The end to its eight-week lockout leaves the CBC facing a lingering rift with its workers, a jilted audience that must be wooed back from the competition, calls for president Robert Rabinovitch’s resignation and an uphill battle in the already crowded fall TV season.
‘No one is going in without realizing this was a big rupture in this [worker-management] relationship, and there’s work needed to overcome this,’ Arnold Amber, president of the Canadian Media Guild’s CBC branch, said after his membership returned to work on Oct. 11.

It’s no surprise that all sides are talking tough ahead of the Oct. 24 CRTC hearings on new pay channels. What is perhaps unexpected is some of the opposition the proposed channels are facing.
Four applicants have made proposals for four new services – Spotlight Entertainment, the Canadian Film Channel put forth by Channel Zero, Allarco Entertainment, and Quebec-based Groupe Archambault, which is looking to launch an English/French service called BOOMTV.

Producers and studio owners are keeping an eye on the Canadian dollar, which is once again holding at unusually high levels against the U.S. greenback.

Vancouver: At the wrap of the 24th Vancouver International Film Festival, organizer Michael Francis declared to a sold-out Vogue Theatre that ‘this was the most successful festival ever.’

CanWest Global Communications has unloaded the Canadian rights to the television library of its failed subsidiary Fireworks Entertainment, selling to Motion Picture Distribution LP for an undisclosed amount. The limited partnership essentially acts as the distribution arm of Alliance Atlantis Communications.

Atom Egoyan’s controversial thriller Where the Truth Lies was overshadowed at the Canadian box office over its opening week of Oct. 7, when Les Voleurs d’enfance, a Quebec documentary about abused children, grossed nearly $850,000 – more than double Truth’s take, while playing on fewer screens.

Ending a year of agony for sports fans, the National Hockey League opened its 2005/06 season to record ratings on TSN and CBC’s Hockey Night in Canada, demonstrating that the hockey faithful have not gone astray after last year’s season was wiped out by a labor dispute.

The Hot Sheet tracks Canadian box-office results for the period Oct. 7-13 and television ratings for the period Oct. 10-16.

* Catherine Donohue is the new VP of distribution and sales operations for Cookie Jar Entertainment, coming over from CBC, where she was in charge of children’s and youth programming.

Broadcast execs will be thinking ahead when they converge on Winnipeg next month for the annual powwow of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, which will focus on how new technologies are changing the future of TV and radio.

Now in its second year as an autumn event, the American Film Market expects toattract a record 7,000 attendees next month, at least 200 of them from Canada.

CTV’s newsroom drama The Eleventh Hour and CBC news magazine the fifth estate received 15 nods each, while Showcase’s popular Trailer Park Boys was not mentioned in the category it won last year, as the 2005 Gemini Awards nominations were announced on Oct. 11 on Global’s Entertainment Tonight Canada.