Howard Stern
On September 2, 1997, Canadian radio stations Q107 (Toronto) and CHOM (Montreal) began airing the Howard Stern show. That day, Stern called the French “peckerheads” and said that “the French should bend over for me the way they did for Hitler”. That broadcast, and others, led to thousands of complaints to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. As a result of the complaints Q107 continued to air the Stern show but with an eight-minute tape delay and some bleeping. CHOM stopped airing Stern in August of 1998, and Q107 did the same in November 2001. Officially Q107's owners claimed they dropped Stern because they wanted to return to an all music, classic rock format, but it is widely rumoured that the real reason was a combination of falling ratings (Stern's last ratings in Toronto were around a 6% share, somewhere around 6th or 7th place in the market) and the high costs of carrying the show in both licensing fees and the labour costs of the tape delay.
Stern later announced his move to Sirius, effective January 2006, as the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has no juridiction over content on subscription-based services such as cable television or satellite radio. However, the CRTC has always held content jurisdiction over content on cable services and is apparently able to regulate satellite radio content as well.
Sirius Canada's licence decision made no explicit reference to Stern but does obligate the company to maintain the same standards (i.e. the CAB's Sex-role Portrayal Code) as for conventional stations. The decision also recognizes Sirius's ability to air "adult" programming in separate packages, but even these must comply with the Code. (By way of comparison, even adult content from Canadian pay-per-view providers is subject to review prior to broadcast, to ensure compliance with the Code.)
Sirius Canada later announced that Howard Stern's two channels, Howard 100 and Howard 101, would not be available to its Canadian customers. Naturally this has generated negative response from Canadian fans of Stern, some of whom have claimed that they would not subscribe to any service absent the two Stern channels. According to Gary Slaight, CEO of Standard Broadcasting:
The CRTC, who we are licensed to, would eventually force us to take Stern down, because we have standards we have to abide by in this country when you own a broadcasting licence. (source)
However, it should be noted the CRTC has not in fact banned Stern's broadcast in Canada — Sirius Canada instead chose not to risk provoking an issue with the broadcast regulator. Nonetheless, there is some ambiguity in the licence conditions. Some might argue that Sirius Canada is simply trying to avoid the public relations and regulatory battle that would likely follow if it decided to carry Stern, whereas XM Canada will carry shock jocks Opie & Anthony. However, at present it is unclear whether a completely unedited Howard Stern Show will ever be available via Sirius Canada.
Some media commentators have also suggested that Sirius Canada's reluctance to carry Stern has less to do with regulatory concerns and more to do with unwillingness to pay the American company's syndication fees for the program.
Josef Radomski, a Canadian writer, announced on the January 11, 2006 Howard Stern Show that he has started an online petition to bring Stern to Sirius Canada.
Perhaps in light of pressure from fans, many of whom were reportedly continuing to purchase grey-market Sirius U.S. receivers, on February 1, 2006, Sirius Canada announced that the Howard 100 channel would be made available to all subscribers effective the following Monday. It was not immediately clear if an existing Sirius channel would be dropped to make room, given Sirius Canada's other regulatory constraints.
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