On a good day, listeners in Toronto’s south-west outskirts like Brampton and Mississauga can still get Buffalo’s 93.7 WBLK. It’s a short 90-minute drive from TO to the Niagara Falls Canada-USA border, so driving to the States is a good listening treat for fans of American Black music programming.

There was a time when WBLK strong signal totally saturated Toronto city, thriving because for decades a starved Canadian market was historically deprived of their own Black music radio station. Ironically, during this time, hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising dollars were spent by Toronto promoters and businesses seeking to cater to the Black and Canadian-West Indian and urban demographic because no Canadian stations offered this same listenership, at least not on a full time basis. Similar musical programming at the time could only be found in snippets on a handful of community stations brave enough to play Black music. 

But all this changed on February 9th, 2001 when Toronto’s Flow 93.5 FM was born. For the great majority of Toronto listeners, the 93.7 FM WBLK frequency was knocked out by Flow’s new appearance at 93.5 FM. 93.5 and 93.7 were too close together on the dial to continue to co-exist, and it all happened quickly without warning. Nobody saw it coming, nobody talked or wrote about it. Nobody had a change to say goodbye to WBLK because nobody anticipated the fatality of the two-station conflict. But that would be the end of the WBLK Black radio experience as far as Toronto listeners were concerned. We did not have a say in the matter, nor did the America’s WBLK. 

It was a privilege to have been served by WBLK, and since it’s been gone, no other station has been able to replicate it in Canada. We’re Canadian, they’re American, and radio is governed by two different bodies; the CRTC in Canada, and the FCC in the States. So in the end, there was no platform for a fight or a protest, and there was no mercy for WBLK, seen by Canadian eyes as a foreign entity. It no longer made sense for Canadians listeners pledge allegiance to them, and there was no saying thank you for filling the void for at least 25 years or so for Canadian listeners.