Your question has hit the nail on the head, in fact. When Canadian Heritage established the NNBAP program, its initial intention was to have the CBC, as the public broadcaster, pick up some of the programming that was done by the communication societies in the north and broadcast it as part of its national mandate to reflect all peoples. That wasn't happening. The CBC wasn't interested in picking up that programming and airing it. That's how the northern distribution programming came into existence later on; when it became apparent that the societies were creating programming that the CBC was not airing, the department provided funding to establish 96 transmitter sites across the north so that the programming could be distributed over the air to every resident north of 60, basically.
On April 20th, 2007. See this statement in context.