← 99% Invisible
99% Invisible
The MAPL Test
00:40:27
Canada reshaped its music industry with a quirky radio rule that changed who got heard.
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- [00:01]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:23]
Chris Berube
this is 99% invisible. I'm Chris Berube sitting in for Roman Mars. Back In January, about 10 million people tuned into the Hockey Romance series Heated Rivalry. Even I watched it because the show is made in Canada by Canadians and I'm Canadian. And the Canadian ness, it's kinda everywhere. The main characters in the show go to a cottage at one point, not a cabin. One of the hockey studs has an interview with a journalist in pretty passable high school French Winnipeg is mentioned. Look, it's all there in the text,
- [01:59]
Max Collins
but if you ask me, the most Canadian part of the series is the music.
- [02:03]
Chris Berube
That's producer and fellow Canuck Max Collins.
- [02:07]
Max Collins
The soundtrack is loaded with artists from Canada. There's needle drops of songs by Feist and the Soul Jazz Orchestra and Dilly Dally. To me, this was delightful, but the Canadian music wasn't obvious to everyone watching. I found this out when I threw on the show with my roommate Keith Press. Play yes, Unheeded Rivalry Can I ask if you've ever been with another guy? Key knew and loved a lot of the song's unheated rivalry, like this power ballad by the band Wolf Parade. The song plays during the emotional climax of an episode when a closeted hockey player invites his boyfriend out to set her ice for the first time and they kiss. Give me your eyes, I need the sunshine Give me But Key isn't originally from Canada and they weren't aware that Wolf Parade is from Montreal. Actually, Key was shocked to hear that a lot of the big musicians they know are Canadians. Finger 11. Oh, did not know that. Yeah, yeah. Deadmau 5. Oh, I did not know Deadmau 5 was Canadian. Yeah. Oh, Michael Buble is Canadian.
- [03:18]
Chris Berube
Yeah.
- [03:19]
Max Collins
What? Yeah, yeah.
- [03:22]
Chris Berube
Okay, maybe you're thinking Wolf Parade's Canadian. Sure. Why does this matter to us Canadians? It matters. It matters a lot. If you are American and you have Canadian friends, Perhaps you've noticed that anytime a Canadian celebrity is mentioned, people like me love to point it out. Look, we just cannot help ourselves.
- [03:45]
Max Collins
Oh, did you know that Mac DeMarco is from Canada?
- [03:49]
Chris Berube
Mac DeMarco is from Canada. Part of the reason this game is so fun for us is because of the sheer volume of secretly Canadian artists. Sure, everybody knows Drake and Justin Bieber are from Canada, but when you start to dig in, we are literally everywhere. We're responsible for Nelly Furtado and Pup and Que Trinata and Propagandi. This is just a small sample of an overwhelming list.
- [04:15]
Max Collins
Canada is a country with about 41 million people. That's only a little bit bigger than the population of California, but the country punches well above its weight in terms of very famous musicians.
- [04:27]
Chris Berube
This hasn't always been true. Fifty years ago, Canada's music industry was basically non existent and the most successful Canadian musicians were expats making it big in the United States. But today, Canada has one of the biggest music industries in the world. And it's partly thanks to some good old fashioned government meddling.
- [04:48]
Max Collins
It's a public policy that was really controversial, but it's been imitated all over the world. I'm talking about a policy called Cancon. Okay, so to understand this policy, we gotta rewind to just before the dawn of Canada's music boom, the early 1960s. In those days, most of the stuff played on Canadian radio was produced outside of Canada.
- [05:14]
Chris Berube
The biggest musicians at the time were mostly from the US and the uk places with a bunch of recording studios to produce music and a bunch of record labels to distribute it, and a bunch of radio stations to market it and a lot of fans to consume it. But Canada, on the other hand, had pretty much none of that.
- [05:33]
Alan Cross
If you were a Canadian musician, there was essentially no modern music industry.
- [05:41]
Chris Berube
Alan Cross is a radio legend in Canada and host of a long running documentary series called the Ongoing History of New Music.
- [05:50]
Alan Cross
Back then there was very little in the way of development, nurturing, coaching, mentoring of Canadian talent. I was just like, you know, get out there and play.
- [06:00]
Max Collins
Record labels in Canada were mainly set up to distribute American records domestically. And on top of all that, there was a stereotype that Canadian music was somehow inferior.
- [06:11]
Alan Cross
Canadian radio stations had this thing that Canadian music was substandard or not popular or had no potential, no commercial or ratings appeal.
- [06:23]
Chris Berube
Allen is not exaggerating here. Another Canadian music industry legend, Stan Cleese, saw this bias firsthand. Here's Cleese recounting an experience he had in an interview with music historian Kenneth Murphy.
- [06:36]
Commercial Announcer
The guy opened the little envelopes that they got from the record companies, looked at it and he said, canadian shit. Threw it against a cement brock wall and shattered and fell to the floor.
- [06:47]
Alan Cross
The thinking was, you're just not good enough. If we put your song next to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or any of the other music coming out of the United States, it would sound bad. It did not meet the standards, which may have been unfair and prejudicial, but that was the attitude.
- [07:05]
Chris Berube
With this lack of infrastructure and this bias against Canadian musicians, there were two paths you can take to become a Canadian hitmaker. Path one, leave Canada for more fertile musical soil. This was the path taken by some of our most notable folk musicians at the time, like Leonard Cohen, who moved out to New York City, or Neil Young, who went out to Los Angeles.
- [07:27]
Max Collins
For those who couldn't make the move abroad and those who didn't want to, there was path two Ride the coattails of the British Invasion, baby.
- [07:40]
Chris Berube
Some bands would slap a Union Jack on their instruments and others would fraudulently write things like England's number one group on their tour posters, Jack London and
- [07:49]
Max Collins
the Sparrows took it a step further. While their frontman was from the uk, the rest of the band was Canadian and put on fake English accents. And I love her, love her. In a similar fashion, a Winnipeg garage rock band formerly known as Chad Allen and the Expressions obscured their origins to trick Canadian radio stations into playing their music. They had just recorded a cover of Shaken All Over Quivers Down My Bible. I got the shakes in my Bible. But in the Canadian music is bad mindset of the mid-60s, this Canadian record had to be fed to radio stations in a sneaky way.
- [08:36]
Alan Cross
So they pressed up a whole bunch of records and they took them to radio stations across the country and they played them this record without telling them who it was. The label only said, guess who? And in 1965, it sounded like a British Invasion band. And they were, oh, this is really cool.
- [08:52]
Max Collins
From then on, the new Name stuck and the guess who went on to write chart topping classics.
- [09:00]
Chris Berube
Canada didn't have a strong sense of national pride in the 50s and 60s. The music industry was a prime example of this. Musicians had to hide their Canadian ness or move away just to find success in Canadian markets.
- [09:15]
Max Collins
But near the end of the 1960s, Canada had a big surge in national pride. In 1967, the country turned 100 and the government of Canada was determined to celebrate in style.
- [09:28]
Chris Berube
It was a wild year. There were new festivals launching, there was a months long cross country canoe race. And undoubtedly the biggest celebration, the one that captured the attention of the whole world, was Expo 67. Expo 67, the greatest show on earth.
- [09:47]
Max Collins
Expo 67 was a world's fair held in Montreal. Over six months, the fair saw 50 million people come through its gates. That's more than twice the entire population of Canada at the time. It was one of the most successful world exhibitions and it helped shine an international spotlight on the country at large.
- [10:06]
Chris Berube
Suddenly though, Montreal and Canada have found an identity and reputation that owes nothing to the past.
- [10:13]
Erin MacLeod
I think of 1967 as being a bit of a watershed moment.
- [10:17]
Max Collins
Erin MacLeod is a music journalist and educator.
- [10:20]
Erin MacLeod
Like all of these things sort of come together as a means of attempting to push forth a notion of what it means to be Canadian, you know, in the face of like the increasing ability of the United States to spread its cultural dominance quite literally everywhere.
- [10:39]
Chris Berube
Coming out of its centennial year, Canada's national pride had polled a 180 Canadians had just experienced 12 months of intense patriotism and it felt good.
- [10:50]
Max Collins
But that sense of pride didn't match up with the state of Canada's cultural landscape. The music sector was still in rough shape. Enter our unlikely hero of arts and culture, the feds.
- [11:06]
Chris Berube
On February 12, 1970, Canada's cultural regulator, the CRTC, proposed some changes to the licensing requirements for all broadcasters. The goal was to support Canadian musicians and to prop up the industry. And to accomplish this, the CRTC made it mandatory for every Canadian radio station to broadcast a certain amount of Canadian music every week.
- [11:30]
Max Collins
This was such a big deal. The cbc, Canada's public broadcaster, cancelled their regular programming that night to talk about it at length.
- [11:38]
Alan Cross
Good evening, I'm Gordon Donaldson with Norman Depot. Today has been a pretty dramatic one for broadcasting in Canada. A 30% Canadian content rule for the
- [11:49]
Chris Berube
use of music by radio stations. A 30% mandate for Canadian music on the radio. These laws became known as Canadian content laws and the content itself became known as Cancon.
- [12:04]
Max Collins
Now, was Canada the first country in the world to try out something like Cancon, eh? No. Australia beat us to the punch in 1942, but their regulations were pretty loose. The goals for Cancon regulations were more strict. Thanks to a very picky bureaucrat named Pierre Junot, we believe that there is
- [12:25]
Chris Berube
enough talent in Canada.
- [12:29]
Max Collins
It's a matter of making room for the new talents that are developing in Canada. Junot was the chair of the crtc and as the biggest cultural rule maker, he was determined to have Canadian music played all the time on the radio. But before that could happen, the CRTC would have to find the answers to some pretty big questions.
- [12:51]
Chris Berube
Questions like what makes a piece of music Canadian? This might sound simple, but just think about this for one second. To be a Canadian song, does the musician have to be Canadian? Does the song itself have to be recorded in Canada? How many members of the band have to be from Canada? It gets complicated really fast. Even Pierre Junot did not have a clear idea in those early days. Is there a definition of Canadian?
- [13:18]
Max Collins
There are so many variables that you
- [13:20]
Chris Berube
have to consider that you can't make a general ruling.
- [13:24]
Max Collins
You can have a certain number of guidelines.
- [13:27]
Chris Berube
Getting the answer to that really was uncharted territory. So after consulting with industry experts, the CRTC came up with a system that would help determine if a song qualifies as Cancon. And just to really drive home the whole Canadian ness of it, they called it the Maple System.
- [13:46]
Max Collins
Okay, here's how it works. Maple is a four letter acronym. M, A P, A L. Each letter signifies a part of a song's production music, the artist, the performance and the lyrics. A song has to check off at least two of the four letters to qualify is Cancon. To check off the M, you need music that's composed entirely by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident.
- [14:13]
Chris Berube
For the A, you need an artist performing the song who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident.
- [14:20]
Max Collins
For the P, the performance, live or in studio, has to be recorded in Canada.
- [14:26]
Chris Berube
For L, the lyrics of the song have to be written entirely by a Canadian or a group of Canadians.
- [14:33]
Max Collins
So let's pretend that we are a radio DJ from 1971 and let's test out the Maple system ourselves. Say we want to play a case of you by Joni Mitchell, who is Canadian, by the way. The instrumentals, as in the music, are written by Mitchell, as are the lyrics. That's the M and the L. Mitchell is a Canadian artist born in Fort McLeod, Alberta. That counts as the A, but the song was recorded in Hollywood, so the performance, the P doesn't Count. That means A Case of youf checks off three out of four maple boxes and the song counts as cancon. That's four and a half minutes down. And now you only have to fill 13 and a half minutes before meeting our quota for the hour.
- [15:17]
Chris Berube
Sounds great in theory, but right out of the gate, Canadian content rules ran up against a big issue. There just wasn't much buy in from commercial radio stations. They still just wanted musicians who were already established in the US.
