The station is owned and operated by network parent Corus Entertainment, with studios on the 30th floor of 201 Portage in downtown Winnipeg, and transmitter atop the building.

In February 1973, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced that it had received two applications for new television stations in Winnipeg.

[2] The CRTC solicited competing applications for the new Winnipeg television licence, and Peter Liba, who was then the executive assistant to Manitoba Liberal Party leader Izzy Asper, suggested that they make a bid.

[3] Wanting to save money on buying the needed equipment, Asper negotiated with Gordon McLendon to acquire the assets of KCND, convincing him that a new Winnipeg station would cut into KCND's revenues and that Winnipeg advertisers would likely lose tax deductions for American advertising costs.

At the CRTC's public hearings in Winnipeg in May 1974, Canwest noted that the acquisition of KCND would give their new Winnipeg station a $2 million advertising base and would save $1.5 million in capital and start-up costs compared to the alternative of launching a completely new station.

[4] At the same hearing, competing applications were presented by Western Manitoba Broadcasters Ltd. and by Communications Winnipeg Co-Op, which proposed a member-supported non-commercial station.

[4] In September 1974, the CRTC awarded the Winnipeg channel 9 licence to Canwest, which formally took possession and assumed day-to-day management of KCND-TV on March 31, 1975 (due to foreign ownership restrictions, the McLendon Corporation remained the official licensee of KCND until it surrendered the station's broadcasting licence to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission [FCC] later that year).

[10] In 1981, KCND became the call letters for KCND-FM, the first Prairie Public Radio station in Bismarck, North Dakota.

The same year, the U.S. FCC issued a construction permit for a new station to serve Pembina, North Dakota on channel 12.

During a June 1981 hearing to extend CKND-TV's signal into the Westman area and to hear the application by Western Manitoba Broadcasters Ltd. (Craig) for a new television station at Portage la Prairie, Canwest said that the Westman transmitter on a VHF channel would reach up to 175,000 more viewers than with the CKND-TV Winnipeg signal.

[13] Canwest also stated that it would require a population of over 100,000 to serve the Interlake area with two or three UHF transmitters, rather than the 30,000 that existed at the time.

[16] Faced with the dilemma that the films would typically need to be sold to the national CBC or CTV networks to attain profitability, but the station would have to accept a reduced price if the films had already aired in prime time in a major Canadian television market, station manager Stan Thomas would air the films on CKND in an obscure overnight timeslot so that they would be eligible for ACTRA Award consideration, while still having been essentially unseen by an actual television audience so that he could secure the maximum price from a network.

In December 2009, longtime anchor Eva Kovacs announced that she would be leaving CKND after nearly twelve years with the station, to work for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority in 2010.

The spring and summer of 2011 brought a few high-profile departures to the station; first weekend anchor and reporter Nicole Dube left to become the Manitoba correspondent for Sun News Network.

In late 2011, Global Winnipeg became the first television station in Manitoba to broadcast its local news in high definition.