Photo by Erik Drost/Flickr

When it finally came time to push back against Big Media’s closures and layoffs in Canada, there’s no surprise that it wasn’t the government belatedly wielding a stiff-arm. Our quisling politicians in Ottawa are scared to death of an uber-concentrated news media that has so much power over their hopes for re-election. Instead of reining them in, they have thrown money at Big Media in the vain hope that it might stem the cuts. No, in the end it was the workers that have been the victim of so much devastation who went all Howard Beale and said, in effect, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” as the fictional news anchor did in the classic 1976 film Network. It started in 2009 at CHEK-TV in BC’s sleepy capital of Victoria, which was threatened with closure by Canwest Global Communications shortly before its enormous debt forced the company into bankruptcy during the Great Recession. Its workers instead formed a co-operative to buy CHEK, and they have since made it a roaring success. When Bell cut a swathe through Canadian media in 2021, closing a half dozen radio stations including its Vancouver sports talk station TSN 1040, CHEK picked up two of its hosts, Don Taylor and Rick Dhaliwal, to create a popular morning show. Other 1040 hosts, such as Matt Sekeres and Blake Price, took advantage of the online possibilities for podcasting and joined the Nation Network of digital sports media.

Bell was hardly finished wreaking devastation on our media, however, as two years later it eviscerated its remaining broadcast staff by laying off 1,300, or six percent of its entire media division, while closing another half-dozen radio stations and shutting down CTV’s last foreign bureaus in London and Los Angeles. That’s when Jason Gregor, a sports talk host at Bell’s shuttered TSN 1260 in Edmonton, got together with the Nation Network and Stingray Radio, which is best-known for its cable music channels but also owns more than 100 terrestrial stations in Canada. Three months later, Stingray rebranded its little-noticed oldies station W1440 in nearby Wetaskiwin as Sports 1440, putting Gregor and many of his ousted colleagues back in the saddle. Others went the online route with podcasts posted on the website Edmonton Sports Talk, which has also placed some of its shows on FM stations. All of a sudden, between old media and new, Edmonton is now awash with more sports talk than ever.

Bell’s cuts came not because it is unprofitable. Far from it. Our largest media company made an operating profit of a stunning $10.65 billion in 2025, which was $69 million more than the year before, and it was all made at a scandalous profit margin of 43.6 percent. Its media........

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