Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, despite concerns expressed by representatives for former Dish parent EchoStar that prevalent program blackouts caused by requests from local broadcast licensees made under SHVIA syndication exclusivity and sports blackout provisions could force it to drop the five mainland superstations from its lineup. Indeed, such requests have led Dish Network to stop offering one or more of the stations in some markets in recent years, culminating in Dish ceasing all future sales of the superstation tier on September 19, 2013. (A grandfathering waiver exists for subscribers who purchased the tier prior to the cut-off date, allowing them to continue receiving the superstation package barring they ever cancel their subscription to the tier or to Dish Network.) Canada Canada does not have any television stations that operate as "superstations" in the traditional construct of the term. Technically, virtually every Canadian terrestrial television station is a superstation, as almost every local television station in that country – most commonly those that are owned-and-operated stations, as well as a few affiliates, of the five national English-language networks (CBC Television; the CTV Television Network and its companion system, CTV 2; Citytv; and the Global Television Network), and the three French language networks (Ici Radio-Canada Télé, V, and TVA) – are carried nationally by one or both of the country's satellite providers, Bell Satellite TV and Shaw Direct, and any of these stations can be carried by any Canadian cable provider at minimum on a digital cable programming tier. The closest Canadian equivalents to the "superstation" model are the television system, to some extent (basically acting as a smaller, less-centralized form of the network model), and, moreso, the independent station (the number of which had grown to some extent with the 2009 demise of E!—a sister system to Global that was originally known as CH from its founding in 2001 until 2007—although some have become affiliates of other networks and systems). Beginning in the late 1980s, Canadian Satellite Communications (Cancom, now Shaw Broadcast Services) began distributing the signals of independents CHAN-TV (channel 8, now a Global owned-and-operated station) in Vancouver, British Columbia, CITV-TV (channel 13, now a Global owned-and-operated station) in Edmonton, Alberta, and CHCH-TV (channel 11) in Hamilton, Ontario, primarily for distribution by cable systems in smaller markets throughout Canada. Coincidentally, these stations were, like Cancom, either owned or later acquired by Western International Communications (WIC). As a result of