Monarch Cablesystems

» see monarch.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The business began as broadcasting, not cable. J. Harlan Yuill consolidated his interests in Medicine Hat, Alberta as Monarch Investments in the early 1940s, established Monarch Broadcasting in 1945, put CHAT radio on the air in 1946 and CHAT-TV on channel 6 in 1957. He became president of Cablevision Medicine Hat in 1960, and that company went on the air in 1964. His son Willard Yuill took over the family assets in 1972 and ran them for the next three decades.

The cable company changed names twice without changing hands. Cablevision Medicine Hat became Monarch Cable TV, which became Monarch Cablesystems Ltd. By the turn of the century it was one of a shrinking number of family-held Canadian cable operators, serving places chosen by the fact that nobody larger had bothered: Brooks and Canmore in Alberta, Fernie and Kimberley in the Kootenays. In March 2001 it bought OKS Cable Corporation from the Okanagan Skeena Group, and that purchase added the systems that made the company interesting, a northern British Columbia footprint running through Terrace, Kitimat, Smithers, Houston, Hazelton, Stewart and Prince Rupert.

Within five years it had sold all of it. The exit happened in two separate transactions to two unrelated buyers, which is the detail Wikipedia's account of this company flattens into one. The licensed Alberta and southern BC systems went to Shaw Communications, approved by the regulator on 7 January 2004. The northern BC systems went to CityWest, the telephone company owned by the City of Prince Rupert, in a deal announced on 15 August 2005 at $23.5 million and closed that October.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the exempt half ~

The two halves of Monarch were not the same kind of asset, and the difference is the most interesting thing in its paperwork. The Alberta and southern BC systems held broadcasting licenses, so Shaw needed the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to approve the transfer, and the Commission issued a decision doing so. The northern BC systems were small enough to be exempt from licensing, which meant nobody had to approve anything. CityWest could simply buy them.

Somebody objected anyway. On 16 August 2005, the day after the deal was reported, the Canadian Cable Telecommunications Association filed with the Commission arguing that a municipally owned buyer was barred from holding broadcasting licenses under a 1997 federal Direction, so the exemption would lapse the moment CityWest took over and the systems would be running unlawfully. Commission staff wrote to both companies on 19 August. On 30 August staff wrote again, noting that the Direction does contain an exception for municipalities, and that whether it applied was for the Commission to determine. The file ran through a reply in early September and was then closed with no further action required. The sale went ahead.

~ two sales, twenty-one months apart ~

Monarch's broadcasting arm had already gone. At its 1995 peak that division ran fifteen radio stations and three television stations across Alberta and British Columbia, and the whole of it, eighteen licenses, was sold to the Jim Pattison group in 2000. What was left was cable, and the family sold that in the two pieces described above, finishing in October 2005.

The Monarch name did not disappear from Medicine Hat. The Monarch Corporation still trades from the same city, a private holding company whose listed divisions are CSH International, Monarch Ventures and Traxx Transportation, none of them in communications. What ended in 2005 was the cable operator, not the family, and one of the stranger consequences is that a Wikipedia footnote still claims monarch.net redirects to CityWest. It did once. Today it belongs to the holding company and has no cable on it at all.

~ the frameset nobody rebuilt ~

The clearest record of the ending is the company's own homepage, because whoever handled the transition did the cheapest possible thing. On 30 October 2005 the lower frame of monarch.net was still entirely Monarch: a motto, "Monarch Delivers", which the page is careful to explain is more than a marketing slogan, that you may have seen it on billboards or flyers, and that it is also the motto of the staff, from the Customer Care Representatives to the local Field Technicians. Underneath sat the products, cable television and an internet service called M-NET, with a community channel on Cable 10 named Monarch TV-10. The copyright line said 2004.

By 15 December the same page, at the same address, inside the same frameset, read "We are pleased to announce that CityWest Cable is now your new cable service provider." The copyright line said 2005 CityWest Cable. The top frame still said Monarch Cable Systems, because nobody had got to it yet, and it stayed that way until late 2007, when the navigation finally changed too and Monarch TV-10 became CityWest TV-10. A company could be sold and tell its customers so, and still keep its own name in the title bar for two more years.

Canada's rural cable map was built by families like this one and then consolidated into a handful of national operators, and almost none of the small companies left a sentence behind explaining what they thought they were doing. Monarch did, by accident, in a frame that the new owner forgot to delete.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »