Who is inclusive? CTV News Atlantic and the Acadian Blind Spot
Three years of ignored pitches: how Bell Media-owned CTV News Atlantic still shuts out French Acadian culture, and what true inclusion takes now.
Claude Edwin Theriault
That is the brochure. Now step inside the building, CTV News Atlantic in Halifax, and find the French Acadian people of Nova Scotia.
Keep looking.
The brochure and the building
Read CTV News' editorial standards, and you're looking at a newsroom you know has gone the extra mile. "Accuracy, fairness, and balance." A pledge to feature diverse voices—among its story topics, in the sources it uses, on its anchors, behind the cameras, and among staff. A Diversity Leadership Council at parent company Bell Media that tracks data monthly against benchmarks and targets. Public feedback is not seen as a "mailbag" but as part of a two-way street, with audiences influencing coverage, raising lesser-known stories, and calling out sources.
Three years of knocking
I'm an Acadian writer and artist, and I have been knocking on that door since 2023.
In August 2023 I wrote to the Premier's office that Acadians were invisible on corporate Halifax media outside of August 15 and that I had pinged every single newspaper repeatedly and they would not respond. In November 2024 I wrote to CTV News Atlantic with Cajun Dead et le Walking Stick, my children's trilogy about the 1755 Deportation as a parable of today's refugee crisis. I wrote again in January 2025 to the Atlantic Newsroom and to national desks. In February and March 2026 I queried the news team's leaders, with new trailer footage and a simple ask: add an Acadian writer's voice. This November I pinged the news team with Gaza et les enfants, a Nova Scotia production set 1755 side-by-side with the removal of Palestinian children from Gaza, told musically in four languages for neurodivergent audiences. Four days later I queried again.
The editors' reply to all of the above pitches: no.
The only meaningful response I got back from CTV Atlantic was in November 2025, and only because I had escalated the issue to the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, the industry's own complaint arm. A letter to the news director through the complaint file. Then the door was shut again.
Claude Theriault
The double standard
Set that record next to the standards page, and the contradiction is apparent. The policy welcomes recommendations from under-covered communities and sources. The implementation slaughters those recommendations and intervenes only when a complaints process forces it to. That is not a two-way street. It is a toll booth.
Now consider the diversity group named "ethnocultural communities," "Indigenous peoples," and "persons with disabilities." All of them belong. But Canada's official-language minority communities, acadians included, are not explicitly named. Whether by accident or design, that is the result in Atlantic Canada. Among this region's founding peoples, one does not appear in the coverage plan of its own capital city.
What "absent" looks like
Acadians have been here more than 400 years. Clare. And the Baie Sainte-Marie. Argyle. Chéticamp. Isle Madame. Pomquet. Even in our own halftowns, a community of French speakers. This is not history behind museum glass. It's a living culture of musicians, painters, chefs, writers, and entrepreneurs, with a language that has plenty of regional inflections and opinions to air.
On the English-language news flagship of the region, Acadian Nova Scotia appears as a quarterly: a flag on August 15, a clip from the fete, and a last-minute positive news story. CTV probably has a handful of Acadian stories to choose from in any given year. A handful is the problem. A people is not a calendar entry.
And save us the reflexive "Radio-Canada does that." They are bilingual Nova Scotians. We watch CTV. We see the ads and the cities your journalists drive in. Giving a whole people to the French-language network isn't service. It's dividing a population by language and passing them off as coverage.
Cornwallis came down. His habit didn't.
The same year Cornwallis founded Halifax, he declared a bounty on Mi'kmaw lives, a policy that lies at the heart of the decades-long Mi'kmaw-led struggle that ultimately saw his sculpture dismantled in January 2018. Halifax's Cornwallis Park was renamed Peace and Friendship Park. Cornwallis Street was renamed Nora Bernard Street. Leaders, and others, refused to be silenced, and eventually institutions heeded their words. That is accountability, and that is what it took to achieve it.
Claude Edwin Theriault
Edward Cornwallis Callout video to watch
However, Cornwallis had an Acadian strategy of his own. The Acadians had refused to take an unconditional oath to the British Crown. His solution was to go around them: woo them, then conscript so-called Foreign Protestants to settle their lands, believing he could displace them when they could be supplanted. Six years after Cornwallis departed, it happened as he planned, in 1755, in the Grand Dérangement.
So, here's what I mean. It's not 2026 yet. But the habit of governance persists, only in an 11th edition, less shrill mode, "others" are expected to be, well, other: these Acadians are here, but they're not of here. Don't read. Don't reply. Pass 'em on to the next newsroom. This time, the bronze has moved; the habit of assuming the capital story is someone else's has not. Inside the HRM's largest English-language newsroom, three years of retrained pitches on the Acadian story leave me feeling, as ever, nothing has changed since 1749.
Inclusion is a verb.
This is fixable and cheap. Four moves:
1. Return the pitches. A yes, a no, a "not now." A response is the ground of any two-way standard, not a bonus; it ought not take a complaint file to obtain a single.
2. Supply us. Integrate official-language minority communities into the diversity obligation, and focus on Acadian representation in the exact same way as a lot of the other groups.
3. Provide the culture a recurring home. Written in English by the Acadians on the CTV News Atlantic.ca site, a bi-monthly column on their arts and lifestyle written by a prolific Acadian writer like Theriault would be nice. It costs less than one shot from a helicopter.
4. Reclaim the airwaves for Acadian voices beyond August 15. Use them as sources. Use them as interviewees. Use them as talent. Use them on stories that have nothing to do with flags and the tourist brochure industry.
There will never be a better time to do all four than at this newsroom overhaul.
The patience is wearing thin.
This is what CTV News Atlantic needs to know: More and more Acadians are becoming aware, and they are becoming fed up. Musicians send in demos and get rejected. Parents who don't see their kids' schools or festivals once summer is over. Youths in Clare and Chéticamp are scrolling the website and never running into someone who sounds like their grandma.
Annoyed is not hateful. It is how the community reacts when the politeness of them is confused for giving in. Black Nova Scotians and the Mi'kmaq made this province's media switch, and it did. Acadians are watching that lesson closely, and we are finished inquiring softly.
The inbox still remains open on this end. We've been through Cornwallis's successors—surely we will live to see an email left unanswered. The only thing left to ask is whether CTV News Atlantic wants to be in the story when it turns around or be the story.
Sources
- CTV News, "Editorial Standards and Policies." The newsroom's published commitments on diversity, representation, and two-way audience feedback.
- The Canadian Encyclopedia, "Edward Cornwallis." The founding of Halifax in 1749 and Cornwallis's plan to replace the Acadians with foreign Protestant settlers.
- Global News, "Halifax hosts first public engagement session on Cornwallis." The statue's removal on January 31, 2018, and the 1749 bounty proclamation.
- Global News, "Halifax council receives Cornwallis task force report." The joint task force's recommendations on the statue, the park, and the street.
- Global News, "Former Cornwallis Park officially renamed Peace and Friendship Park." The park's renaming.
- Wikipedia, "Statue of Edward Cornwallis." Overview of the statue's history, its removal, and the renaming of Cornwallis Street to Nora Bernard Street.