- [15:33]
Alan Cross
I was a programmer in the 1980s and I can tell you that any Canadian record we added or played was done begrudgingly, rightly or wrongly. I'm just telling you that the attitude generally was it was ratings poison unless it was already big in the us.
- [15:52]
Chris Berube
Granted, there were some Canadian musicians making it big in the U.S. like Neil Young, the Guess who, Joni Mitchell. But critics of Cancon were concerned there simply wasn't enough to decent Canadian music to meet the requirements.
- [16:05]
Max Collins
So radio programmers, needing to fill a third of their weekly broadcast with the supposed ratings poison, came up with other creative solutions to play Cancon music without sacrificing listenership. Like sneaking all of their Cancon music into a time slot when no one was tuning in.
- [16:24]
Alan Cross
What a lot of radio stations would do is they would edit all the Canadian songs that they had to play down to 90 seconds each and they'd play them all between 11 and midnight. Or they'd have specialty programs on Sunday night where they'd play nothing but Canadian music in order to fulfill their quota.
- [16:40]
Chris Berube
These timeslots became known in the industry by the very unfortunate moniker Beaver Hours. The CRTC caught onto this trick pretty quickly and they amended the law to require Cancon during peak listening hours. So that's Monday to Friday between 6am and 6pm so radio DJs tried another scheme. They started playing songs that were definitely not Canadian, but still managed to sneak their way into the Maple system.
- [17:11]
Max Collins
It's 1972, you're a radio DJ sitting at the controls and you're about to cue up Elvis Presley's new single Burning Love. Your music director bursts in and tells you you need to play more can gone. And so instead of playing Burning Love, you cue up Elvis Cancon song. Yep. America's king of rock and roll has music that counts as Cancon. A song called Early Morning Rain. In the early morning rain with a
- [17:43]
Commercial Announcer
dollar in my hand.
- [17:47]
Chris Berube
Early Morning Rain was originally written and performed by a Canadian singer, songwriter Gordon Lightfoot.
- [18:04]
Max Collins
Remember, a song only needed to meet two out of four letters in the Maple system. So despite the fact that Elvis was not a Canadian artist and that his cover was recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, the music and the lyrics were written by a Canadian. MapleTest passed CanCon certified so non Canadian musicians could benefit from this system. And it turns out some Canadians were getting locked out by it. Remember Jack London and the Sparrows, that fake British but actually Canadian band? Well, they went on to become the very famous classic rock band Steppenwolf. But the band added an American singer named John K as their frontman. So most of the songs they wrote together stopped qualifying as Cancon. Basically, if you collaborated with a non Canadian, your music could be disqualified.
- [18:58]
Chris Berube
The Kingston, Ontario pop rocker Bryan Adams found this out the hard way when he released his album Waking up the Neighbors in 1991. Adams recorded the album in the UK and he co wrote the music and lyrics with a South African music producer, Mutt Lang. So none of the songs on that album qualified as Cancon.
- [19:18]
Alan Cross
Bryan Adams, born in Kingston, raised in Vancouver, huge star in the 1980s. I mean, there is nobody more Canadian than Bryan Adams. Canadian radio station said Bryan Adams, of course it's Cancon. So we started playing it and then the CRTC said, not so fast.
- [19:33]
Chris Berube
Ever since his album got disqualified, Bryan Adams has been really vocal about hating Cancon laws. Here he is in the 90s, speaking to the press and just trashing the system.
- [19:45]
Bryan Adams
I think it's a disgrace. And I think it's really a shame that we have to deal with this kind of stupidity all the time. Why can't we just deal with artists and musicians the way every other country deals with them, which is just with some respect, you know, And I just think it inhibits people who wants to have an international record and then be called Un Canadian or Un British. I mean, you just never hear it. You'd never hear Elton John being declared Un British British. It wouldn't. It's just a disgrace.
- [20:09]
Max Collins
Yeah.
- [20:10]
Alan Cross
And it just underscores our point how stupid this is Maple system is. Is. Is terribly, terribly flawed.
- [20:18]
Max Collins
So in the early years, Cancon was not well received. Radio DJs hated it, and the regulator had some kinks to iron out on the whole who is Canadian front. But over time, something strange and surprising happened. The Cancon system started to work.
