The End of Public ACCESS

Once upon a time Alberta had both a public funded radio station and TV station. The radio station CKUA was the oldest and only provincially owned public radio station in North America.
The TV station was ACCESS and is now the only private educational TV channel in Canada.

This week CHUM Ltd. purchased up all the shares of the Learning TV Network which includes ACCESS. Its part of its move into the Alberta media marketplace with its purchase of A-Channel in Edmonton and Calgary and its launch of a new FM radio station in Edmonton. This is the final act of fire sale piracy that sacrificed public access to media on the altar of privatization.

ACCESS was a crown corporation created to house both CKUA and an Educational TV network modeled on TVO(ntario) and the Knowledge Network in B.C. It used public access to cable to launch itself, and was a crown corporation.

The upper management of ACCESS were Tory good old boys owing their positions to who they knew , not what they knew. And it was this that led to the downfall for both CKUA and ACCESS. CKUA has survived as a community supported radio station. This week ACCESS was fully privatized.

This then is a tale of crony capitalism Alberta style.

CKUA The Day the Music Died
A lesson in HOW NOT TO PRIVATIZE

CKUA was surprisingly progressive in its music and news programming, even during the right wing Social Credit era, and through Peter Lougheed's Progressive Conservative ( PC) government era of the seventies and eighties. It broadcast KPFA news a decidedly left newservice and it covered Alberta politics with independent progressive news and features.
It was not just publically owned, but was opena nd remains open to community and public involvement.

I worked with CKUA in the early 1970's setting up its first ever Teen Youth radio show. Youth Radio Production was a cooperative of high school students programming on CKUA every Saturday for 1/2 hour reporting on activism in the community. We were all volunteers who had created radio shows in our High Schools using the school intercom system, those radio shows still exist in Edmonton High Schools. Several of the high school radio show programmers went on to work at making CJSR at the U of A a viable community station.

Like the CBC, CKUA was funded by taxpayers, but was not beholden to the government. For years as an educational radio station it did function as the first distance education program for Alberta Education, and it ran Question Period from the Legislature. During the nineties with the privatization putsch of the Klein government, Question Period was deemed too 'expensive' to support on CKUA and was canceled by the government. So much for democracy in Alberta.

Using a phony debt and deficit crisis to push to reform the state in the 1990's the Alberta Tories under Ralph Klein became Republican Lite. The Alberta Government turned to the extreme right, under the influence of the Reagan Republicans, Sir Roger Davies of New Zealand, the Thatcher Government in England, and with the support of right wing think tanks like the Fraser Institute in Canada and the Cato Institute in the US.

The debt and deficit hysteria was international and allowed right wing parties in power around the world to embrace "change" and propose "radical new ideas" on society and the governments they ruled. Of course there was nothing new in their ideas, it was the same old same old tired mantra of the Chicago School of Economics (Milton Friedman) and their Austrian School (Ludwig von Mises) predecessors; it was the cry of the lazzie faire; Let the Market rule- privatize, privatize, privatize.

In Alberta the so called deficit was temporary, and was a direct result of the government giving a royalty holiday to the giant oil corporations that dominate the provinces economy. It used the economic down turn affecting North America between 1993-1995 to impose wage and benefit cuts on public sector workers as well as downsizing and outsourcing, and began its campaign to sell off public assets and to privatize everything.

As Ralph Klein likes to say; "We want to get the government OUT of business." or "The government has no business being in business", sheer intellectual brilliance out of our infamous Teflon populist Premier. It's a beer hall catchphrase that sums up the neoliberal agenda of privatizing everything.

And that’s what the Klein government proceeded to do. And do it abysmally. As with the privatization of the Liquor Control Board in Alberta (ALCB), everything was put on the block and sold at fire sale prices. CKUA and ACCESS were no exception. Throughout this process of privatization, the same crony capitalism that Russia has suffered from was prevalent in Alberta too. Which is what happens when a One Party State embraces neoliberalism, it moves from state-capitalism to the state funding of capitalism.

In 1994, Alberta's Minister of Municipal Affairs, Steve West, known as the dark lord of privatization, made sure everything in his pervue was for sale. He oversaw the privatization of the ALCB, as well as the Public Works department which was responsible for Highway Construction and Maintenance in Alberta.

He was Kleins unfailing hatchetman. Like Klein, West made no bones that the government should not be in the the business of broadcasting. And he told CKUA and ACCESS to come up with a plan to run independent of government funding. He gave them a month!

Already in the wings CHUM created the Canadian Learning Television and got a broadcast licence with the support of the Alberta government which paid CLT $8 million annually for three years. It sold CLT, ACCESS TV's Edmonton facilities, including library material and the broadcasting and duplicating rights to those materials for $1.

Ever the hatchetman West fired CKUA's President, Don Thomas and its GM Jackie Rollans. He replaced them with a hand picked foundation board. The foundation board was created within the ACCESS coporation to run CKUA.

"Gail Hinchliffe, a Calgary-based property developer with strong Conservative party ties, served as the chair of ACCESS from 1991 and (simultaneously) as the CEO of CKUA from October 1994." Within three years Hinchliffe and her cronies had spent millions of dollars on themselves leaving the station on the verge of bankruptcy.

As the Auditor General would later report on the CKUA debacle; " Further, at times during the period from February 1994 to April 1997, some directors of the Foundation were also directors of ACCESS."

In March 1997 she and her board cried bankruptcy and pulled the plug on the station, their political agenda was clear, they had never intended to make CKUA a viable operation, they were there to plunder it and shut it down.

