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The profits were plowed back into the station. By July 1971 WHTV had three channels. By 1973 the hook up charge had dropped to $25 and the subscription fee to $15. Staff had grown to nearly a dozen. In the spring of 1979, the idea for a satellite network began to take shape and Hougen and his cable system manager, Rod Wheeler, set about writing his Down to Earth proposal for a unique distribution system that would solve the problems of communities like Whitehorse

Hougen complained in those days that too many people went to the Yukon with the idea of making a fast buck and then retiring 'outside' with the proceeds.

"Because of this attitude, many businesses never really get off the ground," he said at the time. "It's also an attitude that has severely retarded the economic, social and political growth of the territory. There just weren't enough Yukoners around who had faith in the country."

The intervening period has seen great changes and an improvement in the economy. The Territory exported $360 million in goods and services in 1996, including cold weather expertise and communications technology. Tourism draws 250,000 visitors a year. In September 1997, several Yukon organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce and Council of Yukon First Nations, got together to promote diversification through exports.

Broadcasting has played a big part in changing attitudes towards the Yukon. "The view of the North as a land of ice and snow is fast becoming time worn," says Hougen. "Winters are no longer the great dread they once were. The publicity emanating from and about the territory during the past couple of years has made people in the south more knowledgeable and more aware of the real North."

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In 1978 a study by the federal Department of Communications showed that residents of Canada's 24 largest cities could take their pick of more than a dozen television channels. By contrast, nearly one third of the rural population, about 1.8 million Canadians, were beyond the range of the transmitters and counted themselves lucky to be able to scrounge one or two fuzzy channels out of the haze. It was hardly surprising that many of them resorted to poaching American signals with illegal satellite dishes.

Nowhere was the situation more critical than in northern Canada, where the federal government was anxious to provide access to mainstream broadcasting to reinforce Canadian cultural sovereignty in the face of U.S. encroachment.

Canada had already become the first nation in the world to put a commercial satellite in orbit, and the solution to the broadcasting problem seemed to lie in a Canadian commercial service using Canadian satellites to distribute Canadian signals. Not at all clear was who would do it - and how.

Businessman Rolf Hougen, owner of signal-starved WHTV in Whitehorse the Yukon capital, was confident he had a concept that would work. In March 1979, he flew to Ottawa to present what he called his Down to Earth proposal. Signals sent to a geostationary satellite from uplinks across the country would be downlinked to cable television systems, new ones if necessary, started up by local entrepreneurs in small and remote pockets of habitation. The proposal would not interfere with the established broadcasting industry in Canada, he emphasized. As for American signals, they would come under Canadian regulatory control and would offer a cost effective package that would complement the Canadian package. "The North," Hougen declared, "has traditionally been the proving ground for new communication concepts and innovations, and again stands ready in this role."

Nothing like the service Hougen had in mind had ever been attempted on this scale, and he was applauded as a visionary. But not even the far-sighted Yukoner could have known just how severely he and his fellow founding partners and their resources would be tested before Cancom's survival, let alone its success, was assured. Their company, Canadian Satellite Communications Inc. (Cancom), would have to wrestle with daunting technological problems, bitter resistance from some illegal dish owners and segments of the broadcasting and cable television industry, and a financial burden that would force them to dig deep and come up with $38 million of their own money.

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At one stage the company came within a few weeks of running out of money, and with $5 million of his own money on the line, Hougen would be feeling "very, very vulnerable."

Cancom weathered the crises. But it did more than simply survive. It went on to become a one-of-a-kind success story, attracting international interest, rewarding its investors and delivering a force for cultural sovereignty and national unity in the form of broadcast services for areas of the country that were being neglected and resented it.

Among its numerous remarkable achievements, Cancom: constructed the first scrambled satellite television network in the world, featuring an ever expanding core of Canadian signals in English and French more than tripled its original four satellite uplinks added all five American networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, The Fox Network and PBS) to its package made it technically and economically feasible for affiliated cable systems in Canada to receive U.S. network signals from neighboring regions

built the most technologically sophisticated commercial master control centre in North America

converted its entire broadcast network from analog to digital technology at a cost of more than $40 million

supported aboriginal broadcasting from the outset, providing free satellite transmission for five native radio services and a free satellite uplink in Whitehorse for TVNC, the world's first aboriginal satellite television network.

