TVO

Alongside CBC and Citytv, Toronto is also home to a broadcaster with a genuinely unusual founding mandate: education first, entertainment a distant second.

A 1960s plan, launched in 1970

The idea for a dedicated Ontario educational broadcaster developed between 1965 and 1970 as part of a three-pronged provincial strategy to improve education. On September 27, 1970, the Ontario Educational Communications Authority (OECA) — a provincial Crown corporation — began broadcasting as TVOntario, with flagship station CICA-DT.

Two firsts in one launch

TVO wasn't just Ontario's first educational broadcaster — it was the first full-time educational television station anywhere in Canada, and the first UHF-TV station in the country as well, a genuinely unusual double milestone for a single provincial network to hold.

Still public, still mandate-driven

More than 50 years later, TVO remains a public educational broadcaster rather than a commercial one — a rare surviving example, alongside Ontario's other public institutions covered elsewhere in this guide, of a mid-century provincial public-ownership experiment that's simply never been dismantled.

Sources

• The Canadian Encyclopedia — TVO
• TVO Today — Fifty Years Ago, TVO Signed On

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