Everyone in Toronto knows about Newstalk 1010. What’s less well known is that the original owners of CFRB never wanted to be on that frequency and fought the Canadian government for more than two years trying to stop it.
 
To understand this long forgotten moment in Toronto radio history, you have to know two things that happened back in the mid-1940s: The Havana Treaty, designed to stop interference on AM, assigned various clear channel frequencies to a number of countries, with Canada getting 740, for example, while the U.S. received great dial spots like 700 and 770. Mexico and Cuba had their share, too.
 
And you may find this one hard to believe or stomach – back in the days before there was a CRTC, the federal government put the CBC in charge of regulating radio in this country. That’s right. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation got to say which competitor of theirs got a licence, how much power they could have and where they were on the dial.
 
At the time, CFRB was on 860 AM with 10,000 watts, and very happy to be there. From June, 1945:
 

 
But after Havana, everything changed. The CBC, in its infinite imperialism, decided they wanted 860 for their CJBC - a station then assigned to 1010. And they weren’t about to take no for an answer.
 

(July 1946)
 
Yes, you read that right. One of the alternates they were offered was 640, the home of their current competition. The irony isn’t lost on anyone.
 
Rogers, which still owned CFRB at the time, considered taking the case to court. But they also knew that the CBC had all the power legally and in the end, there wasn’t much they could do about it. So they considered an alternative: take over the dial spot at what would one day be known as The Big 8.
 
From Sept. 1946
 

 
Luckily, future Windsor-Detroit listeners weren’t subjected to the Big 64, which just sounds weird.
 
In the end, 'RB surrendered, but not without a victory of a sort. The CBC’s rules for radio back then said that only they could have a 50,000 watt signal. All Canadian private stations had to settle for 5,000 or less. (CFRB, Toronto’s oldest station, had been around since 1927 and was allowed to stay at its then 10K.)
 
‘RB agreed to make the swap on one condition – they be allowed to compensate for the loss of the great 860 signal by upping their power to 50,000, the only private radio station in Canada at the time to do so. The government agreed and CFRB began making preparations for the big move, including installing a new transmitter in Clarkson.
 

 
Despite the ad proclaiming July 1st, the big day actually arrived on Sept. 1, 1948.
 

 
The next step was to make sure listeners and advertisers were aware of the change.
 




And that’s how Newstalk 1010 came to its familiar home on the dial – a spot they never wanted to be in the first place.