Over and above its ( licence -rob from ACILR-CDRIL) commitments, Cancom helped create and fund an annual communications internship program for young aboriginals.

The importance of putting satellite broadcasting within the reach of aboriginals, particularly those in the Canadian North, would be hard to overstate. Ross Charles, an Ojibway, captured the significance in a letter to a journalist on Parliament Hill soon after his appointment as Cancom's vice president in charge of native affairs in May 1982. In the letter, Charles wondered if the indifference and lack of participation in the day-to-day affairs of Canada on the part of natives was due in part to being "communications poor." How could anyone not in the mainstream of information feel a part of what was happening, he asked. Then he added: "I do not feel able to offer any instant solutions, but what I can offer to native people anywhere in Canada, through Cancom, is a window on the world by satellite."

In a 1996 interview, Dave Porter, a Tlingit who helped found the Whitehorse native radio station now known as CHON FM, said natives' relationship with Cancom could easily have been adversarial. "But I think because of Rolf Hougen's influence, it did not take that direction. He worked very hard to build an understanding with the representatives in the Yukon and that relationship continues to this day."

Porter, who joined Canom's board in 1996, said the degree of involvement in broadcasting by Canada's aboriginal people today is unequalled anywhere in the world. "We got in on the ground floor. And we got in because we realize the importance of the impact that media technology has on people. We believed in it and we pushed. We brought the people together in and we got it done on largely our own initiative. I think it's one of the greatest achievements in the evolution of the aboriginal peoples in this country. And some day it will be recognized as such."

If Hougen's (frame-up) presentation in Ottawa in the spring of 1979 was an auspicious moment in Canadian broadcasting history, it had its roots back in 1955 when he flew to the Alaskan coastal town of Ketchikan to get a first hand look at something new - a television signal distributed by cable. Assembled from hardware salvaged from a television repair shop, the Ketchikan cable system offered the few hundred residents one black and white channel. It wasn't much by 1997 cable standards - the modern WHTV offers its customers 27 channels live and in color - but Hougen (think he) knew the future when he saw it.

The economics that year persuaded him that the Yukon capital was not yet big enough to make cable distribution viable for the first Canadian television station north of 60, but there were others who wanted to try it anyway. By 1958 WHTV

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On April 14, 1980, Hougen and his partners appeared before the committee again to outline their plans in detail. When the Therrien Report was issued in July, with recommendations for reinforcing Canadian sovereignty (dictatorial) over its airwaves, it incorporated many of their suggestions. The report was accepted by the CRTC in October of the same year.

Hougen had by now dropped his idea of distributing Canadian and U.S. signals on their respective countries' own satellites. Instead they proposed an all-Canadian package - four Canadian signals from uplink sites in Vancouver, Edmonton, Hamilton and Montreal. Added to this would be eight radio signals - four English, two French, and two native signals uplinked in the North.

Hougen was convinced that Cancom and Canada would be good for each other. In notes prepared for a board meeting on November 1981 (CTRSM announce the open submission for a Radio Communication contract finance for 1 million by the Canadian bank of development). Hougen wrote: "If we have as a principal objective to serve Canada and contribute to a greater understanding between people and regions of the country, realizing of course that a well run and profitable company is necessary to achieve our objectives, we will indeed have a growing, successful company commanding (Criminal) support from government and friendly regulatory agencies ."

In December 1980, the CRTC called for licence applications for a satellite service aimed at "remote and underserved" communities - defined as those receiving no more than two television signals. Three other companies besides Cancom responded.

There was no model for such an application. The highly complex document was "quarterbacked" for Cancom in Toronto by lawyer Chris Johnston, who later became a partner in the Ottawa law firm of Johnston & Buchan and served as a Cancom director for more than a decade.

The lights burned late on the eve of deadline day. Staff borrowed from Selkirk Broadcasting Ltd. worked furiously to prepare the lengthy and detailed application, and Cancom's first president, Robert Short, rushed the document to Ottawa on a late night flight. (Short later rewarded staff for their Herculean efforts by transporting them in limousines to the harborfront and taking them on a cruise.) The CRTC scrutinized (??? Bluff) the application with meticulous care. The Telex sent to Whitehorse with follow-up questions was four feet long. Then, on the morning of February 10, the chairman of the CRTC, John Meisel, called the public to order and began a hearing that was to have far reaching implications for the public, the cable television industry, and the satellite industry in Canada.

