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 movie "Aladdin and His Lamp", followed by a cartoon, and then a French film, a news segment and a bilingual variety show. The station aired programming in both French (60 percent) and English (40 percent), a practice common for many stations in Quebec at the time.