It used to be that if you appeared as a regular guest on one radio station, they tried to ensure you wouldn’t wind up on the competition in a similar role. But all that seems to have gone by the wayside, after the same voices keep turning up over and over on both NT1010 and GNR 640.
 
Consider just some of the people who regularly do double duty on the competing stations:
 
Mark Warner: He’s an international trade lawyer and is often asked about NAFTA, which is always in the news. He’s a regular panelist on CFRB’s morning Roundtable, but I’ve frequently heard him (including on Thursday afternoon) pontificating on the same subject up (down?) the dial on the Toronto Corus outlet.
 
Dr. Oren Amitay: He’s a psychologist who Jerry Agar has on way too often to analyze someone in the news (often a person who’s been arrested for some crime or other) or an issue involving mental health. And sure enough, he turns up in the same role on 640, often on the same day. (He even has a website that bills him as a “Registered Psychologist and Media Commentator.”) Not sure that’s the guy I’d want to spill my guts to if I were a patient, but that’s just me.

 Anne Lagace Dowson: The Montreal writer appears every Friday on RB’s second morning Roundtable and then turns up about 4 hours later on Tasha Kheiriddin’s round-up of issues of the week. She’s slightly to the left of Mao on most things, having run for the NDP in Papineau in 2015 – and lost to some guy named Justin Trudeau.

It’s one thing if you’re a politician like John Tory or Doug Ford, who frequently turn up on both stations. Or if you’re promoting a book or movie and making the tour around the city once. But I remember when I worked in radio, if one of these other regular experts kept turning up on the competition, we’d dump them tout de suite.
 
To be fair, I assume they don’t have a contract, so they’re free agents and can do what they want. But there was once a tacit agreement that if you were going to be on our station (at the time a highly rated one) then you weren’t going on the airwaves locally somewhere else.
 
I guess times have changed. But I sometimes wonder why talk market leader CFRB lets it go on and doesn't kick the duplicates off their airwaves.