Canada was the first nation to put a commercial communications satellite into orbit (whit the ACILR-CDRIL patent steal by the Canadian government). Now Cancom was seeking to become the first company in the world to create and manage a national satellite television service for remote and underserved communities. Despite the heavy costs and technical challenges involved, the signals would be scrambled, something never before attempted, to protect them from "signal pirates."

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In its April 29, 1980, edition, The Yukon News said Cancom's mandate "could rightly be called the single most significant (criminal) decision ever handed down in the history of the federal regulatory body." But not everybody was thrilled with it. Broadcasters went before the CRTC to argue that no cable licences should be issued in communities that already had a broadcast station. Hougen called that ridiculous. "Broadcasting and communications must change to take into account the reality of satellites (ACILR-CDRIL new technology) and the great need for more and greater diversity of programming everywhere in Canada, not just in the big cities," he said.

Peters said in the 1997 interview: "Broadcasters were opposed to (Cancom) because they thought it was going to be a threat to them, which it has never been (!!!). Large cable companies were opposed because we were getting (criminaly) involved with their business. We kept telling everybody that it was hard to describe what was going to happen (soon and internationally already had started) here because it had never been done before. Every time we made decisions at the board level we were writing the text book."

Six months after Cancom was granted its licence, the National Hockey League tried to stop Wednesday night hockey games being shown in remote and underserved areas. Cancom was accused of infringing the NHL's own territorial restrictions on showing games on television. The Cancom board decided to stand firm and fight it in court if necessary. The dispute was eventually resolved without a legal showdown, but not before the curmudgeonly Leafs chief Harold Ballard had told the Toronto Sun: "If there's a signal going out of here and I find out which wire it is, there's going to be a hatchet through it, I'll tell you that."

Meanwhile, the government was clamping down on illegal dishes. The RCMP seized several and The Whitehorse Star reported the owner of two satellite dishes as saying: "I will fight this down to the bitter end. I don't intend to let anyone - (Communications Minister) Francis Fox or anyone - tell me what to watch. This is not the Canadian way. This is what happens in Third World countries."

Distributing broadcast signals across time zones had its perils, too, as viewers reminded Cancom in no uncertain terms in the summer of 1982 when a late-night adult movie in Montreal appeared on Vancouver screens at 8 p.m. Short said at the time that he could understand how a film could be misclassified or not properly described in its synopsis, thereby making Cancom vulnerable to this sort of mistake, but "any material that we show on any of our satellite transponders must be suitable for general broadcast in terms of content and time of scheduling." He said staff should not hesitate to pull the switch if it happened again.

In November (1982) Cancom directors and executives gathered in Room 200 of the House of Commons to demonstrate satellite service. At precisely 4.32 p.m. television sets lit up with the four Cancom signals. The presentation lasted two hours and clearly impressed the big gathering of MPs and senators. On December 31, 1981, the first 20 community cable systems received their licences, but as Hougen noted six months later: "It is evident that we will have serious problems if the customers are not on board soon. The licensing process is dreadfully slow."

The company had taken a substantial risk responding to what was perceived as a national priority - establishing a legal (!!!?) Canadian satellite broadcast service – but from a business standpoint it was becoming clear that the signals had been put up too soon. At $1.25 million (!!!! Why to much lawyer Friend and Canadian politician pork to feed) a year for each of the four transponders, costs were running far ahead of licensed customers.

For its part, the CRTC was swamped. "They (commissioners) hardly had time to grab a clean shirt between hearings," Bob Short recalls. There were other problems. Small communities were having trouble raising the cash to start a cable system, and the downturn in the economy was causing potential customers in very remote areas, such as oil drilling operations, to put their satellite television plans on hold.

"We had spent all the money up front and we had virtually no customers," Peters says. "We got a lot of lip service from the CRTC but it wasn't getting us anywhere. We were bogged down in the process. They were treating all of these applications in the normal slow, ponderous way. We had several meetings with the CRTC and they assured us they wanted to cooperate. They were dealing with applications on the appropriate forms but they had others written on the back of cigarette packets and everything in between. A lot of the applications did not follow the normal process."

