101.5 The Hawk almost didn't survive its first decade. CIGO signed on in Port Hawkesbury, Nova Scotia in October 1975, and within ten years the station was in receivership, buried under debt it had carried since its earliest days on air. That it's still broadcasting fifty years later, now on FM instead of the AM signal it started with, is largely down to a handful of local owners who kept betting on it.
A Cabinet Minister's Radio Station
CIGO began under Gerald J. Doucet, who received his broadcasting licence on April 4, 1975, and put the station on air that October through Eastern Broadcasters Ltd., running 49 and a half hours of local programming a week that included content for the region's French and Aboriginal communities, according to a history from the Canadian Communications Foundation. Doucet later served as a Nova Scotia cabinet minister before his death in 2017 at age 80, but the station he founded struggled financially almost from the start, entering receivership by October 1985.
Kept Alive by Local Ownership
Eastern Group of Companies bought the struggling station in 1986, and the ownership that mattered most came seven years later: in 1993, program director Bob MacEachern purchased CIGO outright, keeping it under local control for the next twenty-six years. MacEachern held onto the station until 2019, when Acadia Broadcasting took over, a rare run of continuity for a station that had nearly folded within its first decade.
The First AM-to-FM Flip in the Province
CIGO's biggest technical milestone came in 2000. After getting approval from Canada's broadcast regulator in 1999, the station tested a new frequency that March and made the official switch on April 3, 2000, moving from 1410 AM to 101.5 FM under the branding it still carries, The Hawk. That move made CIGO the first radio station in Nova Scotia to flip from AM to FM, a distinction that put a small Cape Breton station ahead of far larger Nova Scotia broadcasters in adopting the format change.
Broadcasting Over a Causeway That Made the Town
Port Hawkesbury's own history explains why a station here matters beyond its city limits. The town sits on the Strait of Canso, the passage separating Cape Breton Island from mainland Nova Scotia, and it became the island's first incorporated town back in 1889. Everything changed on August 13, 1955, when the Canso Causeway opened, connecting Cape Breton to the mainland by road for the first time and turning Port Hawkesbury into a year-round, ice-free deep-water port. Industrial growth followed fast, a pulp and paper mill in 1962 and a Gulf Oil refinery in 1971, building the region The Hawk still serves today.
Fifty Years, One Signal
CIGO's transmitter power jumped to 38,000 watts in a 2010 upgrade, extending its reach well beyond what the original 1975 AM signal could manage. From a debt-burdened startup to the first FM flip in the province, 101.5 The Hawk has spent five decades tied to the same stretch of causeway-connected coastline, run for most of that time by people who lived in the community it was broadcasting to.