REVOLVING DOOR:
Avi Lewis has secured the federal NDP leadership. The veteran broadcaster and filmmaker is arguably best known for his time as host of CounterSpin on CBC Newsworld, and shows like The Big Picture with Avi Lewis and On the Map. Prior to his work with the public broadcaster, he hosted The New Music on Citytv and MuchMusic from 1996-98. He’s gone on to collaborate on award-winning documentaries and docuseries, including The Take (a collaboration with his wife – author and journalist Naomi Klein), This Changes Everything, and A Message From the Future with U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Kirk LaPointe has penned his final column for Glacier Media as he announces his candidacy for Mayor of the Regional District of West Vancouver in the Oct. 17 municipal election. LaPointe is a former CBC Ombudsman and previously served as CTV’s Senior VP of News, publisher of BIV (Business in Vancouver), and was a talk host on Roundhouse Radio (CIRH-FM) Vancouver from 2015-18. He was previously a City of Vancouver mayoral candidate in 2014.
Samantha Morris Mastai has been upped to Director of Development, Comedy at CBC. She takes over from Greig Dymond, who retired at the end of last year. Morris Mastai previously held the title of Executive in Charge of Current Production, Comedy.
Daniel Bouchard is retiring from Radio-Canada after four decades with the network. Most recently the anchor of the weekend Ottawa-Gatineau newscast, his final broadcast will air on April 26.
Susan Campbell is retiring from CBC Quebec after 34 years. Originally from Cape Breton, Campbell has been a journalist with the public broadcaster since 1991, serving as a producer and host for Breakaway and Quebec AM, among other shows.
Betsy Trumpener is retiring from CBC in Northern BC. Based in Prince George, Trumpener has been with the public broadcaster for 25 years, working in various roles – including reporting, hosting, writing and producing – across radio, podcast, regional and national news.
Sidhartha Banerjee is joining CBC Montreal on the assignment desk. Banerjee arrives from The Canadian Press (CP) where he’s been a Montreal-based reporter and editor since 2007.
Eli J. Ridder has joined The Canadian Press (CP) as a reporter, covering New Brunswick. He’ll be based in Fredericton. Ridder arrives from CBC in Medicine Hat, where he’s been part of the public broadcaster’s newly-established bureau there for the past nine months. Prior to that, he was a reporter with Pattison Media in the market.
Dan Ahlstrand is now the host of Nova Scotia Today on 95.7 NewsRadio (CJNI-FM) Halifax, following Todd Veinotte’s retirement. Ahlstrand, who also doubles as the station’s news director, had been filling in for Veinotte off and on as the host underwent treatment for Parkinson’s over the last few years. Veinotte had been a host with Rogers Sports & Media since 2008.
Bruce Wylie is set to retire from My Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) and 104.9 myFM (CIMY-FM) Brockville on April 7, which Brockville City Council has declared Bruce Wylie Appreciation Day. Wylie has been on-air in the community for 55 years, with April 7 also marking the day he was hired by CHJR in 1971 as a nighttime DJ.
Amanda Abergel has been appointed General Sales Manager for My Broadcasting Corporation’s 91.7 Classic Rock Giant FM (CIXL-FM) Welland and Niagara’s New Country 89.1 (CKYY-FM). Local to the area, she joins the Niagara radio team after 15 years in sales and business development, including working with Yellow Pages and Royal LePage.
Ben Davy has joined 680 NewsRadio (CFTR-AM) Toronto, taking on weeknight overnight traffic duties after a six-year absence from radio. Davy was the original morning man at LIFE 100.3 (CJLF-FM) Barrie for 13 years, prior to joining Corus Radio in Barrie and later Skywords Media from 2017-19. The part-time position allows Davy to continue helming play-by-play for the Canadian Baseball League’s Barrie Baycats on YouTube and Rogers TV.
Joelle Tomlinson has announced her departure from Global Calgary. Tomlinson had been with the station since 2023, most recently as a weather and news anchor.
Jane Lytvynenko has joined NBC News as a Senior Technology Reporter. Based in New York, she’ll cover how tech and conflict intersect and the impact of tech on the stories of the day. Lytvynenko, a former Senior Reporter for BuzzFeed in Toronto, has been freelancing since 2022, including contributing to the Wall Street Journal’s Ukraine coverage.
