IN 1983, MORE THAN 30 years after the first CBC and Radio-Canada television broadcasts began connecting Canadian cities, residents of Lac-Beauport and Lac-Saint-Charles, communities at the foot of the Laurentian Mountains near Québec City, still had no TV reception. So they formed a cooperative, applied for a CRTC licence and began working toward setting up their own distribution network. By 1985, the Coopérative de câblodistribution de l’Arrière-Pays (or Backcountry Cable Distribution Network, known by its French acronym CCAP) had 3,000 subscribers. Thirty years later, it’s still there, and thriving.
The company provides TV, internet and landline telephone service to over 17,000 subscribers in the Laurentian foothills, covering the communities of Lac-Beauport, Lac-Delage, Lac-Saint-Charles, Stoneham-et-Tewksbury, Ste-Brigitte-de-Laval and Notre-Dame-des-Laurentides, from an office on the outskirts of Quebec City.
(Pictured, from left to right: Marco Gonzalez, operations director of CCAP, Maryna Carré, director of marketing, communications and sponsorship, and Stéphane Arseneau, co-operative director.)
“We’re kind of surrounded by Vidéotron in the Quebec City area; where they stop, we start, and where they start, we stop,” says CCAP director Stéphane Arseneau . “Most of the areas we cover are bedroom communities for Quebec City commuters. We have no big businesses in our coverage area, no hospitals, a small research park but otherwise it’s all residences.”
Maryna Carré, the co-op’s director of marketing, communications and sponsorship, describes its oddly-shaped territory as a “spiderweb.”
“It’s very mountainous and very spread out; it’s not centralized around our office. To get from point A to point B in our coverage area, technicians cover 30 kilometres, sometimes 40 or 45,” she explains. “There are some places where you have to invest a lot of time, money, effort and equipment to serve relatively few clients. For some areas of Stoneham and Tewksbury, we’ve had to ask ourselves, ‘Is it worth it to go install equipment up there?’ We are a co-op, our goal is to offer services, but there is a cost associated with that.”
“In the city, you think about clients per pole, but out here it’s poles per client,” says Arseneau. “That’s the challenge. When a major company comes to a territory like ours, they’ll say, the houses are too spread out, it’s not profitable, and they won’t go any further. That’s why the co-op was formed in the beginning.”
The $100 sign-up fee paid by new members is also their co-op membership fee; members vote on major decisions at CCAP’s annual general meeting. Profits, instead of going into the pockets of a limited number of shareholders, are mostly reinvested in service improvements or distributed to members as dividends. Board members are volunteers. “All the clients are members and vote at the AGA they are all part owners. We have 18,000 bosses, but no individual can impose their way of working on us,” sys Arseneau. “Everyone pays the same price for the same service.”
According to Arseneau, the co-op model and limited coverage area allow the company to switch the emphasis of its service from quantity to quality. “Because we’re not focused on making money for shareholders, we don’t have that pressure to make sales,” he says. “If an employee takes an hour on the phone with a client, that’s how much time it takes. Clients also appreciate being able to call back and speak to the same person, which you can’t get with big companies. We’re lucky to be able to do this.”
Since 2011, the company has also offered its own community cable channel to subscribers, on digital cable and online. “The CRTC requires us to either invest in our own local TV programming or send 5 per cent of our revenues to a national TV fund and not see that money again. We decided to keep the money and the production here,” says Carré. “The Quebec City area is well covered by the major news networks, but they’re not always going to cover what goes on in the community of Lac-Beauport, for example. We want to give local people and companies that time to shine.”
“Our members like seeing us on the ground in the community, and people like seeing their neighbours or their grandkids on TV.” – Stéphane Arsenault, CCAP
Most of the content is produced by a local video production company that is also a co-op. A range of music, cooking, exercise and entertainment programs are available, aimed mostly at children and senior citizens. A recent documentary, Freeski, about high school students learning acrobatic skiing, won a Canadian Cable Systems Alliance award in 2016, one of several CCSA awards that CCAP has picked up since the channel’s launch. Production teams also cover local festivals and special events. “Our members like seeing us on the ground in the community, and people like seeing their neighbours or their grandkids on TV,” says Arseneau. “It’s a win-win situation, and it gives us more visibility.”
For the future of the co-op, Arseneau is betting on expanded TV offerings and improved Internet access. Internet, he says, is “the main motor of our business, more than phone or TV, with TV watchers increasingly migrating toward Internet-based platforms like Netflix and livestreaming.” CCAP recently began offering the CRTC-mandated basic TV bundle alongside larger bundles, offering clients the chance to switch between the packages if they choose to. “The CRTC doesn’t mandate smaller companies like ours to offer that, although we saw clients wanted it, so we did,” says Arseneau. While the company doesn’t yet offer fiber-to-the home internet access, Arseneau says they’re “working hard to provide equivalent service.” CCAP is currently a redistributor for Vidéotron’s mobile products; Arseneau hopes that within a few years they’ll be able to provide their own cell phone service.
“One of our biggest challenges is that now, in rural areas, people want the same service they would get in downtown Quebec City,” says Arseneau. “Telecommunications today are as important as electricity, and if we want to keep developing as a community and as a people, those structures need to be accessible.” He says he hopes the CRTC and provincial governments will intervene to make structures such as poles and towers more accessible to small companies.
“Access to structures is getting more and more complicated and expensive. A lot of these structures belong to other companies, either Hydro-Québec or another phone company which is our principal competitor, so you have competitors deciding whether to give us access. They find reasons to say no or to delay the projects which increase our costs and delay our expansion. Access to structures permits companies to create healthy competition, if you have no competition you are going to have one company that does whatever it wants, sits on its laurels and doesn’t develop, and that hurts everyone. The best way for the CRTC to encourage co-ops like ours would be to make it easier for us to access structures.”
“Keeping our current clients already takes a lot of effort, considering that we’re competing against major companies with bigger budgets and expanding telemarketing operations,” says Carré. “Our main goal is serving our current coverage area to the best of our potential.”
Cartt.ca’s series on The Independents continues next week with Execulink Telecom, followed by Brooketel, Mornington Communications and Cable Cable.
