Powell River, British Columbia exists because of a pulp and paper mill that once supplied enough newsprint to print one in every 25 newspapers on the planet. Long after the mill's peak, 95.7 Coast FM still carries that small town's identity over the air, its own history stretching back nearly as far as the mill's most productive decades.
A Town Designed Around One Mill
Powell River began in 1910 as a planned company town, built by the Powell River Company around a newsprint mill whose construction had started two years earlier. The mill produced its first roll of paper in 1912 and grew so large that by the 1960s it stood as the world's largest newsprint mill, according to Heritage BC. The original townsite proved so well preserved, with more than 400 of its early buildings still standing, that it earned National Historic Site status in 1995, and its Patricia Theatre still claims to be the oldest continuously operating cinema in British Columbia.
A Station That Started on AM in 1967
Radio arrived in Powell River decades after the mill, signing on as CHQB at 1280 kHz with 1,000 watts on March 21, 1967 under Sunshine Coast Broadcasting Co. Ltd., according to records kept by Canadian Communications Foundation. Ownership passed through founder Billy Browne's family after his death in 1990, when his wife Norma took over management, before Vista Broadcast Group acquired the station in 2005 under Margot Micallef.
Losing a Frequency Fight, Then Winning a Different One
Vista's push to move the station to FM hit a snag in 2007 when the CRTC rejected its first choice of frequency, 94.1 MHz, ruling it technically incompatible with CBC's own radio plans for the region. The company came back with 95.7 MHz instead, won approval that November, and relaunched the station on FM on August 27, 2008 as "Sun FM: The Energy of Powell River," an adult contemporary format aimed at listeners 25 to 54.
From Sun FM to Coast FM
That adult contemporary branding lasted until 2014, when the station rebranded again as Coast FM and shifted to a classic hits format, the identity it still carries at 95.7 MHz with a directional signal reaching 5,798 watts. Westerkirk Capital, controlled by the Thomson family's investment arm, gained effective control of the station's parent group in 2012 and still oversees it today.
Old Songs for an Old Company Town
The pairing fits. Powell River's Historic Townsite still looks much as it did when mill workers filled its planned streets decades ago, and Coast FM's catalog of familiar hits gives that same sense of continuity a home on the radio dial, a station that has changed names and formats more than once while the small coastal town around it keeps its early twentieth century bones intact.