CKSA 95.9, branded Real Country Lloydminster, streams commercial country music free on Radio Shuffle from a city that exists nowhere else quite like it in Canada. Lloydminster sits on the border between Alberta and Saskatchewan, and this station has been part of daily life there since long before the current FM signal existed.
A city split down the middle
Lloydminster is the only city in Canada that straddles two provinces, founded in 1903 by British immigrants who did not anticipate that a provincial border would later run straight through the middle of their town, according to Wikipedia's history of the city. When Alberta and Saskatchewan were created in 1905, the town was split into two separate municipalities before being reunified in 1930 under a joint order-in-council from both provinces. The border oddities persist today. Saskatchewan does not observe daylight savings time, but Lloydminster keeps Alberta time on both sides of the line to keep the city functioning as one place rather than two.
Nearly seventy years on the air
CKSA first went to air as an AM station on April 3, 1957, broadcasting on 1150 kHz before moving to 1080 kHz in 1965, according to the History of Canadian Broadcasting archive. For years it was the only radio station serving Lloydminster and the surrounding area under Midwest Broadcasting. The station shifted to a country format in the 1990s under the name Country 108, later became 95.9 Lloyd FM after an acquisition by Newcap, and finally received CRTC approval to move from AM to FM in 2002.
From Country 108 to Real Country
The station took on its current Real Country branding in November 2016, part of a wider rebrand that Newcap applied across its Alberta country stations at the time, per Wikipedia's entry on CKSA-FM. Ownership has since passed to Stingray Group, but the format has stayed put: commercial country hits and local favorites for a listener base spread across a genuinely unusual municipality where an address can determine which province, and which set of provincial rules, a resident lives under.
A hometown station for a one-of-a-kind hometown
Few radio markets in North America can claim a setup quite like Lloydminster's. CKSA has spent nearly seven decades adapting its format and frequency while staying anchored to that same unusual border city. Listen to CKSA 95.9 Real Country free on Radio Shuffle to hear country radio from the one Canadian city that needed its own time zone rule just to stay in sync with itself.