Canada’s broadcasting system is adequately diversified to reflect and reach our ethnic communities and financial viability is improving, says the CRTC in a new 40-market benchmark survey.

‘We’re doing a lot of monitoring to see if our policies are having a positive impact,’ says CRTC spokesman Denis Carmel. ‘This was an internal study we chose to make public.’

In Canada’s 14 largest markets, for instance, television viewers who are not English-, French- or Aboriginal-Canadian have access to four or five of the five analogue ethnic specialties: Telelatino (Italian, Hispanic), Fairchild TV (Cantonese), SATV (Hindi and other South Asian languages), Odyssey (Greek) and Talentvision (Mandarin, Vietnamese and Korean).

Even in the Canadian markets where ethnic groups represent less than 10% of the population, says the regulator, homegrown ethnic analogue specialty services (with the exception of Talentvision) were widely distributed on cable or satellite.

Over-the-air television services include CJNT-TV Montreal with 877,000 viewers in the Italian, Chinese and Greek communities and OMNI, servicing 1.3 million viewers in Toronto and others in the Italian and Portuguese communities of southern Ontario. (M Channel, a multilingual over-the-air television channel not included in this survey, is launching in Vancouver this year.)

The CRTC’s list of foreign ethnic services includes ART America (Arabic), Deutsche Welle (German), Black Entertainment Television, The Filipino Channel, TV Japan, TV Polonia (Polish) and WMNB-TV (Russian-American Broadcasting Company).

Additionally, the CRTC has approved 44 Category 2 ethnic digital services, 10 of which are currently operating, including All TV (Korean), ATN Alpha Punjabi, ATN B4U Hindi Movie Channel), ATN Tamil Channel, Festival Portuguese Television, IPTN (Religious-ethnic/seven languages), OdysseyII (Greek), ITBC Television Canada (Tamil), S.S. TV (Punjabi) and Tamil Vision.

Between 1996 and 2000, Telelatino’s subscriber base increased 52% to nearly three million, advertising revenue jumped 198% to $6.8 million, and subscription revenue doubled to $3.4 million, indicating the improving fortunes of the domestic ethnic broadcasters. Telelatino’s pretax operating margins were 36% in 2000, compared to only 18% for English and 17% for French pay, pay-per-view and specialty services.

According to Statistics Canada in a December 2002 report, there are 126 different languages spoken in Canada, including more than 25 million English speakers and more than nine million French speakers. There are more than 680,000 Italian speakers, 610,000 Spanish speakers, 635,000 German speakers, 338,000 Punjabi speakers, nearly 400,000 Cantonese speakers and 97,000 Cree speakers.