Imagine that you're a king who wanted your princess daughter to be married by September 1st. Princes from several kingdoms came by as potential suitors. You already decided whom your daughter would marry, but decided to keep it a secret until August 31st. Imagine what would happen! Heck, there isn't enough time to organize the wedding! The other kingdoms would've freaked out big time! They might even declare war!

That's what might have happened in the 21st century had CanWest not announced CKVU's sale yesterday. I'm glad to see that, after much delay, they finally announced the sale. To keep postponing the sale deadline is really unfair to CKVU and its new owner. As we count down to Crossover Television, the station needs TIME to get prepared. If CanWest decided to keep their favoured "suitor" a mystery until the last minute, it really wouldn't give the new owner enough time to get everything done by Crossover. It would just make CanWest seem like "Hey, we already got hold of the province's most-watched station [BCTV]. We couldn't care less about CKVU!" It would just make them seem irresponsible.

On the other hand, the station's sold to CHUM, which has a reputation of irregular news presentation. They'll need even more time to make CKVU a replica of CITY-TV Toronto (presumably taking the "Citytv" brand" too). I mean, it took them a while before their station in Ottawa, CHRO, got converted to its current format. So here's some interesting thought in case they can't get everything done by the Crossover deadline:

1: They can revive the station's previous brand, like U.TV, or better yet, VU13. Then they can call their newscasts "City VU13" to correspond with their future brand "Citytv." The "VU13" brand can stay for several months until they're ready to convert to Citytv. Hopefully people won't mix up "VU13" with "Q13," the current brand of KCPQ Seattle.

2: Or, if they're really desperate to have the station re-launched by Crossover, just swap studios with CIVT!

But Vancouver will still lack a multi-cultural free-to-air station even after CKVU's sale. The CRTC is currently calling for applications to such a station in the Vancouver market. Again, CHUM, Craig and Rogers are interested. I don't think CHUM will get it because they already have 2 stations in the area. They can't have 3. (That's why CanWest had to sell CKVU in the first place!) Currently my favourite is Rogers because I have seen their multi-cultural station CFMT in Toronto. Frankly, I was quite impressed! They'll finally introduce the Vancouver ethnic population to such things as a lower-third graphic, a standard OTS graphic, a semi-virtual news set, a fixed set of news anchors, etc, but most importantly, higher standard of news reporting. Well I'm only guessing because they did it in Toronto. But still that would trigger competition against Fairchild, the current monopoly in the Vancouver ethnic broadcast industry, a station whose reporter/news writer called the poor people stuck in a train wreck "hostages." (Imagine that on an English-language station!)