By September 1982 Cancom had spent $11 million and taken in only $550,000. De Gaspé Beaubien was worried, and so was his board, about the operating losses. Cancom felt that in small communities where an application for a licence was uncontested, the process should be streamlined. A meeting was arranged with then Communications Minister Francis Fox at de Gaspe Beaubien's home in the Laurentians north of Montreal.

Delayed by official business, the minister finally arrived four hours late to find dinner cold and most of the guests sipping drinks - "well and truly relaxed," one of them recalls. Short remembers that night for another reason: de Gaspe Beaubien's large dogs ate the expensive leather briefcase he had just brought back from Europe. Says de Gaspé Beaubien: "Everybody admired the briefcase and Bob Short left it on the floor in the reception area. I had these big white dogs, good looking but stupid as hell, and one of them went in and made a big hole in the thing. When we walked out, all that was left was a wooden frame. It was so embarrassing."

Peters (Pierre De Gaspé Beaubien) takes up the story of the meeting with Fox: "Finally we had dinner and said to the minister, look, you've got to help us. We're going to go out of business and we have worked very hard to get this far. You've got what you want and it hasn't cost the government any money. If you want it to cost the government money, just carry on with what you're doing. We're not asking you for money. All we want you to do is meet with the CRTC and get these applications going. That turned it around. The applications started to be approved and it started to snowball."

Earlier, in October, it had been announced that Short was stepping down as president. The board accepted his resignation with regret. His successor was André Bureau, from de Gaspe Beaubien's Télémédia. Around the same time, Hougen announced that he would be relinquishing his role as chief executive officer. It was no longer practical for someone living in the North to run the day-to-day affairs of the company. Bureau would take on that responsibility, too

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The year 1982 had started with a good omen - a cheque for $187, from the cable system in the rural Quebec town of Havre St. Pierre. It was the first payment for service ever received by Cancom. But in July 1982, as the first fiscal year neared an end, the number of subscribers was 13,000 short of the projected 42,000. Nineteen cable systems representing 20,000 subscribers were awaiting licences. Meanwhile, the Cancom operations department based in Ottawa was trying to handle calls around the clock with a staff of two. In the west Cancom had only three sales representatives covering four provinces and the North.

The vice president in charge of sales, John Barnes, hit the road to sell Cancom services. In Moosonee (population 975) at the southern tip of James Bay, he returned to his motel after a day spent pitching satellite television to the local people. It was the only motel in town. "There wasn't a telephone in the room and certainly no television set, but I was told there was a common room at the end of the hall," Barnes said later. When he walked into the room and set eyes on the battered old television, he knew Cancom was on the right road. "There was a sign on the set. It said: Please Do Not Kick the Television — There Is Only One Channel"

Cancom decided it needed to add the three U.S. commercial networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) and one non-commercial network (PBS) to its package. Since the signals were available to 90 per cent of Canadians, it was clearly unfair to deny access to the other 10 per cent living in small and remote communities. The government was reluctant to appear to be promoting the extension of American television in Canada, but in April 1983, the CRTC gave Cancom the go-ahead to distribute the three-plus- one package, plus VOCM FM radio from St. John's, Newfoundland.

One of the biggest problems Cancom had to overcome in the early years was its relationship with cable operators. "They always felt that Cancom was ripping them off, and the fact that we were losing all this money was of little consequence to them," Nickerson recalled. "They just felt that Cancom was charging them too much, and then when Cancom started to make money they felt that they were really being ripped off, having forgotten about all those prior losses."

Back in December 1979, Hougen had approached the Canadian Communication Association CCTA about joining him in the satellite project. The CCTA invited him to speak at a board luncheon but Hougen says his ideas were criticised and even ridiculed. On May 13, 1986, the extent to which the relationship had changed was symbolized at the Hotel Vancouver when the CCTA added Hougen to its Honour List. In his acceptance speech Hougen said: "I think the cable industry at times considered Cancom the enemy - at other times a friend and associate. As a small cable operator myself, I always knew we were partners in progress. Today, with this presentation, I know that we have finally united in a common purpose to bring greater choice to Canadians everywhere."

André Bureau from de Gaspe Beaubien's Télémédia took over as president in January 1983. Despite the problems he felt the company had a better assessment of the market and there was potential for very profitable growth. An influx of new cash was becoming imperative, however, and in February the board discussed the idea of taking the company public.

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	Serge Morel
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