- [20:37]
Chris Berube
It was a basic matter of supply and demand. Cancon laws created an instant need for music that could pass the Maple test.
- [20:46]
Alan Cross
Once this artificial demand was created, you had to come up with something that would feed that quota. If we were going to play a lot of this music on the radio, well then we needed an infrastructure, an industry to supply that music.
- [21:01]
Max Collins
At their core, Cancon regulations were an industrial policy. The system created a market for songs by Canadians and that stoked a need for Canadian studios to record in and Canadian producers to help with songwriting.
- [21:16]
Alan Cross
Music slowly got better because we had better studios, we had better producers. Artists began to develop, Realizing they were just thrown on the radio because they needed to be on the radio. Artists began to compete with each other in Canada for these increasingly coveted radio slots. We put it on the radio. People loved it. Give us more.
- [21:37]
Max Collins
By the 1980s, there was enough organic demand for Canadian music in Canada that musicians were able to build a career here without needing to move to the us. Take for example, Cory Hart, the Sunglasses at Night guy.
- [22:05]
Chris Berube
Maybe you've heard this song before. It's great. It was a hit single around the world. And while Corey Hart might have been a one hit wonder in most countries in Canada, he was a machine, making chart toppers until 1998. And there are lots of cases like this.
- [22:23]
Max Collins
This also created a world where Canadians have a very skewed vision on who is actually famous. When certain songs play on the radio all the time, it hasn't always been clear that the band is getting a boost from Cancon. In reality, most of these bands have little to no traction outside of Canada. Back in the 90s, there was this bubblegum pop duo called Prozac and I guess it's true. I know, I know. Their music videos were all over Canadian tv. I always thought they were European, but nope, it's Cancon, baby.
- [23:01]
Chris Berube
This was a super common thing that happened to Canadian singers and musicians. Some Cancon bands became kind of like a hometown hero, but for an entire country. The most prominent example of this is the tragically hip hop. They became so famous, a broadcast of their final concert was watched by 12 million Canadians. That is about a third of the total population at the time. Outside of Canada, they are nowhere near that popular.
- [23:29]
Max Collins
Cancon may have kickstarted the industry by mandating a spotlight for Canadian musicians on the radio. But once Canada had proven to be a steady stream of good music, record labels from outside the country started recruiting our talent. Even in smaller cities like Halifax at
- [23:45]
Jay Ferguson
the time, it was such a story, like a Cinderella story, like, who's this band from Halifax?
- [23:51]
Chris Berube
This is Jay Ferguson, the guitarist and vocalist in an alt rock band called Sloan. They were pioneers of Canada's indie music boom in the early 90s.
- [24:08]
Max Collins
Jay started the band with his friends Chris, Patrick and Andrew just after college. At the time, Halifax didn't have any massive stadiums to dream of selling out, or any record label headquarters to send your demo tapes to. Sometimes there weren't even any venues to perform in.
- [24:25]
Jay Ferguson
So there were a lot of people who had the get up and go to organize underground gigs, or the YMCA or ywca. You could rent it out. Or Chris even at one point rented out a storefront, an abandoned storefront, rented it for a month and had a gig every weekend, you know what I mean?
- [24:44]
Max Collins
Shortly after their first single came out, Sloan got played on the radio a ton. And once they had a foothold on the air, they caught the attention of some big wig record label scouts. And then Geffen, the label that signed Nirvana, offered Sloan a contract that put a huge spotlight on Halifax's music scene.
- [25:04]
Jay Ferguson
Once we got out and we were signed by Geffen, there were people from American, major and independent labels going, what's going on in Halifax? Like, why is Geffen signing this band that have played a dozen shows?
- [25:20]
Chris Berube
So when judging Cancon as a policy, we have to ask, how well did it actually work? It's clear that in an industrial sense, it went really well. By the mid-90s, Canada's music industry became the sixth largest in the world, beating other countries with much bigger populations, like Italy and Mexico and Brazil.
