Andrea Langlois et al - Islands of Resistance - Pirate Radio in Canada

Setting Sail • 17
in the broadcasts. Curiously dressed for the occasion in Vancouver
2010 jackets, the Industry Canada officials handed out business cards
which sported a 2010 logo and e-mail address, and arrived to silence
the radio dissenters in a Vancouver Olympics Organizing Committee
(VANOC) vehicle. 24
In spite of an undisclosed history of similar enforcement measures
on the part of Industry Canada, some writers have nevertheless maintained
that the reason that there have not been as many pirate radio
stations in Canada as in the States is because the openness of the Canadian
community radio sector makes piracy unnecessary. An example
is Charles Fairchild’s argument presented in the 1998 book Seizing
the Airwaves. At that time, the FCC did not allow the issuance of lowpower
radio licences under 100 watts. Today, his arguments must be
tempered by the existence of the FCC’s low-power FM (LPFM) program
which came into being at the turn of the century as a result of
the rapid growth of the pirate radio movement in the United States.
However, the new LPFM option was arguably initiated by the FCC as a
divide and conquer strategy. 25 In relation to that movement, some radio
pirates had merely wanted licences and so became advocates of LPFM,
while others refused to submit to having their broadcasts legally sanctioned
and wanted nothing to do with licensing. Taking into account
what we consider to be the FCC’s intentionally divisive goal for the
LPFM service and the relatively small number of low-power licences
actually granted by the program in comparison to the number initially
promised, we can see that the mission, scope and impact of the US community
radio sector is still quite limited in relation to access. However,
with reference to licensed community radio outlets in Canada, Sheila
Nopper (Chapter 4) describes the increasingly restrictive nature of stations,
such as CIUT in Toronto, as a possible impetus for the potential
flowering of Canadian pirate radio broadcasting in the future.
While the Canadian regulatory regime gives lip service to the positive
weight allocated to social context and diversity of content in
approving new applications for community radio licences, the middlebrow
atmosphere of the CBC and the market demographics of the
corporate sector are still what overwhelmingly characterize licensed
programming. Moreover, their privileged position legally enables
licensed stations to expand their broadcast range at the expense of new
community radio applications. For example, in 2002, the proposed
Gabriola Co-op Radio station, on Gabriola Island in British Columbia,