Taylor Lucas has left Curiocity Media Group after three years to join Postmedia as a lifestyle journalist. Lucas started with the Daily Hive publisher as Regional Editor in 2023 and moved up to Associate Editor last year. She previously worked for ET Canada, TSN and Rogers Sports & Media as a producer.
Elizabeth Firth has been appointed Senior Vice President, Partnerships & Commercial Strategy at Blink49 Studios. Based in New York. Firth joins Blink49 from influencer marketing company Influential, where she served as VP, Brand Partnerships. Earlier in her career, she spent 14 years at UM Worldwide, most recently as SVP, Client Business Partner. Blink49 has also hired Melissa Lacks as Senior Director, Sales, Brand Studio. Lacks previously served as Sales Director, Brand Partnerships at Moonbug Entertainment. Prior to Moonbug, she was Director of Media at VaynerMedia, overseeing campaigns for clients including Sour Patch Kids, Clif Bar, PepsiCo, and Mondelez, across social, streaming, and CTV platforms.
Claire Macdonald, Realscreen‘s former longtime publisher and Executive Director of NATPE (National Association of Television Program Executives), will be moving on from Brunico Communications to pursue other opportunities as the company exits the U.S. event space and discontinues the Realscreen Summit and sister events Kidscreen Summit and NATPE Global. MacDonald had worked with Brunico since 2000.
RADIO & PODCAST:
Memorial University (MUN) in St. John’s, NL is the latest Canadian post-secondary institution to de-fund its campus and community radio station, 93.5 CHMR-FM. At a meeting of the Memorial University Students’ Union (MUNSU) on Wednesday evening, the board of directors passed a motion indicating that by June 1, employees assigned to CHMR “shall no longer spend their paid working time on broadcasting.” The motion leaves the future of CHMR-FM uncertain as it doesn’t preclude the station from continuing to operate independently. Read more here.
I’m really excited about two new weekend shows I’ll be doing very soon on 680 CJOB.
Hal’s Kitchen begins April 11th and Hal Knows A Guy starts April 12th.
Both will air at noon every Saturday and Sunday.
Hal’s Kitchen will be everything food, while Hal Knows A Guy will focus… pic.twitter.com/L7YeLh0nNN
— Hal Anderson (@halanderson) March 30, 2026
Hal Anderson is set to debut two new weekend shows on Corus Entertainment’s 680 CJOB Winnipeg. Anderson, who hosts Connecting Winnipeg from 10 a.m. – noon weekdays, will be heard in the weekend noon time slot, starting April 11, with Hal’s Kitchen on Saturdays – an extension of his food column in the Winnipeg Sun, followed by Hal Knows A Guy on Sundays, featuring guests from the trades and business to sports and entertainment.
Triton Digital has released its Canada Podcast Ranker for the February reporting period (Feb. 2 – March 1), as measured by Triton’s Podcast Metrics measurement service. The Top Sales Networks remained the same, with CBC/Radio-Canada at #1 with 2.2M Average Weekly Downloads (AWD), Audioboom at #2 with 1.5M AWD, and BBC at #3 with 614K. The Top Canada Podcasts and Top Canada-Originated English-Language Podcasts were also status quo with CBC/Radio-Canada pods Front Burner at #1, World Report at #2, and The World This Hour at #3. Debuts for the Top Canada Podcasts included Insight with Chris Van Vliet (Cumulus Podcast Network), 10 to Life (Audioboom), and Lagacé le matin (Cogeco Media). Debuting in the Top Canada-Originated French-Language Podcasts was Cogeco’s Radio textos.
CBC Podcasts’ Someone Knows Something is back for a 10th season. The new season sees host David Ridgen dive into the 2021 disappearance of Jaclyn Ferland-Smith, a Canadian expat living in Playas del Coco on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.
LISTEN: Some of the most influential voices in music, film, TV and media will gather in Toronto, May 4-10, as Departure Festival + Conference gears up for its second annual event. We welcome festival co-founder Kevin Barton to this episode of Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast to tease this year’s lineup and the event’s evolution, including why the festival is much more than Canadian Music Week “reimagined.”
LISTEN: Doug Downs joins the Sound Off Podcast, tracing his journey from a tape recorder-obsessed kid in Scarborough to radio, TV, corporate communications, and ultimately podcasting. He shares how overnights at a country station, brutal newbie pranks, and moves through Ajax, St. Thomas, London, Kirkland Lake, Sudbury, and eventually Edmonton shaped his love of audio and storytelling. He and Matt Cundill also reminisce about the ITV / CFRN days and why he ultimately pivoted into public relations at Epcor, learning to think in terms of stakeholders, key messages, and strategy.
