produced for CFCM to air on CKMI when it was deemed too expensive to produce a separate English commercial. Despite this, Télé-Capitale had no qualms about keeping the station on the air, viewing it as a public service to Quebec City's anglophone community. Over the years, the station served mostly as a semi-satellite of CBMT in Montreal. The only local program on the air by 1996 was a 30-minute newscast on weeknights; the host of the newscast, Karen McDonald, was the editor and co-owner of the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, the only English-language newspaper in the city. Many stories on the newscast, Inside Quebec, were in French because they were supplied by CFCM's newsroom; McDonald, who left the Chronicle-Telegraph to work for the station known as "MI-5" before also returning to the newspaper four years later, recalled that CFCM's reporters did not ask questions in English even when they were interviewing an anglophone. In the late 1980s, the newscast only attracted 5,000 viewers per statistics from the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement; McDonald believed that most of those viewers were francophones. Becoming a Global station On June 13, 1995, Télé-Métropole and CanWest Global Communications announced a plan that would transform CKMI from a de facto rebroadcaster of CBMT into the third major English-language TV service in the province, providing the first private competition to CFCF-TV. Under the plan, Télé-Métropole and CanWest would form a joint venture, TVA CanWest, that would own CKMI, and it would apply to build transmitters in Montreal and Sherbrooke. CanWest would own a 51 percent controlling interest in the venture. Because of the nature of the Quebec City market and Montreal being one of Global's two major coverage gaps of the time (the other being Alberta, where it had affiliated stations), it was immediately evident that the primary goal of the venture was to get Global a foothold in Montreal, the country's third-largest anglophone market. According to Mike Boone, the television columnist for The Gazette, CanWest would have stood virtually no chance of getting a licence for a Quebec station on its own and joined forces with Télé-Métropole to lend "local clout" to its bid. Global had spent almost a quarter-century trying to get a transmitter in Montreal. When the network originally launched in 1974 as an Ontario-based network, original plans called for a transmitter in Maxville, near Cornwall. While it would have primarily served Hawkesbury, it would have