning that today, native broadcasters share the same vision. In one year, new transmitters, new stations and new frequencies increased the national coverage from 49% to 70% of the population. Meanwhile, the only service available in the Northwest Territories still consisted of freak receptions of the Northern Messenger. When war broke out in 1939, new high-powered transmitters had been opened and national coverage was near 90% of the population.
    In 1944, the southern provinces were served by three networks, the Trans-Canada (the original English network), Radio-Canada (French) and the Dominion (a new syndication network) when the CBC International Service (today Radio-Canada International) was opened. This new service was operated by CBC but financed exclusively by parliamentary grants. Two 50-kilowatt short-wave transmitters had been built near Sackville NB. The programs were directed towards Canadian troops overseas (e.g. in Greenland) as well as European listeners. However, it constituted the first regular broadcasts available (weather permitting) north of the 60th parallel. These receptions were only the result of chance and here comes another recurrent pattern: providing broadcasts to the north was not a priority. The service included programs in English, French but also German, Czech, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese. Interestingly enough, there were broadcasts in Czech before broadcasts in Inuktitut.

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