- [25:43]
Max Collins
Other countries started copying our system too. By 1987, the Philippines introduced a music quota for radio. Then France created a French language radio mandate in 1996. Then similar laws popped up in South Africa, Uruguay, Malaysia, Sweden, and today every continent except Antarctica has at least one country with a local content quota.
- [26:06]
Chris Berube
But while this suggests things were going great, the Maple system is far from perfect.
- [26:13]
Max Collins
One critique of Cancon is that it actually creates a stigma around Canadian music. I saw this firsthand when reporting on the story. Despite being part of this innovative pro artist Canadian music ecosystem, nobody wants to be identified as making Cancon. Has anybody ever referred to Sloan as a Cancon band?
- [26:32]
Jay Ferguson
No one's ever said that to my face. Let's just put it that way.
- [26:36]
Chris Berube
Jay Ferguson again. And he totally saw this inferiority complex around Canadian music firsthand.
- [26:43]
Jay Ferguson
We would go to England in the early days, in 92, 93, oh yeah. Next up was Red Cross and they're great, they're from California, blah, blah, blah. And then Verve are playing, yeah, up and coming. And then, oh, loan, they're from Canada, they don't count.
- [26:54]
Max Collins
So even with other countries emulating our system, Canadian content laws haven't done a good job at getting the rest of the world to take Canadian musicians seriously.
- [27:04]
Chris Berube
Roly Pemberton is a rapper from Edmonton, Alberta. He performs under the stage name Cadence Weapon. And he says Cancon, it can create this feeling of our bands being tokenized in a way.
- [27:21]
Roly Pemberton
I think there's a bit of inferiority complex about ourselves. With Cancon out there, it's like, oh, so you're only able to get played because they have to play it and nobody's listening to you because they want to listen to you. It's forced upon us. All right, so then there's this idea that it's we're lesser than because we have this, this benefit of Cancon.
- [27:46]
Max Collins
I think Canada is at least partially to blame for this inferiority complex. The cutesy naming conventions for this inherently nationalistic mandate gives the music industry an air of unseriousness. I mean, we decide on what music is Canadian by using the Maple System. Really.
- [28:06]
Chris Berube
There are other critiques of the Cancon system, like how the impact of Cancon can sometimes be a little bit overstated. Around 2005, Canada saw a huge boom in our indie music scene with bands like Broken Social Scene and artists like Feist becoming big stars. But mostly those artists weren't played on commercial radio. They got big because of word of mouth on the Internet and sites like Pitchfork and TV ads. The Maple system, it wasn't needed for them to break out.
- [28:38]
Max Collins
And some argue that while Cancon helps Canadian bands, the real power behind the Canadian music industry isn't radio mandates, it's public funding. In Canada, there's government funding to help with things like recording, touring, setting up record labels, starting festivals and more.
- [28:55]
Roly Pemberton
Having a grant system like we have in Canada is the. We're the envy of the world for this, right? Whenever I tour in the States and I talk to people, they're like, they give you money to make music, literally, they help you with it. Like people can't believe it.
- [29:15]
Chris Berube
Another major critique of Cancon is how the benefits of the system can be pretty unequal. There aren't any rules dictating what genres or what groups should get airplay. And studies show that the lion's share of music programmed by Canadian radio stations are made entirely by white people.
- [29:33]
Max Collins
So you've been referred to before as like a quote unquote, Cancon musician. I love that, I hate that. I love that.
- [29:40]
Roly Pemberton
That's so funny to me.
- [29:42]
Max Collins
Jeremy Dutcher is a world renowned singer and composer and a willistic member of the topic First Nation in New Brunswick. If you haven't heard Jeremy's music, he sings traditional indigenous songs accompanied by contemporary instruments and some of his songs include waxes cylinder recordings by his ancestors singing in Willistic way.
- [30:10]
Roly Pemberton
There's less than 500 fluent speakers of this language left. And so it's a big reason and important mission for me is to bring awareness to this disparity and this precarity and, and also celebrate the beauty of what's there.
- [30:28]
Max Collins
Jeremy Dutcher is selling out theaters around the world now, but there's still very little representation of indigenous musicians on the radio. Here's Roli Pemberton again.
