Why we cancelled your Saturday Evening News

Unlike online media or platforms, CHCH operates with a federal licence because we are an essential public service delivered freely over the public airwaves.

With that licence comes serious obligations. We are bound by ethics and practices from the Radio Television Digital News Association to make sure we tell our viewers, readers and listeners the truth as we find it. Our advertising has to be honest. We must be careful airing vulgar language, violence and age-appropriate content. We are required to broadcast emergency alerts.

We also have to air certain minimum hours of Canadian content and are obligated to spend a big chunk of our revenue on it. Most of what CHCH spends when it comes to Cancon is on local news. Our licence says the floor for CHCH’s local content is just 3 hours of TV news per week. However, we produce 28 hours per week, to say nothing of our podcasts and all the excellent journalism published on chch.com and circulated in newsletters and on our available social channels.

We dramatically exceed the prescribed level of news because we believe deeply in our mission. We are committed to serving our viewers, readers and listeners with researched and vetted professional news and local content. Our news standards are dear to us. It’s what makes us the gold standard when compared to social media garbage and AI slop.

It has historically been possible for us to do this because returns were once very good and profits supported a robust business. Once.

But, the economics of the business have now been co-opted by foreign attention miners who care only about enriching themselves by keeping people addicted to their apps, and not about properly informing us.

CHCH now competes with these large foreign platforms for the attention of the citizens in our region while continuing to fulfill the obligations set out in our license. The platforms, however, have no obligations to Canadians whatsoever. Meta has no requirement for making sure what appears on Facebook and Instagram is true and has demonstrated it does not care about right and wrong. Fakes abound on TikTok and YouTube, too. Netflix has no requirements to spend any money on or to offer a minimum number of Canadian stories. Neither does Amazon, Apple or any of the others.

And Meta, Google and Amazon now vacuum up more than 75 per cent of the ad dollars in Canada, all while stealing our content to train their artificial intelligence. CRTC data shows that since 2018, ad revenues flowing into private TV broadcasters like CHCH have fallen 25 per cent, or close to $400 million.

These massive imbalances have been apparent for some time and the Canadian government did, slowly, establish the Online Streaming Act and the Online News Act. The CRTC then put policies around those laws which would have forced American platforms to contribute a small portion of revenues earned here to Canadian entertainment and news, albeit at a far lower level than Canadian broadcasters. Thanks to the Online News Act, Google contributes $100 million per year to local news in Canada and CHCH receives about $460,000 from that fund. Facebook chose to block legitimate news on its platforms to dodge any obligations.

In June, however, Prime Minister Mark Carney seemingly gave in to American demands and set aside the Online Streaming Act, saying it would instruct the CRTC to rethink its new policies. The industry was rife with rumours that the feds were also about cave to American demands and scrap the Online News Act.

Meanwhile, in 2025, the CRTC allowed Corus Entertainment’s 15 local TV stations into the Independent Local News Fund. The ILNF is financed from 0.3 per cent of each Canadian’s traditional TV subscription bill and is meant to buttress independent broadcasters committed to local news.

CHCH used to receive more than $2 million for the production of local news from the ILNF, but it has been cut by 45 per cent because Corus Entertainment’s Global stations were allowed in without any increase to the fund. This impact has been felt elsewhere already. Thunder Bay’s TBayTV cut its entire weekend news earlier this year while Pattison Media and Stingray closed three stations between them in 2025.

CHCH has held on but can’t keep taking financial hits and not reacting. While PM Carney said in June there will be $600 million worth of taxpayers money set aside for Canadian media, we have no idea when it will be distributed or how much might, in the end, flow to CHCH.

And for what it’s worth, we don’t want taxpayer funding. We believe those foreign platforms scooping hundreds of millions of dollars out of Canada should have an obligation to fund Canadian content such as news, just like CHCH does.

Now that Prime Minister Carney has walked away from negotiations with the U.S. and set out the country’s own retaliatory tariffs, our federal government has a chance to reset itself on the cultural files, to let the CRTC do the work it has been doing and make it clear to foreign streamers that as long as they are pulling hundreds of millions of dollars out of Canada, they have an obligation to fund Canadian content, including news.

All that having been said, the situation has forced us to trim costs. As of today, the Saturday Evening News at Six and 11 are cancelled. Instead, we will air our podcasts between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. and from 11-11:30 p.m. Local news, sports and weather will still be found in the ticker surrounding the video.

We will continue to have a team working hard to gather news on Saturdays and publish to chch.com. We are not letting anyone go. The Evening News will continue to be broadcast on TV Sunday-Friday, as will Morning Live, and Trending Now will return in October as planned.

We recognize the impact this change has on those who rely on our Saturday broadcasts and we are so grateful to our entire team at CHCH News as well as our viewers, readers and listeners for sticking with us. For more information or to share your feedback with us, please visit www.chch.com/protectyourlocalnews.

Greg O’Brien is news director at CHCH News. greg.obrien@chch.com