Le5 Communications

Although originally established by separate owners in the 1950s, CHYC-FM in Sudbury and CHYK-FM in Timmins had been under common ownership since their acquisition by Mid-Canada Radio in 1985. The stations were acquired by the Pelmorex Radio Network in 1990, and subsequently by Haliburton in 1999, before Le5 acquired the stations in 2008.

On August 4, 2010, Le5 Communications applied to operate a new French-language FM radio station in West Nipissing, operating at 97.1 MHz with an adult pop-music format. The company received approval to operate the new station on January 6, 2011.

On March 28, 2015, Lefebvre was chosen as the Liberal Party of Canada's candidate for the Sudbury riding in the 2015 federal election. He won the seat in the 2015 election. The company subsequently operated in a blind trust, for compliance with parliamentary conflict of interest regulations.

Controversy

Although it was not opposed to Le5's application to take over ownership of CHYC, Le Voyageur (which was still owned by a different company at that time) published an editorial in 2008 criticizing the CRTC for its handling of the application process. The paper took issue with the fact that the CRTC's original notice of hearing was not published in any of the region's local media, but only in the Ottawa newspaper Le Droit, a publication with very limited readership in the Sudbury or Timmins areas — thereby giving the region's Franco-Ontarian community little notice of either the pending transaction or the deadlines for reviewing and submitting comments regarding the application.