- [30:37]
Roly Pemberton
There aren't any safeguards for what can happen with these kinds of initiatives where you end up just having a bunch of white rock bands being who ends up benefiting. So there isn't anything to be like, hey, we need this percentage of Cancon to be bipoc artists. Like they don't have that.
- [31:01]
Max Collins
In recent years, there has been a push to amend Canadian content laws to enforce a minimum percentage of radio airplay by bipoc Canadians. But even if those changes were made, it might not have a big effect because Cancon rules are becoming a lot less relevant with the rise of music streaming.
- [31:20]
Chris Berube
It turns out the Maple system, it's not at all future proof. Cancon laws focus solely on terrestrial radio. While Spotify and other music streaming services go unregulated. Spotify has argued they actually can't be regulated the same way as radio stations because they don't choose what music people are listening to.
- [31:42]
Max Collins
The federal government of Canada has passed a bill called the Online Streaming act, which is their attempt to regulate streaming companies. But instead of content quotas, the bill would introduce a 15% streaming tax on these big companies. Spotify and others challenged this law in court so that streaming tax might not
- [31:59]
Erin MacLeod
even happen without a willingness on the part of the companies who are not Canadian. Unfortunately, without a willingness to engage with, let's just say, the spirit of the Cancon regulations, it's very hard to think of how streaming could make use of the Maple system.
- [32:27]
Max Collins
Maybe this era is a post CanCon one where musicians have to rely on other tools moving forward, like support from public funding and going viral and the luck of the algorithm. But I really hope we don't use this new era as an excuse to stop promoting the great artists I share a home country with. Canadian music has been everywhere for the past few decades. It's been the soundtrack to my life. It might be a big part of your life too, even if you don't know. Could be a Sloan song on an alt rock radio station or someone playing a Gordon Lightfoot cover at your local cafe's open mic night. Maybe it's a wolf parade song that made you and your roommate tear up while watching a TV show. That was really well done. Canadian music will still exist without the Cancon system to spotlight it. It just might be a little harder to find. But music that's good enough to move us and that earns a place in our lives once we find deserves to be.
- [33:37]
Chris Berube
When we come back, Max Collins and I, we are going to nerd out about some more Cancon stuff. You do not want to miss it right after this.
- [33:54]
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- [34:41]
Max Collins
Ready
- [34:42]
Commercial Announcer
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- [37:53]
Chris Berube
okay, we're back with producer Max Collins. Hey Max.
- [37:56]
Max Collins
Hello. I am very ready to give you some more riveting cultural policy history from Canada.
- [38:03]
Chris Berube
Well, I am born ready for this. So what do you have for us?
- [38:06]
Max Collins
We spent a lot of time talking about Canadian content laws for music, but we didn't talk at all about Cancon laws in Canada's other creative industries. So let's talk a little bit about tv.
- [38:17]
Chris Berube
Yes, absolutely. Because TV in Canada is also subject to content laws, right?
- [38:22]
Max Collins
Yeah, that's true. So Canadian broadcast TV also has a content quota if they want to keep their licenses. Half of the content between 6pm and 11pm primetime on weekdays has to be Cancon.
- [38:35]
Chris Berube
That is kind of shocking to me because, like, I grew up watching Canadian tv. Sometimes they will play American shows. For example, you could watch who Wants to Be a Millionaire on CTV or something like that on a Canadian channel. I watched a ton of American shows growing up. So, like, I find it shocking that half of the stuff they were playing was Canadian. How is that even possible?
- [38:54]
Max Collins
There's a lot of news broadcasts that they do, and sports basically. Think about it. If every two hours you have a 60 minute news broadcast, you can play whatever American content you want.
- [39:06]
Chris Berube
Right. That actually makes a lot of sense. And that explains a great deal. So that also explains why there's so much news on Canadian tv. Like, it is on a lot, I find.
- [39:14]
Alan Cross
Yeah.
- [39:15]
Max Collins
Another way that they get to this 50% mark is by using like spinoffs or franchises of non Canadian TV shows.
