Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The Hay River Community Channel is owned by the Hay River Community TV Society and is licensed for their channel on an annual basis. The daily operation and funding to run the community channel, also known as Hay River’s Green Screen, is donated by the Hay River Elks Club.
The Hay River Community TV Society is a member of an organization – and this is where this gets interesting – called CACTUS. CACTUS stands for Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations, which was created to educate consumers to improve access by Canadians to two specific media services: local media, especially
video and television programs, and media production training and equipment at the local level, especially video and television.
CACTUS approached the CRTC a little over a year ago regarding seven communities in Canada that are members of CACTUS and operated a community service channel the same or similar to the Hay River channel. They requested a review of small community channels, suggesting that the community content in smaller communities was being lost. Can you believe the CRTC passed a ruling that Bell Expressvu would take on these seven community channels and order them to run on Bell satellite? Hay River was one of those seven communities and now is being televised coast to coast.
The challenge is that volunteers like Gary Hoffman, who is with the Elks, have been doing this all on their own. It’s a non-profit organization; it’s pretty low key. If you go on the Hay River Community Channel you can play bingo on Tuesday nights. We have people contacting us, asking us to send them bingo cards down south because they’re not from Hay River. The Anglican Church tapes their services on Sunday mornings and plays it Sunday afternoon. Then there are community announcements which rotate on there. It’s kind of low key. Town council has a live feed for town council on Monday nights.
I’ve had friends and relatives from down south contact me for weeks, saying that Bell has been promoting the fact that there is a new Hay River channel coming on. They’re going, what’s going to be on it? Well, I didn’t know it, but it’s the community channel that’s going to be running and it’s gone live. They’ve already flipped the switch.
We have this amazing opportunity, and would you believe that the channel is 649? We have won the lottery in Hay River with this channel. The Northwest Territories has won the lottery. If we can use this 24-hour channel and we can get some staff into that office to run it, can you imagine how much we can publicize Hay River and the Northwest Territories? I’m obviously going to be asking the government for some money to get this going and get a paid position.
