Vancouver: CHUM Television’s The New VI in Victoria laid off 29 full- and part-time employees July 7 as part of a restructuring that also includes changes in programming and management.

‘This is a difficult but necessary action as the station continues to perform below our expectations after three years of operation,’ says Stephen Tapp, executive VP television at CHUM Ltd. ‘These changes are essential to building a profitable business that will continue to serve local Victoria and Vancouver Island viewers.’

Politician-turned-talk show host Moe Sihota was among the highest-profile personalities given the pink slip. His shows VILand Voices and RightOn – the latter of which he cohosted with also-terminated Norman Spector and Pia Shandel – were canceled.

Other on-air personalities dropped include Briony Penn, Klaudia Ceglarz, Tricia Mausa and Cheekwan Ho. Other programs cut include Environmental and Talk TV, hosted by soon-to-retire Laura Acton. Barry Dodd, director of programming, and Ed Yiu, regional director or operations and technology, were laid off from the management team.

Brad Phillips, VP CHUM Television B.C., says the canceled shows were low ratings draws and therefore low revenue draws.

‘We’re going to put more of the station’s energy and resources into the morning show [New Day], the dinnertime news show and the late-night newscast,’ he says. ‘We were doing more [local programming] than we could afford to do.’

CHUM does not disclose the revenue from The New VI, but Phillips says the station will still meet its commitment to air 26 hours of local programming per week.

CHUM says the one-time cost of the changes will be $650,000, by the time they are fully implemented in September, and the annual savings are $1.4 million.

The staff complement at The New VI now includes 93 full-time and 13 part-time workers.

-www.chumlimited.com