Owned and operated by network parent Corus Entertainment, the station maintains studios on Queen Street in downtown Kingston, and its transmitter is located near Highway 95 on Wolfe Island, south of the city.

It was originally a joint venture between Roy Thomson and the Davies family, owners of The Kingston Whig-Standard (the source of its callsign).

Children across the country were exposed to CKWS programming in the late 1970s and 1980s by the Harrigan series – a particularly innocent and low budget show about a leprechaun, starring Barry Dale.

[5] The switch was approved by the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission on August 27, 2015, when it dismissed objections by Rogers Media (who argued that the change was an "affiliation" and thus required CRTC consent to implement, and was not in the public interest because it created duplicate sources of CTV programming), and by a resident who complained that as he only received television over the air, he would lose his ability to receive CBC Television as a result of the disaffiliation.

Corus stated that it had "reimagined our broadcast schedule in Kingston, Peterborough, and Kelowna with a focus on supper hour and late-night news programming".

[21] The station was not obligated to convert this transmitter, as Kingston was not one of the 31 markets in which the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) imposed a mandatory analogue shutdown on August 31, 2011.