About Middle East Radio

Middle East Radio

Overview

Middle East Radio — in French, Radio Moyen-Orient, and in Arabic, إذاعة الشرق الأوسط (Idhā'at ash-Sharq al-'Awsaṭ) — is the brand under which the Montreal ethnic radio station CHOU broadcasts. CHOU transmits on 1450 kHz on the AM band in Montreal, Quebec, and is retransmitted in the east end of the island on CHOU-1-FM at 104.5 MHz and on the HD2 subchannel of CKIN-FM 106.3. The station is owned and operated by 9015-2018 Québec inc., doing business as Radio Moyen Orient du Canada, and its programming is multilingual but predominantly Arabic, serving the Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, Iraqi and Maghrebi communities of Greater Montreal.

The name and the station are effectively two sides of the same operation: "Middle East Radio" is not a program carried on someone else's station, but the identity of the broadcaster itself, whose call sign, CHOU, is taken from the Arabic word شو ("chou"), meaning "what?". The same company also owns CHHU-FM 99.1 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a sister station launched in 2016 with a multicultural format built around Arabic programming. Note that CHOU's frequency is 1450 kHz; the 1280 kHz position sometimes associated with Montreal ethnic radio belongs to a different station, CFMB.

History

Arabic-language broadcasting under the Middle East Radio banner began a decade before CHOU took to the AM band. In September 1996 the CRTC approved an Arabic-language SCMO service for the group (Decision CRTC 96-634): for almost ten years, until early 2007, its programming was carried on a Subsidiary Communications Multiplex Operations subcarrier of CISM-FM, the Université de Montréal student station. Because SCMO signals cannot be received on an ordinary radio, listeners had to buy special receiving devices to hear the broadcasts, which kept the audience small and committed.

On 15 March 2006 the Commission approved the group's application for a full ethnic commercial AM licence in Montreal (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2006-82). The new station took over 1450 kHz, a frequency that had fallen silent in the region when CHEF in Granby ceased operations in 1996, and CHOU began broadcasting on 18 January 2007, reaching ordinary radios for the first time. The licence application committed the station to programming directed to at least ten different ethnic groups in at least four languages, with about 80 per cent of spoken-word programming directed to Arabic-language groups across a mixture of dialects, some 12 per cent in classical literary Arabic, and the remainder serving Armenian, Syrian, Egyptian, Maghrebi and Iranian communities; at least 95 per cent of programming was to be locally produced, including 42 hours a week of spoken word and 15 hours of news. In April 2008 the CRTC authorized a transmitter power increase (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2008-87) to improve reception downtown and on the South Shore.

The station's licence was renewed for a full seven-year term in 2013, a proceeding in which the CRTC examined how the station had allocated its Canadian talent development contributions. An application to add a low-power FM retransmitter in Saint-Léonard was denied in October 2014, on interference and need grounds, but the Commission reversed course and approved the transmitter on 26 February 2016 (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2016-72); a follow-up technical change that November set the retransmitter, CHOU-1-FM, at 49 watts from a site near Pie-IX Boulevard. Unusually for an FM service, the retransmitter broadcasts in mono, and its signal is reported to reach beyond eastern Montreal into parts of the island's west end, Ahuntsic, Ville Saint-Laurent and Laval. In 2020 the station's licence was renewed again, with the current term running to 31 August 2027 (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2020-133).

Programming and Content

Arabic is the station's main language, presented in the range of dialects spoken by Montreal's Arab communities: Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian and Iraqi dialects, and the Maghrebi dialects of Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, alongside classical literary Arabic. The schedule mixes locally produced talk, community and cultural programming with news and discussion services from abroad, including the Voice of Lebanon and Monte Carlo Doualiya, the Arabic service of France Médias Monde. The station covers local, artistic and religious events for Middle Eastern and North African communities in Quebec, and it also carries a two-hour weekly program in Armenian. Its licence conditions require it, during each broadcast week, to provide programming to a minimum of ten different ethnocultural groups in a minimum of four languages.

Audience and Reach

CHOU is the incumbent Arabic-language broadcaster in Montreal, a market where Arabic is one of the most widely spoken non-official languages. In CRTC proceedings in the mid-2010s, Arabic was counted as Montreal's most popular third language after Italian, with some 126,865 residents identifying it as their mother tongue. The station's position has not gone unchallenged: when CKIN-FM was sold in 2015 and shifted to a largely Arabic schedule, Radio Moyen-Orient complained to the CRTC that its competitor was breaching its licence conditions; the Commission dismissed the complaint, finding that the ethnic broadcasting policy sets the number of groups and languages a station must serve but does not cap the hours devoted to any one of them. CHOU reaches its audience on 1450 AM with 2,000 watts by day and 1,000 watts at night from an omnidirectional antenna, supplemented by the 104.5 FM retransmitter in the island's east end, the CKIN-FM HD2 simulcast, and online streaming.

Digital Presence

The station's official website is meradio.ca, and its programming is offered online and through radio applications in addition to its terrestrial signals. Its carriage on the HD2 subchannel of CKIN-FM 106.3, which began HD broadcasting in spring 2026, added a digital terrestrial outlet in the Montreal market, and the station's Halifax sister service extends the Middle East Radio brand to Atlantic Canada.

Ownership and Organisation

CHOU is owned and operated by 9015-2018 Québec inc., an independent company doing business as Radio Moyen Orient du Canada. The station's two founders and owners are Antoine (Tony) Karam and Zeina El-Soueidi. The company's main studios are on de Meulles Avenue in the Cartierville district of Montreal; business directories list the address as 11876 rue de Meulles, Montréal, Québec H4J 2E6.

The group's second station grew out of a deliberate expansion strategy. An earlier application to bring the service to Halifax, which would have relied heavily on simulcasting CHOU, was denied in 2014 over concerns about local programming. A revised application, licensed to Antoine Karam on behalf of a corporation to be incorporated and built around a dedicated Halifax studio at the Montreal station, was approved on 15 September 2015 (Broadcasting Decision CRTC 2015-424). CHHU-FM began testing on 99.1 MHz on 26 February 2016 and started regular broadcasting that April, airing Arabic programming during the day and programming in other languages at night, with ten languages planned in total. At the time of the Halifax launch, Karam said publicly that the company was building a larger network and intended to expand further to Ottawa and Edmonton, cities with sizable Arab-Canadian communities.

Contact and Availability

In Montreal, Middle East Radio can be heard on CHOU 1450 AM, on CHOU-1-FM 104.5 in the east end of the island, and on CKIN-FM's HD2 subchannel at 106.3-2, as well as online through meradio.ca and radio apps. Its sister station CHHU-FM broadcasts on 99.1 FM in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The station's studios are in the Cartierville district of Montreal, on rue de Meulles.