The Radio Planet presents
Canadian broadcasting did not start with a national broadcaster. It started with an experimental Marconi licence in Montreal in 1919, a newspaper’s own station carrying hockey from the Mutual Street Arena in 1923, and a railway that strung a network across the country before NBC existed. The CBC arrived in 1936 to a dial that had already been running for seventeen years. This is what survives of it — the private, sponsored and regional radio that went on running alongside the Corporation, and then everything the Corporation itself made once it had the medium.
467
Broadcasts
26
Series held
14
Pre-network finds
1919–2005
Years covered
A note on what is missing
Almost nothing survives from CNR Radio (1923–1932), Canada’s first national network, or from the Canadian Radio Broadcasting Commission that followed it. Stations did not record what they transmitted; the discs that were cut were cut for sponsors, and most were thrown out. Later Canadian drama survives in quantity but sits with Library and Archives Canada under restricted terms, and we will not put anything here that we cannot lawfully stream. This collection is therefore small on purpose. Every item in it is a real recording with a traceable source.
Before the Corporation
Two documents of the beginning: the Montreal station that was licensed in 1919 and lasted long enough to write its own anniversary, and the hockey broadcast that a newspaper started in 1923 and a car company nationalised in 1931.
1919–1969 · CFCF Montreal (formerly XWA)
A flexi-disc pressed by CFCF Montreal for its golden anniversary, tracing the line back to XWA in 1919 — the first licensed broadcasting station in Canada, and arguably in the world.
1 recording
1923–1931 onward · CFCA Toronto, then the General Motors Hockey Broadcast
The first hockey transmission went out on 8 February 1923 over CFCA, the Toronto Star’s own station. Nine years later General Motors bought the national rights and Saturday night was fixed in place.
1 recording
The sponsored hour
A tobacco company, an electrical manufacturer, an anonymous transcription house arguing about citizenship. The sponsored programme was the commercial spine of the Canadian dial, and it is the layer historians skip and the archives kept by accident.
1941 · Sponsored by Sweet Caporal
Ted Steele and the Novatones, baritone Bill Johnson, and Milton Cross announcing — a sponsored music series built for Canadian listeners and numbered by programme rather than by date.
5 recordings
8 April 1946 · CFPL London, the Dominion Network
A remote pickup from an arena in southwestern Ontario: the most popular dance band Canada produced, the Northernaires quartet, and a manufacturer paying for the hour.
1 recording
1945–1947 · Sponsored network music series
Five surviving broadcasts from the immediate postwar seasons, from Remembrance Day 1945 through to the new year of 1947.
5 recordings
1948 · Syndicated transcription series
Out of the Ivory Tower, What Is a Canadian, Free Enterprise, Communism, Taxes, National Unity — a postwar civics series in dramatic form, complete from first episode to last.
13 recordings
The stations out west
Every history of Canadian broadcasting is written from Toronto and Montreal. On the Prairies the dominant sound was the local station's own house band holding the same slot on the same night for decades.
1930s–1960s · CFCN Calgary
Tony Niedermayer and the Old Timers played the same programme on CFCN Calgary for more than thirty-five years: waltzes, breakdowns, polkas and the tunes the West actually danced to.
15 recordings
Canada on the air
The lunch hour, the fiddle from Prince Edward Island, the travelogue with Lorne Greene in it, and the Canadian band broadcasting to the armies from London. Between them they account for a very large share of the listening a generation did.
1939–1940 · CBC
Winter Fun and Romance, the Glories of Niagara, Bonny Vistas on the Cabot Trail — skits, music and actuality, with Lorne Greene and J. Frank Willis in the cast.
6 recordings
1939–1956 · Weekday lunchtime, coast to coast
Bert Pearl’s troupe held the lunch hour for twenty-two years and became the most listened-to programme in the country. Seven broadcasts survive here, from before the war to the middle fifties.
7 recordings
Late 1940s · Organ and poetry, late evening
A late-night programme of theatre organ and spoken verse — the kind of quiet, unsponsored half hour that no commercial schedule would carry today.
1 recording
1939–1958 · CBH Halifax and CBL Toronto, the Trans-Canada Network
Messer built the largest audience in Maritime broadcasting from a station in Charlottetown and then took it national. This is the December 1957 broadcast.
1 recording
1944–1945 · Allied Expeditionary Forces Programme
Canada’s contribution to the three Allied bands of the AEF Programme, led by the arranger Robert Farnon — March of the Toys, C Jam Blues, Wartime Favorite Medley.
16 recordings
Canadian radio drama
Canada wrote radio drama at industrial scale and at a standard that embarrassed larger countries. Only fragments have reached the public domain. These are the ones we can play.
Late 1940s · Canadian anthology drama
A Hat for Miss McCain, We Must Triumph, The Dolls, Dear Milkman — four surviving plays from a Canadian anthology series.
4 recordings
Late 1940s · Canadian documentary drama
Six dramatised Canadian trials, from an 1894 Toronto murder acquittal to an eighteenth-century hanging in New France.
6 recordings
And then the Corporation
Everything above happened before, beside or in spite of a national broadcaster. This is what the Corporation itself did with the medium once it had it: Andrew Allan’s Sunday-night company, a comedy team that made Saturday night, and a horror tradition running unbroken from wartime propaganda to the last anthology the CBC commissioned. We hold 12 of these series and 385 broadcasts — the largest body of Canadian radio drama streaming anywhere.
1942
Six half-hours for the National War Finance Committee imagining an occupied Canada, with Orson Welles, Vincent Price and Helen Hayes.
6 broadcasts
1944 onward
Andrew Allan's Sunday-night company in Toronto — the series that proved a country could write its own drama.
8 broadcasts
1946 onward
Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster, the comedy team the CBC built a Saturday night around and Ed Sullivan later borrowed.
4 broadcasts
1960s
Poe and the masters of suspense, adapted for Canadian radio.
26 broadcasts
1960s–70s
Original Canadian scripts at half past ten at night.
13 broadcasts
1980–1983
The Friday-night horror anthology that drew complaints, pulled broadcasts, and a permanent cult.
64 broadcasts
1980s
Nightfall's successor, turning to science fiction and speculative drama.
24 broadcasts
1980s
A detective serial that follows the railways and the coasts.
17 broadcasts
1996
A comic serial set entirely inside one hotel.
13 broadcasts
1990s–2000s
The Saturday-night mystery hour, and the largest single run of Canadian crime drama we hold.
195 broadcasts
2005
A modern heir to Nightfall, made for one summer.
7 broadcasts
Sunday Showcase
Ghost stories and cold-weather tales for the winter schedule.
8 broadcasts
Provenance
Every recording on these pages is a surviving transmission or transcription held by the Internet Archive and in the public domain. Titles, air dates and durations are taken from the archives’ own metadata; where a date could not be established from the source we leave the broadcast undated rather than guess. Series covers are set here in period type: no network artwork survives in the public domain for these programmes, and we do not invent one.