The genesis of CBC North began in 1923 when the
Royal Canadian Corps of Signals established a
radiotelegraph system linking
Dawson City and
Mayo in Yukon with
Alaska,
British Columbia, and
Alberta. Other settlements in Northern Canada were soon connected, forming the
Northwest Territories & Yukon (NWT&Y) Radio System. While the original purpose of the NWT&Y Radio System was to provide a means of communication among military personnel and commercial interests in far-flung corners of remote Northern Canada, the system came to be used for the transmission of general information and entertainment to the civilian population as well. Over the subsequent three decades, this ancillary role of the NWT&Y Radio System led to the development of
low-power AM community radio stations at sites where NWT&Y radiotelegraph stations were located. In addition to local programming, the stations often aired recordings provided by the United States
Armed Forces Radio Service—owing to the
US military presence in several Arctic settlements at the time—and also a limited amount of CBC programming relayed via the NWT&Y Radio System. In late 1952, the Armed Forces Radio Service ceased deliveries of programming to several of the radio stations. Efforts were then made to expand the reach of CBC programming in Northern Canada by utilizing the resources of the CBC's Troop Broadcast Service, which was originally developed to distribute recordings of CBC radio programming to Canadian military units stationed overseas. The domestic distribution of CBC radio recordings began in January 1953 with
CFGB in Goose Bay,
Labrador (now
Happy Valley-Goose Bay,
Newfoundland and Labrador) receiving an initial shipment of 53
discs that would then be sent to
CHFC in
Churchill, Manitoba; and then to
CFWH in
Whitehorse, Yukon. By 1958, the
Department of National Defence desired to reduce its role in maintaining broadcasting infrastructure in Northern Canada. the CBC proposed operating a "northern service" of up to twelve radio stations, in part by converting existing stations operated by volunteers into stations staffed by CBC employees. One of the primary reasons cited for the necessity of such a service was that radio listeners in the North could often more readily hear broadcasts from
Radio Moscow and the
Voice of America than from Canadian sources. The CBC's proposal was presented to the
Parliament of Canada and approved in June 1958. Over the next two years, the CBC would take over the operations of seven other stations, listed below in chronological order: • CFYT – Dawson City, Yukon (November 13, 1958) •
CFYK –
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (December 13, 1958) • CFGB – Goose Bay, Labrador (February 23, 1959) • CBXH –
Fort Smith, Northwest Territories (May 29, 1959) • CFHR –
Hay River, Northwest Territories (September 7, 1959) • CHFC – Churchill, Manitoba (September 13, 1959) • CHAK –
Inuvik, Northwest Territories (November 26, 1960) Of the eight inaugural stations, studio facilities were retained only in Churchill, Goose Bay, Inuvik, Whitehorse, and Yellowknife. The Dawson City, Fort Smith, and Hay River stations were converted into unattended
relay transmitters. Similar relays were built during 1959 at Fort Nelson in British Columbia and
Watson Lake in Yukon. As the service took its present form, numerous additional relay transmitters would be added throughout its service area. In conjunction with the CBC taking over the stations, delivery of programming slowly began to be transitioned away from tape recordings and toward direct links to the CBC network via an expanding
Canadian National Telegraph (CNT) system, The CBC constructed
CFFB in Frobisher Bay, Northwest Territories (now
Iqaluit, Nunavut), and began operations on February 5, 1961, adding it to the Northern Service. The new station had local programming in
Inuktitut,
English and
French, as well as news and other programs from the CBC network. Television became a component of the Northern Service in 1967 when the CBC introduced the
Frontier Coverage Package, a service in which the CBC Delay Centre in
Calgary would record onto
videotape four hours daily of
CBC Television programming and send the recordings to remote communities in Northern Canada for playback over local television facilities. The programming did not arrive at all facilities simultaneously, but was instead sent to one facility, which, after playback, would send it to another, and so on, until all facilities had gotten a chance to air it. This process meant that programming could be up to a month old by the time it aired. On May 14, 1967,
CFYK-TV in Yellowknife became the first television station to partake in this service. With the advent of the
Anik series of satellites in 1973, the CBC began transmitting its television programming on satellite. For Northern Canada, this meant the ability to view the full CBC Television schedule live with the rest of Canada for the first time. The Frontier Coverage Package was discontinued, and all remote northern communities with a population of 500 or more were offered a live television relay transmitter as part of the CBC's
Accelerated Coverage Plan of 1974. Radio was affected by the transition to satellite broadcasting as well, since a feed of
CBC Radio originating in
Toronto was carried via satellite for reception at local CBC production centres. By 1976, CFFB was utilizing this feed not only to obtain live CBC Radio programming, but also to distribute a separate satellite feed to eleven relay transmitters in
Inuit Nunangat that combined the output from Toronto with CFFB's own local programming in Inuktitut and English. For the first fifteen years of CBC North, most of the service's radio stations with studios produced very little of their own programming. Instead, regional programming targeting the North was largely produced in southern Canada, particularly Montreal. This goal was further reiterated with the
Government of Canada's
Northern Broadcasting Policy of 1983. To facilitate increased local radio productions, a radio production centre was opened at
CBQR in
Rankin Inlet in 1979 to serve the
Keewatin Region of the Northwest Territories (now mostly the
Kivalliq Region of Nunavut). A similar centre was opened in
Kuujjuaq, Quebec, in 1985 to serve Nunavik. On television, the first CBC production centre inside the CBC North service area opened at CFYK-TV in Yellowknife in 1979, producing
Our Ways, a monthly news magazine. An additional television production unit was established in Whitehorse in 1986, and in Iqaluit in 1987 when production of the weekly program
Taqravut moved there. The 1980s also saw the creation of new Indigenous-led broadcasting organizations in Northern Canada, some of which were permitted to use CBC North to broadcast their programming. On radio, programming from the
James Bay Cree Communications Society and
Taqramiut Nipingat aired on local CBC North relay transmitters and
CKCX until the 2000s, when both organizations launched their own independent radio networks. In 1992, after being located in
Ottawa since the establishment of CBC North, the service's regional head office was moved to Yellowknife. CKCX and its associated shortwave broadcasting facilities were shut down on December 1, 2012, following a significant budget cut to
Radio Canada International, the operator of the facilities. To compensate for the loss of CBC North radio coverage this caused in northern Quebec,
FM relay transmitters were installed in five communities of Nunavik, including the production centre of Kuujjuaq. By 2018, CBC North was broadcasting 211 hours per week of regional programming, including 125 hours per week in eight Indigenous languages. == Radio ==