Vancouver: The CRTC, capitulating to the will of the federal cabinet and Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, issued a call for bids Feb. 28 for an over-the-air ethnic television station in the Greater Vancouver market.

The call, a victory for ethnic TV supporters, comes just eight months after the broadcast regulator denied the last proposal for such a station.

On July 6, the CRTC granted a Victoria licence to CHUM and a Fraser Valley-specific licence to religious station Trinity Television. But supporters of multicultural programming in B.C. were outraged and cited "eastern discrimination" when the three eastern-based commissioners, including former chair Francoise Bertrand, nixed Rogers Media’s application for LMTV, a clone of multicultural signal CFMT in Toronto.

Western-based commissioners Cindy Grauer and Barbara Cram approved the Rogers proposal and published dissenting opinions.

"Vancouver is now arguably the most culturally diverse city in Canada," stated Grauer in her dissent last year, "and while the multicultural communities in both Montreal and Toronto are served by a free, local, over-the-air ethnic television service, Vancouver has none."

Stated Cram: "If the demand in this market were not seen as sufficient, this would mean there would never be another ethnic television station in Canada."

Supporters successfully appealed the decision by lobbying Copps and the federal cabinet last fall. "Canadians deserve access to Canadian programming that reflects that diversity," said Copps, who used Section 15 of the Broadcasting Act to grant the appeal in October.

The leading candidate in this race is Rogers – a perennial applicant and, to date, a two-time loser in the recent Vancouver station races.

LMTV, in its $30-million proposal, promised to produce more Canadian news and current affairs programming and would establish Ottawa and Victoria news bureaus. Dinner-hour newscasts would include a one-hour Chinese show and a one-hour Punjabi show. Each hour would be split evenly between local and national news. The station expects to have little reliance on imported programming.

According to LMTV, there are 800,000 people in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland who speak neither English nor French as their first language. While 40% of LMTV’s free, over-the-air signal on basic cable was going to be in English, the balance of the programming schedule was to be split between 15 languages, including Chinese, Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish and Greek.

Licence applications from Rogers and others are due by June 29. *

-www.crtc.gc.ca