Serge Morel        P.O. Box 17222     Sarasota, FL   34276-0222                 Fax:   (941) 378- 8008     e-mail:   serg@gte.net 9/20/2000 Page 144 of 579 Six months after Cancom was granted its licence, the National Hockey League tried to stop Wednesday night hockey games being shown in remote and underserved areas. Cancom was accused of infringing the NHL's own territorial restrictions on showing games on television. The Cancom board decided to stand firm and fight it in court if necessary. The dispute was eventually resolved without a legal showdown, but not before the curmudgeonly Leafs chief Harold Ballard had told the Toronto Sun: "If there's a signal going out of here and I find out which wire it is, there's going to be a hatchet through it, I'll tell you that."   Meanwhile, the government was clamping down on illegal dishes. The RCMP seized several and The Whitehorse Star reported the owner of two satellite dishes as saying: "I will fight this down to the bitter end. I don't intend to let anyone -   (Communications Minister) Francis Fox or anyone - tell me what to watch. This is not the Canadian way. This is what happens in Third World countries."   Distributing broadcast signals across time zones had its perils, too, as viewers reminded Cancom in no uncertain terms in the summer of 1982 when a late-night adult movie in Montreal appeared on Vancouver screens at 8 p.m. Short said at the time that he could understand how a film could be misclassified or not properly described in its synopsis, thereby making Cancom vulnerable to this sort of mistake, but "any material that we show on any of our satellite transponders must be suitable for general broadcast in terms of content and time of scheduling." He said staff should not hesitate to pull the switch if it happened again.   In November (1982) Cancom directors and executives gathered in Room 200 of the House of Commons to demonstrate satellite service. At precisely 4.32 p.m. television sets lit up with the four Cancom signals. The presentation lasted two hours and clearly impressed the big gathering of MPs and senators. On December 31, 1981, the first 20 community cable systems received their licences, but as Hougen noted six months later: "It is evident that we will have serious problems if the customers are not on board soon. The licensing process is dreadfully slow."   The company had taken a substantial risk responding to what was perceived as a national priority - establishing a legal (?) Canadian satellite broadcast service – but from a business standpoint it was becoming clear that the signals had been put up too soon. At $1.25 million a year for each of the four transponders, costs were running far ahead of licensed customers.   For its part, the CRTC was swamped. "They (commissioners) hardly had time to grab a clean shirt between hearings," Bob Short recalls. There were other problems. Small communities were having trouble raising the cash to start a cable system, and the downturn in the economy was causing potential customers in very remote areas, such as oil drilling operations, to put their satellite television plans on hold.   "We had spent all the money up front and we had virtually no customers," Peters says. "We got a lot of lip service from the CRTC but it wasn't getting us anywhere. We were bogged down in the process. They were treating all of these applications in the normal slow, ponderous way. We had several meetings with the CRTC and they assured us they wanted to cooperate. They were dealing with applications on the appropriate forms but they had others written on the back of cigarette packets and everything in between. A lot of the applications did not follow the normal process."   By September 1982 Cancom had spent $11 million and taken in only $550,000. De Gaspé Beaubien was worried, and so was his board, about the operating losses. Cancom felt that in small communities where an application for a licence was uncontested, the process should be streamlined. A meeting was arranged with then Communications Minister Francis Fox at de Gaspe Beaubien's home in the Laurentians north of Montreal.    Delayed by official business, the minister finally arrived four hours late to find dinner cold and most of the guests sipping drinks - "well and truly relaxed," one of them recalls. Short remembers that night for another reason: de Gaspe Beaubien's large dogs ate the expensive leather briefcase he had just brought back from Europe. Says de Gaspé Beaubien: "Everybody admired the briefcase and Bob Short left it on the floor in the reception area. I had these big white dogs, good looking but stupid as hell, and one of them went in and made a big hole in the thing. When we walked out, all that was left was a wooden frame. It was so embarrassing."