My Shaw Cable package
in Thunder Bay includes a channel (No. 195) called OMNI. As its website
states: “OMNI is Canada’s only
multilingual and multicultural television broadcaster, offering a wide range of
ethnocultural and third-language programming to the country’s diverse
communities. OMNI is available in more than 11 million households across Canada
through its five local over-the-air television stations in Vancouver, Calgary,
Edmonton and Toronto (OMNI.1 and OMNI.2) and its national speciality channel –
OMNI Regional, which is comprised of four regional channels and is offered as
part of all digital basic television packages throughout the country. In
Quebec, OMNI Regional has partnered with independent ethnic broadcaster, ICI
Television, to offer French-language local programming to the province’s ethnic
communities. OMNI offers a wide range of locally produced and acquired
programming, including daily national news in Cantonese, Italian, Mandarin and
Punjabi, current affairs programming and popular entertainment programming
including Bollywood movies, Asian cinema, and Italian and Portuguese telenovelas.”
Now the channel
available in Thunder Bay via SHAW appears to be some version of OMNI regional. Its two Toronto channels are OMNI1 and OMNI2
with OMNI1 offering a fair amount of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese
programming while OMNI2 offers more Punjabi, Mandarin and Cantonese
programming. Until last week, what I assume is OMNI regional here on Shaw in Thunder Bay had two Italian newscasts around
noon – one its Toronto news program in Italian and another the RAI news
broadcast from Italy. I used to watch
them quite frequently and would even PVR them if I was unable to watch them
during the noon hour period. Well, this
week these seem to have disappeared and the OMNI channel’s programming in
Thunder Bay seems to largely reflect OMNI2.
When I contacted SHAW, they said that they have no control what OMNI
provides, they just provide access to the Channel. I have contacted OMNI itself via their “Contact Us” link but have yet
to hear back.
Not sure what has happened
here given that there are nearly 3000 people in Thunder Bay whose first
language is Italian (Thunder Bay’s CMA population in 2016 according to the Census
was 121,620) and the entire community of Italian descent is probably close to
10,000. Italian appears to be the largest foreign first language group in
Thunder Bay followed by Finnish at just under 2000. True it is an aging first language community
but then so is the Italian community in the GTA which has access to OMNI1. In terms of some of the other first language groups
in Thunder Bay with programming available on OMNI there is Cantonese (180), Mandarin (315),
Punjabi (75), and Tagalog (200). Yet OMNI no longer has Italian programming
from the OMNI regional feed available in Thunder Bay.
What has happened
here? Not sure because I have not heard
back from OMNI but my best educated guess is that this was a made in Toronto HQ
one size fits all decision that decided that since SHAW is based in Western Canada (i.e.
Vancouver and Calgary are the big centres there) the programming should reflect
the community composition there. One
would have expected a multicultural television broadcaster to have done a
better job on its community composition home work, but these things
happen. Hopefully, OMNI will come to its
senses and put back an hour or so of Italian programing back on OMNI regional
(or better yet add OMNI1 to the package feed that SHAW provides in Thunder Bay) and allow me
to get back to watching Toronto area news reports done by Gianpietro Nagliati.
