Telile Community Television was founded as a non-profit society in Arichat in 1993. Its first broadcast was in 1994. One of only nine over-the-air, not-for-profit, independent television stations in Canada, it remains a local community broadcaster although its programming is now distributed by cable across Canada.
The station originated in the years of the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishing industry in the early 1990s. The collapse provoked a terrible and urgent economic crisis for the people of Isle Madame. In the absence (at the time) of any specific local media such as newspapers, radio or television, urgent questions arose as to how to inform local residents about the state of the local crisis, the measures being undertaken to address it, and how to provide a communications medium through which groups and individuals could mobilize both unified and effective community responses.
According to its founding documents, Telile was intended as an answer to these questions. Its five-fold aims were to: pull local communities together; provide critical information to those communities; share ideas; share business opportunities; build self-confidence and local awareness. In addition, Telile was intent upon facilitating and enabling economic development, creating non-profit business, and moving Isle Madame into the information economy. Training local residents in information technologies was also a priority. Funding from the federal government’s Atlantic Groundfish Strategy (which provided funds to retrain those most affected by the fishery collapse) allowed Telile to hire its first employees. These included 14 displacedfishe rs who received 32 weeks training in broadcast technologies.
At the time, Telile’s programming was distributed locally through the good graces of Strait of Canso Cable TV. When new regulations were put in place by the CRTC in 2022 to facilitate enhanced access to community-based television across Canada, Telile was granted a license to broadcast its own programming through its own 450-watt transmitter. The new regulations also required locally operating cable companies to carry the signal of community-based based broadcasters on their networks. As a result, Telile content is now broadcast far beyond the 25-mile radius of Isle Madame. When it began broadcasting in 1994, Telile received $50,000 from the federal government to purchase equipment to operate its studio out of rented premises on the lower road in the village of Arichat. Today, it operates out of a state-of-the-art, fully digital broadcasting facility on Conney’s Lane in Arichat, a facility which first opened in 2007 thanks to generous funding from the Government of Canada.
