CBFT was the first permanent television station in Canada (an experimental station, VE9EC, had been on the air in Montreal from 1931 to 1935). It launched on September 6, 1952, at 4 p.m., beating CBLT in Toronto by two days. The station went on the air with the movieAladdin and His Lamp, followed by a cartoon, and then a French film, a news segment and a bilingualvariety show.[1] The station aired programming in both French (60 percent) and English (40 percent), a practice common for many stations in Quebec at the time.
This continued until January 10, 1954, when CBMT was launched on VHF channel 6. At that time, all English programming moved to CBMT, while CBFT became a purely French-language station as the flagship of the Télévision de Radio-Canada network for francophone viewers. CBMT's sign-on was hastened by the planned launch of television stations across the border in Burlington, Vermont, and Plattsburgh, New York.
Prior to the digital transition, CBFT operated a translator network that stretched across most of Quebec, parts of Ontario, and most of northern Canada (Northwest Territories and Nunavut).
In recent years, Radio-Canada's network feed has largely become a retransmission of CBFT. Due to a lack of sources for alternative programming, most Radio-Canada stations' schedules are largely identical to those of CBFT, other than commercials and regional news. This was the case for privately owned Radio-Canada affiliates before the last such station closed in 2021.
CBFT had over 30 analogue television rebroadcasters throughout rural Quebec and Labrador. Due to federal funding reductions to the CBC, in April 2012, the CBC responded with substantial budget cuts, which included shutting down CBC's and Radio-Canada's remaining analogue transmitters on July 31, 2012.[5] None of CBC or Radio-Canada's rebroadcasters were converted to digital.