Must carry

In cable television, governments apply a must-carry regulation stating that locally licensed television stations must be carried on a cable provider's system.

In the mid-to-late 1970s, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) implemented a rule that a cable system must carry a broadcast television station at no cost to the broadcaster so long as the transmitter emitted an equivalent isotropically radiated power of at least 5 watts. This CRTC rule may have changed over the years, but in principle, a broadcast television station transmitting at 1 kW EIRP must be carried. The status of terrestrial digital only channels with respect to the must-carry requirement is untested as, unlike the U.S., some television stations in Canada did not operate digital signals until the August 2011 and the digital broadcasters that were active prior to then were merely high definition simulcasts of those stations' existing analog signals in major centres such as Toronto and Vancouver with no additional digital subchannels offered due to broadcasters opting not to carry any due to CRTC rules that require subchannels to be licensed separately.

CITY-TV in Toronto (according to its own website and annual reports) owes its financial success as an independent station to this CRTC must-carry rule. It is assumed that this must-carry rule was aimed at smaller television stations in Ontario and Quebec, many of which are not carried by satellite television providers.

For many years, the Canadian must-carry rules created very little friction between terrestrial broadcasters and cable systems, as providers are allowed to more aggressively implement other digital telecommunications services (like cable internet services and IP telephony) with less overall regulation than their U.S. counterparts. However, in 2008, Canada's two largest commercial television networks, CTV and Global, began to demand that the CRTC permit them to charge a fee for cable carriage, even alleging that some smaller market stations would be forced to cease operations if this was not allowed.

...
Wikipedia