Alex Freedman wants to ensure no more campus or community radio stations go dark.

That’s why the Executive Director of the Community Radio Fund of Canada (CRFC) is floating an ambitious campaign to establish a centralized advertising agency with a goal to funnel federal and national advertising revenue back into the country’s independent, campus, and Indigenous radio sectors.

The new initiative is part of an expanded $30-million funding push ahead of the next federal budget. It aims to fundamentally change the economic survival model for hundreds of hyper-local broadcasters.

“The conversation around why the government has not been giving advertising dollars to local media has been ongoing for a while,” Freedman told Broadcast Dialogue. “The problem fundamentally is, when you have 260 radio stations, each of them selling a separate ad package, no advertising agency hired by the government is going to go out and spend their entire lifetime having 260 different conversations.”

The CRFC envisions creating a centralized, technology-driven agency to act as a single point of contact for ad buyers. It would rely on tracking automation to verify when ads are spun, generating network-wide compliance reporting and dynamically distributing compensation to participating stations based on play counts.

“Our dream here is to build an advertising agency for community radio,” Freedman explained. “What we are arguing is, let’s give the federal government and national ad campaigns one-stop shopping to access the entire network of community radio stations. This would facilitate that conversation with the federal government and national advertisers.”

Freedman stressed that this central engine would not cannibalize local ad sales. Instead, it would act as a critical financial lifeline for smaller, rural, and Indigenous stations that lack the resources to knock on the doors of national brands.

While the first iteration of the project would focus exclusively on community radio, he sees the proposed agency expanding into a broad, non-profit umbrella that could bolster all independent media.

Established as a non-profit entity, Freedman says once up and running, it could be governed by a coalition of organizations, including the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA), L’Association des radiodiffuseurs communautaires du Québec (ARCQ), Alliance des radios communautaires du Canada (ARCC), independent community newspaper associations, and community television advocates like CACTUS (Canadian Association of Community Television Users and Stations).

Emulating Australia’s success

The blueprint for a central ad agency is modelled after a Community Broadcasting Association of Australia (CBAA) concept, which successfully implemented a centralized advertising structure years ago.

“They are, in the world of community and local broadcasting, the world standard,” Freedman said, noting that he and CEO Jon Bisset co-presented the model to the CRTC in mid-June. “With a modest amount of funding, we could emulate and recreate that here.”

The push for structural revenue comes as campus radio stations, including the University of Ottawa’s CHUO and Memorial University’s CHMR, have recently faced dire operational challenges or gone dark due to shifting student union funding structures.

Furthermore, a multi-year regulatory backlog at the CRTC, which effectively halted standard licensing processes to implement the Online Streaming Act, has left 11 pending community station licences in limbo. Freedman expects those applications to finally be authorized when the CRTC lands its final audio policy framework this fall.

“If a station gets $90,000 from us, it’s not going to completely change their viability on its own,” Freedman noted. “But if they can count on that as part of what they’re doing, there is an increased amount of stability…we need to build the sector to be able to walk on its own.”

Final push for Budget 2026

The CRFC says the proposal is gaining traction in Ottawa, with an active lobbying effort  underway through August, backed by letters from various community organizations, cross-party MPs, and prominent non-profits like the David Suzuki Foundation.

Establishing the central agency requires “not insignificant” federal seed funding, though Freedman anticipates philanthropic interest once the initial structure is built.

Canadians and community radio supporters are being encouraged to join the Community Radio Initiative (CRI) campaign by visiting mycri.ca.