Canada Radio and television ownership in Canada is governed by the CRTC. The CRTC does not regulate ownership of newspapers or Internet media, although ownership in those media may be taken into consideration in decisions pertaining to a licensee's broadcasting operations.
Apart from the public Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, commercial media in Canada are primarily owned by a small number of companies, including Bell Globemedia, Canwest Global, CHUM, Rogers, Standard, Shaw, Astral, Newcap and Quebecor. Each of these companies holds a diverse mix of television, cable television, radio, newspaper, magazine and/or internet operations. Some smaller media companies also exist.
Due to Canada's smaller population, some types of media consolidation have always been allowed. In small markets where the population could not adequately support multiple television stations competing for advertising dollars, the CRTC began permitting twinstick operations, in which the same company operated both CBC and CTV affiliates in the same market, in 1967. This model of television ownership was restricted to smaller markets until the mid-1990s, when the CRTC began to allow companies to own multiple television stations in large markets such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver.
As of 2005, almost all Canadian television stations are owned by national media conglomerates. These acquisitions have been controversial; stations in smaller markets have frequently had their local news programming cut back or even eliminated. For instance, CTV's stations in Northern Ontario and in Atlantic Canada are served by a single regional newscast for each region, with only brief local news inserts for headlines of purely local interest. This, in turn, has contributed to the rise of independent local webmedia such as SooToday.com,The Tyeeand rabble.ca.
Many, though not all, Canadian newspapers are also owned by the same media conglomerates which own the television networks. Companies which own both television and newspaper assets have strict controls on the extent to which they can merge the operations. The issue of newspaper ownership has been particularly controversial in Canada, especially in the mid-1990s when Conrad Black's Hollinger acquired the Southam chain. Black's 1999 sale of the Hollinger papers resulted in an increase in the diversity of newspaper ownership, with new ownership groups such as Osprey Media entering the business, but was even more controversial because the CRTC, waiving its former rules against broadcasting companies acquiring newspaper assets, permitted Canwest Global to purchase many of the Hollinger papers. The Toronto Star is a partial exception to this — it is owned by an independent company, but is itself a part owner of Bell Globemedia.
In radio, a company is normally restricted to owning no more than three stations in a single market, of which only two can be on the same broadcast band. (That is, a company may own two FM stations and an AM station, or two AMs and one FM, but may not own three FMs.) Under certain circumstances, local marketing agreements may be implemented, or the ownership rule may be waived entirely. For example, in Windsor, Ontario, CHUM Limited owns all of the city's commercial broadcast outlets, due to the city's unique circumstances — being in the immediate environs of the Metro Detroit market in the United States, Windsor has historically been a difficult market for commercial broadcasters, so the CRTC waived its usual ownership restrictions to help protect the Windsor stations' financial viability.
When licensing a new broadcast outlet, the CRTC has a general (but not strict) tendency to favour new and local broadcasters. However, in the modern media context such broadcasters often struggle for financial viability, and are often subsequently acquired by larger companies. The CRTC rarely denies the acquisition applications. Canada also has strict laws around non-Canadian ownership of cultural industries; a media company in Canada may not be more than 20 per cent foreign-owned.
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