CKLN began as a closed circuit station set up in 1970 as Ryerson Community Radio, its broadcasts piped to loudspeakers around campus.

[5] The Globe and Mail says of the station that "it sat at the forefront of independent music and radical politics in the city for more than three decades, working with a shoe-string budget, and yet it somehow always managed to survive.

[5] Former station manager Adam Vaughan, later a Member of Parliament, said in a 2015 interview that "What was great about CKLN is that it combined the strength of Ryerson with the diversity of Toronto...

And instead of bringing diversity together, groups kind of started to fight with each other and it was hugely problematic in terms of trying to unify an audience... You could see the station drifting further and further away from a position of strength and experimentation into bitterness and at times, straight up incompetency.

"[9] By September 2003, following the departure of station manager Conrad Collaco,[10] CKLN was teetering on the brink of insolvency.

[15] The management and board of CKLN viewed the Special General Meeting as illegitimate along with the impeachment vote and subsequently dismissed several dozen volunteer programmers as well as two paid staff,[15] including the station's news director,[16] who was allegedly told she was being fired for not seeing "eye to eye" with the board.

[15] Station manager Mike Phillips claimed that members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and Ontario Coalition Against Poverty had stacked the February meeting and defended the dismissal of volunteer programmers by arguing, "If you have people decrying the station that is allowing them to go on the air, and breaking CRTC rules in the process, that can't be allowed to go on for very long.

[18] Responding to this action, the first board initiated a statement of claim in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice naming the RSU and Ryerson University as defendants.

On March 1, 2009, two individuals, Paulette Hamilton, one of the members of the first board who had been locked out the previous day, and Daibhid James, a programmer, were arrested after they "barricaded themselves into the radio station's studios.

"[20] Later that month, the Ryerson Student Centre board voted unanimously to close the station until both sides of the dispute could negotiate CKLN's future.

[23] During the period of the lockout, which lasted until mid-September 2009, CKLN broadcast unattended loops of previously aired programs, jazz and pre-recorded speeches.

[2] Even before CKLN resumed scheduled programming in late September 2009, the CRTC expressed concerns over the station's inability to comply with licence requirements during the dispute, such as playing the aforementioned loop for several months in 2009, its failure to properly submit on-air logger tapes, program logs and complete annual financial returns since 2007, and that the CRTC licence for CKLN had been transferred to a third party without authorization.

[25][27] In March 2010, the CRTC called CKLN to a hearing for May 12, 2010 in which the licensee was to "...show cause why the Commission should not take steps to suspend or revoke the broadcasting licence in question or why the Commission should not issue mandatory orders requiring the licensee to comply with the Regulations and its conditions of licence..." The hearing was postponed in part due to ongoing mediation efforts in the aforementioned Mary Young case.

During this period, the CRTC required the station to file monthly progress reports on its efforts to improve its licensing compliance.

[36] CKLN station manager Jacky Tuinstra-Harrison said that the CRTC failed to follow its own policy of graduated discipline: "The CRTC could have followed their own policy, but did not; they did not pursue avenues such as warnings, fines, mandatory orders or other options against CKLN, but moved directly to the most serious of measures- revocation.

[37] On April 18, 2011, in his inaugural television broadcast on Canada's Sun News Network, as well as his column in the Sun Media newspaper chain, conservative commentator Ezra Levant claimed that the CRTC's decision on CKLN was just another oppressive example of arbitrary government bureaucracy and interference into the lives and businesses of ordinary Canadians.

"[5] Vaughan told the Toronto Star that "It's very sad that the CRTC couldn't sit down and work with this clearly volunteer organization and give them the benefit of the doubt and help them solve the problem rather than simply render a very tough decision against them.

[54] In 2016, the CKLN-FM call sign was taken by Newcap Radio for a transmitter in Clarenville, Newfoundland and Labrador, which operates as a rebroadcaster of CHVO-FM in Carbonear.