SIGN OFFS:
Rose Kingdon, 65, on March 27. Kingdon began her four-decade career in broadcasting at CKLA Guelph as summer relief, following her graduation from the Radio Broadcasting program at Humber College in 1981. From there, she moved on to CKEY Toronto in 1984, before joining The Canadian Press (CP) subsidiary Broadcast News the following year. She held various roles over the years, starting as a reporter and editor, news reader, and later Audio Supervisor and Supervising Editor/Audio, before being named CP’s Broadcast News Director in 2012. Kingdon helped guide the wire service’s breaking news coverage across numerous events from federal and provincial elections to Olympic Games, the World Trade Center Attacks, and Canada’s mission to Afghanistan, among many other stories, leading the team to numerous RTDNA Awards and a New York Festivals Radio Award. She was awarded the RTDNA Lifetime Achievement honour in 2023, the year she retired after 38 years with the wire service.
TV & FILM:
Blue Ant Media has announced a longterm partnership with ZoomerMedia to represent advertising sales for its VisionTV specialty channel. Blue Ant says the partnership will enhance its position “as a major player for advertisers seeking national reach delivered with market-leading cost efficiencies.” Blue Ant says it now reaches six million Canadians weekly across its specialty networks, with the company’s ad sales team representing eight Canadian specialty TV channels in-market, including BBC Earth, BBC First, Smithsonian Channel, T+E, Cottage Life, and Makeful, in addition to VisionTV. Read more here.
CHEK Media is working through technical difficulties following a cyber incident last week. CEO Rob Germain said the Victoria station team, alongside external cybersecurity experts, have been working to contain the issue. “Throughout this, we have remained on the air – something we are proud of – and continue to deliver our newscasts, even as we work through temporary adjustments,” wrote Germain, in a post to the station’s website.
Damian Abraham, frontman of acclaimed punk band F*cked Up, and Emmy-winning producer Zach Feldberg have launched Cut & Paste Pictures, a new Toronto-based prodco focused on projects “rooted in music, counterculture, and outsider perspectives.” Cut & Paste’s slate spans scripted and unscripted formats and a feature doc currently in production. Read more here.
The Blue Jays Way is a seven-part Sportsnet docuseries set to premiere in July, celebrating the 50th season of the Toronto Blue Jays. It chronicles the team’s history from its 1977 expansion debut to the 2025 World Series. The series features player interviews and highlights from 50 years of franchise history.
Bell Media is reviving Cash Cab after a 12-year hiatus. Season 10 of the game show has been greenlit, produced by Toronto’s Castlewood Productions. Adam Growe is set to return as host, with two new episodes to air Wednesdays at 10 p.m. ET on Much, beginning April 22. The series, which last aired a new season in 2014, will also be available to stream on Crave.
How We Do It Productions, in association with AMI (Accessible Media Inc.) and Citytv Saskatchewan, has announced the start of production on new preschool series, How We Do It (27×7). Hosts Carly (Allison Lang), Isaac (Donovan Whyte), and puppet Howie the Dog (Crispi Lord) explore a range of topics from handling big feelings to trying new sports and making friends, with a special focus on the disability community. Currently filming at the John Hopkins Regina Soundstage, episodes will be available on AMI+.
Media Technology Monitor (MTM) says nearly a third of Anglophone and a quarter of French-speaking households in Canada are now “streaming only” homes. While overall paid TV penetration has declined since 2015, the report says fiber optic has emerged as the most common subscription type, used by one in three English-speaking households and nearly half of Francophone homes. Read more here.
ONLINE & DIGITAL MEDIA:
APTN is betting on YouTube as it looks to widen the reach of its Indigenous-language content. Announced ahead of National Indigenous Languages Day on March 31, the network says its YouTube channel is now home to over 1,200 hours of Indigenous-language content across 20 distinct Indigenous languages. The content expansion encompasses close to 2,500 episodes of programming, including series like Taken (Anishinaabemowin), Water Worlds (Cree), Ocean Warriors (Nisga’a), Michif Country (Michif), Poke’n the Bear (Blackfoot), Mohawk Girls (Kanien’kéha), and Warrior Up! (Inuktitut). Read more here.