As Larry Pratt noted in his article in Alberta Views in 1998:

"A lawyer friend of mine says the fiasco surrounding last spring's closure and reopening of CKUA radio station made her long for a return to the days when political leaders who had betrayed the public trust would be dragged out to a city square and locked in stocks for a few days of self-reflection, preferably in February.

What really outraged her was less the revelations about financial mismanagement or the incompetence of CKUA's board than it was the total failure of anyone - board, management, government - to take any responsibility for the mess. How is it possible that no one was held accountable for the million dollars that the former directors of CKUA paid themselves and their own companies out of the station's scarce funds from 1994 to 1997, the period after it was privatized by the Klein government, in spite of an explicit ban on any remuneration for the board members?"

The CKUA Foundation board under CEO Gail Hinchliffe were predominately from Calgary, and like other privateers benefiting from this provinces crony capitalism, she was part of the Calgary Tory network. While she issued layoff notices to all the staff and after she shut down the station she still paid herself a salary.

SEE magazine reported at the time that "Hinchliffe had dual roles as board chair and CEO, and board member Larry Clausen's Calgary company, Communications Inc., handled the station's marketing contract. Revenue Canada documents showed three of the station's top executives shared some $201,000 in earnings in 1995."

Liberal MLA Lauri Blakeman revealed that " former board chair Gail Hinchliffe's company received $388,345 between Aug. 1994 and April 1997; former board member Larry Clausen's firm received $245,345 from March 1995 - March 1997; former board member and station accountant Gerry Luciani's company was paid $120,190 from July 1995 - May, 1997; and former board member Rick Baker's company, on contract to develop Friends of CKUA chapters across the province, earned $48,150 from March 1995 - Aug. 1996."

This crony capitalism is rampant in the Klein Government that rules Alberta. Under Klein's leadership the PC's became the Party of Calgary with links to the National Citizens Coalition (which moved its headquarters to Calgary), the Federal Conservative Party (which was formerly the Reform/Alliance party based in Calgary), the right wing think-tank the Fraser Institute, lobbyists for the Charter School movment, and the right wing think tank in the Political Science department of University of Calgary.

Under the leadership of both Peter Lougheed and Don Getty the PC's ruling Alberta viewed Calgary as the headquarters for corporations in Alberta and Edmonton, the provincial capital, as headquarters of the government. Under Klein the putsch to privatize the government was also an attempt to radically restructure power in Alberta, moving it from the capitol city to the corporate environs of Calgary. Even if it meant that ALCB buildings and inventory were sold off at below cost and CKUA and Access were sold off for $10 and $1 each!

The unionized staff that was all laid off called an emergency meeting and decided to shut down the station at midnight. This was a tactic never before used by media facing state intervention in their radio or TV stations. Around the world radio and TV stations have been occupied and continued broadcasting. In hindsight the tactic was brilliant. It mobilized Albertans in outrage and it was done in the middle of the provincial election!

Hinchliffe talked about running a scab radio station with volunteer announcers, but that was for naught, their were public pickets across the province at every CKUA station, and no one was going to cross the line.

As CKUA GM Ken Reagan told the CRTC last November :

"In conclusion, Mr. Chairman, when CKUA was taken off the air in 1997, what occurred was, indeed, unprecedented and, some might say, astounding. The citizenry of one of Canada's most politically conservative provinces rose up to save their community radio service. Something even more remarkable when you consider that essential services like health and education were also being cut significantly at that time. But people drew a line in the sand over CKUA radio and it begs the question: why? To be honest, I'm not sure that I have an answer. Except to surmise that over its 77-year history, CKUA has become such an integral part of people's lives in Alberta and the life of its community that, for those people who love it, losing it is not an option. And I'm not trying to hyperbolize or be melodramatic, but the love the people have for CKUA is deep and genuine."

Mass protests and candle light vigils were held and within a month a new board was created which removed the privateers and created a viable non-profit public station, which is still running the station today.

Unfortunately one of things CKUA sacrificed in its rebirth was news and critical news features. In order to be a PBS like public access radio station with telethons, it has spent several years being more music than substance.

The Klein government did nothing to change its "privatization is the cure for everything ideology". And it still engages in crony capitalism funding CHUM to run ACCESS. One of the ideological reasons given by the right wing for privatizing the State is that crown corporations are a monopoly, with no competition.

Of course ACCESS was a monopoly it was the only educational station in the province. There are plenty of private broadcasters in Alberta but none who provide this service because it is 'not profitable'. In fact without Alberta Education and other provincial governments funneling taxpayers money into ACCESS it would not be a viable private Educational TV station. And it's still a monopoly, albeit a private one!

While the public rallied for CKUA lost in the dust of the Klein Revolution in Alberta was the effects of the privatization of ACCESS. It never went off the air, it just quietly shifted from being owned by Albertans to being owned by CITY-TV/CHUM and funded by Albertans. It is another example of the public purse being used for private profit.

The most recent P3-Public Private Partnership- endeavor of the government is to fund the private construction of a ring road around Edmonton. The reason to contract out this service, paying the contractor $34 million a year for 30 years, says Infrastructure Minister Lyle Oberg its because the province doesn't own any road construction equipment. Nope they sold that off at fire sales prices of 25 cents on the dollar to the private highway construction contractors back at the same time they sold off CKUA, ACCESS and the ALCB.

Appendix to this Article

CKUA History of a privatization putsch

ACCESS- The Privatization of Educational TV in Alberta

Also See Wild West Buy Out, February 20, 2005









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