XM Canada

» see xmradio.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Canadian Satellite Radio was incorporated in 2002 and wholly owned by John Bitove, who is better known in Canada for bringing the Raptors to Toronto. It signed its agreement with XM Satellite Radio of Washington on 7 August 2003, applied to the broadcasting regulator twelve days later, and then waited almost two years while the country argued about whether a radio service beamed from American satellites should be allowed to exist at all.

The argument was settled on 16 June 2005, when the CRTC licensed Canadian Satellite Radio and Sirius Canada on the same day. The licenses came loaded. Both applicants had proposed carrying five Canadian-produced channels alongside a hundred and twenty or more American ones, and the Commission said plainly that this would make Canadian channels less than five percent of the offering, which it called an unacceptably low level. It raised the floor to eight original Canadian channels from the first day of operations, capped the ratio at nine non-Canadian channels per Canadian one, required that eighty-five percent of the music on those Canadian channels be Canadian, and insisted that at least three of the eight be French-language.

XM Canada announced its brand on 11 October 2005 and went on the air on 22 November, nine days before Sirius Canada, which makes it the first satellite radio service Canadians could legally subscribe to. It said it had passed 350,000 subscribers on 30 November 2007. The parent listed on the Toronto exchange, so unlike its rival it had to publish what the business actually looked like, and what it looked like was expensive. By the time the two companies went to the regulator to merge, they told the Commission that their combined cumulative losses came to more than four hundred million dollars.

~ the case file ~

~ a quota in orbit ~

Satellite radio was the first broadcasting technology to arrive in Canada with no geography in it. A terrestrial station has a transmitter in a city and a license area drawn on a map, and Canadian content rules had always been attached to that map.

So the Commission wrote the quota into the subscription instead of the transmitter, and the 2005 rules were unusually specific: a nine-to-one linkage cap, an absolute floor below which Canadian channels could never fall under ten percent of any package offered, and five percent of gross revenues into Canadian talent development. The French-language condition went further than a channel count, requiring those channels to give sixty-five percent of their vocal music to songs in French.

~ two into one ~

Satellite radio in Canada supported one company badly and two companies worse. Sirius Canada, owned by the CBC with Slaight Communications and the American Sirius, had roughly twice XM Canada's subscriber base: about 1.2 million monthly subscriptions against about 600,000 paid subscribers in early 2011. XM had the stronger automotive position, with the Canadian car market accounting for around sixty percent of its base, and the NHL rights.

The deal was announced on 24 November 2010. CSR shareholders approved it on 18 February 2011, the Competition Bureau said on 23 February that it would not challenge it, and the CRTC approved the change of control on 11 April. Because the average profit before interest and tax of each service over the preceding three years had been negative, the Commission exempted the transaction from the tangible benefits payment it would normally have demanded. The merger closed on 21 June 2011. The applicants projected twenty million dollars of synergies within eighteen months.

~ why the brands outlived it ~

The merger did not merge anything a subscriber could see, and the reason was hardware. XM and Sirius were built on separate satellite constellations using incompatible transmission schemes, and a receiver made for one could not decode the other. To merge the customer bases, somebody had to replace every radio in every car and kitchen in the country.

So the companies told the regulator they would not try. In the April 2011 decision the Commission recorded that they had no intention of adopting a common satellite platform and intended to keep distributing from both networks for at least the next ten years. Instead they promised interoperable receivers for future buyers and a cross-platform package letting subscribers of each service hear popular channels from the other. Those arrived on 1 October 2012 under the Premier name, and the basic monthly price went from $14.99 to $15.99 at renewal.

~ the fortnight the names went ~

On 28 August 2012 the merged company announced it had launched a redesigned siriusxm.ca, though that same announcement still told people they could find programming at sirius.ca and xmradio.ca. xmradio.ca was still serving its own site on 24 August 2012, about five kilobytes of What Is XM and XM In Your Vehicle. By 6 September it was a redirect. sirius.ca lasted a day longer and was redirecting by 8 September. The unified site appeared in full on 19 September. No farewell was published for either name; the evidence of death is a redirect, which is why this is filed at month precision rather than to a day. The corporate tidying followed: the Commission replaced the two licenses with one on 16 November 2012, and Canadian Satellite Radio Holdings renamed itself Sirius XM Canada Holdings that January.

~ still on the license ~

That single license is where this gets strange. When the Commission consolidated the paperwork it was careful to say the two undertakings would continue to operate as distinct services because the technological differences made that unavoidable. Compliance with conditions would still be assessed for each one separately. The names never left the regulatory record. The CRTC ownership chart dated 1 November 2024 still lists Sirius XM Canada Inc. as licensee of two national satellite subscription radio undertakings, and it still names them Sirius Canada and XM Canada.

So XM Canada is a brand that no customer has seen since 2012 and a licensed undertaking that existed on paper at least twelve years later, carrying conditions written in 2005 about how much French-language vocal music it had to play. The satellites are the reason. Two incompatible fleets were cheaper to keep flying than one fleet plus a nationwide receiver swap, and the regulator wrote that reasoning into the file.

~ content rules, from somewhere else ~

Quotas on broadcast music are not a Canadian peculiarity and that is the part I recognize. Turkish radio has operated under its own content requirements for as long as I have been listening to it, and the arguments here run the same way: somebody says a quota protects an industry that would otherwise be flattened, somebody else says it is the state deciding what comes out of your speakers. What Canada did in 2005 was apply that argument to a signal falling out of the sky from a foreign satellite, and then keep applying it for twenty years to a service that stopped having a name.

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