Design Cook Eat (DCE) is a YouTube-first lifestyle platform, anchored by influencer collective “The Better Live Guys” – which includes design expert and TV personality Micheal Lambie, private chef Howard Seivright, and food culturalist Ryan Hinkson, documenting how people live, gather and experience the world through thoughtfully designed spaces and meaningful food across North America. DCE says the site generated 52,000 views in its first seven days, upping the channel to nearly 350,000 total views and 2,325 subscribers in four episodes.
Indiegraf is evolving from a CMS (Content Management System) into an operating system for independent local media. The OS will be built around diversifying revenue, deepening audience trust and enabling collaboration between newsrooms. To that end, Indiegraf has acquired public-powered journalism pioneer Hearken. Its Engagement Management System (EMS) – which allows audiences to submit questions that shape coverage and vote on the stories that matter most to them - will be available as a core feature of the new Indiegraf OS Full tier, or standalone tool for publishers outside the Indiegraf ecosystem to purchase.
Tim Shore, the former publisher of blogTO, has started new Substack, The Story of blogTO, a deep dive into how the publication was built. Shore, who founded blogTO in 2004, parted ways with blogTO last year following the publication’s sale to ZoomerMedia in 2022.
REGULATORY, TELECOM & MEDIA:
The Federal Court of Appeal has dismissed a legal challenge from the Motion Picture Association – Canada (MPAC) and Apple, arguing against a CRTC decision forcing them to disclose their Canadian financials. Representing streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and Paramount+, MPAC suggested that having to publicly disclose its members’ annual contributions to domestic content and their gross Canadian broadcasting revenues pre-empted their ability to designate competitively sensitive information as confidential. The court ruled that the appeal applications were premature because the commission’s decision has not been finalized. Read more in our sister publication, CARTT.ca here (paywalled).
The Western Association of Broadcasters (WAB) and the British Columbia Association of Broadcasters (BCAB) are inviting submissions for their newly-combined awards program. Set to be handed out during the inaugural FWD Conference, June 3-4 in Kelowna, the awards are open to submissions until April 15. BCAB President Kevin Gemmell, General Manager at Pattison Media Prince George, said the combined awards program will see the conference “showcase the best in the west,” with the FWD Awards to “unify” excellence across WAB and BCAB member stations. Read more here.
The Jack Webster Foundation Professional Development Grants are now open to applications until May 3. Journalists and journalism educators are welcome to apply for funding to take a course to enhance your skills, or apply for a self-directed professional development grant to research and write a special project.
HarperCollins Canada is set to publish Hazel Mae memoir, Before I Let You Go: My Life in Broadcasting, Baseball, and Beyond. Set for release on Nov. 10, the book will take readers from the Sportsnet personality’s early days in the Philippines to her rise through the ranks of sports journalism, reflecting on breaking into broadcasting, navigating the U.S. sports media scene, and returning home to cover the Toronto Blue Jays.
Andy LeBlanc, former news director at CTV Kitchener and CTV Atlantic and a past president of RTDNA Canada, has published Sleepytime Tales – Mindful Bedtime Stories for Restful Nights, a collection of 12 stories inspired by his grandchildren. Available in print hardcover and paperback, as well as ebook and audiobook, LeBLanc tells Broadcast Dialogue he is already at work on his next title.
BROADCAST TECH & ENGINEERING:
LISTEN: In this episode of Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast, Publisher Shawn Smith speaks with Dielectric President Keith Pelletier about how the company is using deep legacy knowledge, digital twin design, and strong industry partnerships to deliver faster, more reliable RF transmission solutions for broadcasters. Pelletier explains how Dielectric’s engineering approach has dramatically shortened time to market, why long-term reliability remains central to its design philosophy, and how the company is blending veteran expertise with younger technical talent to keep pushing innovation forward ahead of NAB Show.
LISTEN: In this episode of Broadcast Dialogue – The Podcast, publisher Shawn Smith talks with MusicMaster’s Director of Technical Services, Jerry Parker, about where radio programming technology is headed and how MusicMaster is evolving to meet it. The conversation covers the company’s push toward more holistic solutions, including deeper integrations through the Nexus API, curated AI-assisted workflows, cloud-based SaaS deployment, and its partnership with InfoAudio to simplify support and unify automation with music scheduling. Read more here.
