[1] The objective of such media in Canada is to create a voice for a community of a particular ethnic background, challenge social injustices, and foster cultural pride for minority and immigrant Canadians.
[5] Today, multicultural media is available across Canada from small newspapers to full-fledged broadcasting stations run by the private sector, such as OMNI TV.
[6] Today, multicultural media is available across Canada from small newspapers to full-fledged broadcasting stations run by the private sector, such as OMNI TV.
According to the act, 60% of programming on a channel, whether on the radio or television, has to be considered ethnic in order to be approved for the licence under this policy.
[3] Founded in 1992 by Egbert Gaye, the Montreal Community Contact contains stories pertaining to all black Canadians regardless of country of origin (unlike Ghanaian News).
[3] This “calendar journalism” presents a very limited view of these communities and only further removes them from being included in to mainstream discourse as this coverage further perpetuates otherness.
The reductionist coverage of black individuals in the cities mainstream print publications is undoubtedly related to the lack of diversity in the newsrooms.
Ultimately the Multicultural Policy, which was created to avoid this under and misrepresentation, does not address the racism that causes these structural inequalities in the media.
[3] This is problematic as by making the paper only available to the ethnic audiences, little impact is made in changing the image of minorities to the mainstream population.
Using custom studies and current demographic records provides CHIN the accurate numbers behind their audiences, making advertisers support the ethnic broadcaster.
[23] Due to the success of CHIN, many companies have begun to specialize in ethnocentric demographic and lifestyle data to help predict not only the media preferences of ethnic audiences but also their spending habits.
[23] No longer merely relying on Statistics Canada for information on minorities in the nation gives a more of a well-rounded look at the complexities of Canadians of various cultural backgrounds.
[22] This includes the children of immigrants who grew up with English and French as their dominant language but want to learn more about their heritages traditional music, cuisine, and fashion.
[22][24] CJNT-DT is a multicultural broadcast television station in Montreal whose roots are traced back to a public-access ethnic cable channel that launched in the 1980s called Télévision Ethnique du Québec (TEQ).
[22] The audiences of ethnic stations are large enough to matter to advertisers, and this was made evident in the case of Italian-Australian comic Joe Avati's local Canadian tour.
With this success due in part to TLN’s promotion, Avati expanded his tour by seven more shows in southern Ontario and Montréal.
[22] One of the problems ethic television station face is the lack of both qualitative and quantitative research information about their audiences.
[24] This problem led to OMNI’s collaboration with Manifold Data Mining to provide the numbers to verify the Chinese and South Asian markets purchasing power to advertisers.
[23] However, other channels that wish to corroborate their ethnic audience numbers do not have such tools thus severely affecting their funding from advertisers.
[7] This statement was extremely problematic as at that time, though there were 93 foreign-owned channels licensed for broadcasting in Canada but only 10 were in languages other than English or French.
[8] Furthermore, in the 14 largest TV markets, only 4 analogue specialty services were available which only catered to Italian, Spanish, Cantonese, South Asian and Greek communities.
In February 2004 there was an attempt to amend the Radiocommunication Act to increase the penalty for transmitting or decoding unauthorized satellite signal.
[7] As the CRTC refused to add more third-language channels to the existing cable and satellite services, many saw this amendment as a direct attack on the minorities whose needs were not being met by the framework set in place.
They stated “Under the guise of a seemingly legitimate news agency, Al Jazeera has provided hatemongers and terrorists with a platform for their view.”[7] Ultimately, many in the Jewish communities found the station allowed and promoted anti-Semitic sentiments.
To allow any segment of the population to influence the CRTC’s decision on an ethnic channel can keep any third-language station off of Canadian airwaves legally.
[8] As Shaw Communications President Peter Bissonette explained by taking the responsibility which came with Al Jazeera, meant having a human monitoring the channel for 24 hours, who was fluent in Arabic, and knew contemporary broadcasting standards.
[7] Due to this demand in human and technological services, Al Jazeera is still not viewed on television in Canadian homes legally.