- [39:23]
Chris Berube
Right.
- [39:24]
Max Collins
Canada does this shamelessly all of the time. And it seems to be relatively popular, at least. Like, last year, the most watched TV show on cable was the Amazing Race Canada. Have you heard of it?
- [39:37]
Chris Berube
I have seen the show. This is a classic hotel room show. So you throw on the TV at the hotel room and you watch whatever is on. And often it will be a marathon of the Amazing Race.
- [39:47]
Max Collins
Yeah, absolutely. Well, for the uninitiated, the Amazing Race is this competition show from the United States where contestants race around the world and do challenges. The Amazing Race Canada is just like that, except every season they spend almost all of their time in Canada. You know, like, here's your challenge. Fly to Calgary, Alberta and learn how to do a line dance at Ranchman's.
- [40:11]
Chris Berube
The racer doing this Roadblock will perform the complicated routine with a group of experienced line dancers. When this world champion line dancer feels they performed the steps correctly, he'll present them with their next clue. I know we're saying this is like kind of a cheating way to hit the Cancon quota with a franchise like this, but that is a very Canadian thing we just listened to. Right, like going and doing line dancing in Calgary.
- [40:35]
Max Collins
Yes, that is true. And for the record, like, I grew up in Calgary. I learned lion dancing in junior high gym class. I know how Canadian that is.
- [40:45]
Chris Berube
It's authentic. Yeah, totally.
- [40:47]
Max Collins
Yeah, exactly. But, you know, like, there's other examples of this too. A recent one is Law and Criminal Intent. I think it's set in Toronto.
- [40:58]
Chris Berube
It is. It certainly is.
- [40:59]
Max Collins
Yeah. That's a spinoff of Law and Order, of course. On French language tv, there's Chanteur Masquet, which is a spinoff of the Masked Singer. That's an American competition show that is based on a South Korean competition show.
- [41:20]
Chris Berube
I feel like there's quite a few of those in Quebec as well. Like you do hear about the Quebec office, for example. One that I always tell people about is the Bachelor Canada. There was one season, or perhaps a couple of seasons of the Bachelor Canada. And instead of going to like glamorous locations, I'm pretty sure the final episode was in a Sandals resort, which people will know is kind of a mid market resort to go to. So it's not, you know, like going to Hawaii or whatever they do at the end of the Bachelor.
- [41:47]
Max Collins
Yeah, it's Canadian rinky dink, you know.
- [41:51]
Commercial Announcer
Hi there.
- [41:53]
Erin MacLeod
Hi.
- [41:53]
Commercial Announcer
What's your name?
- [41:54]
Max Collins
April.
- [41:55]
Chris Berube
Where are you from? Okay.
- [41:56]
Max Collins
Yeah. Wasega Beach, Ontario.
- [41:59]
Commercial Announcer
Oh, nice.
- [42:00]
Max Collins
You know what?
- [42:01]
Chris Berube
Yeah, Yeah.
- [42:01]
Max Collins
I don't know if you asked me, like, it doesn't feel. Feel like it's in the same spirit as like Cancon quotas on the radio. It's not really supporting like innovation in Canada. That brings us back to the question of like, how do we actually support arts made in Canada?
- [42:16]
Chris Berube
Okay. And do you have an answer for this, Max? What is your. What is your big solution to all of this?
- [42:20]
Max Collins
Hot take, but funding?
- [42:22]
Chris Berube
Yeah.
- [42:22]
Max Collins
You know, like tax credits, bursaries, like grants, all that.
- [42:29]
Chris Berube
It's true. I mean, money is the most obvious answer here. And it is kind of the solution to a lot of problems with this kind of thing. I mean, if you look at it, in the last couple of years, we've seen a couple of breakout Canadian TV hits like Schitt's Creek, for example, Heated Rivalry, which we were talking about. And some of those are produced by the public broadcasters, some of those are produced by private broadcasters. But kind of everything in Canada has some level of public support and public funding behind it. Like with a country of our size, you kind of need that to sustain an entertainment industry. And now we're seeing the really talented people from Canada, you know, find a global audience. And that's very exciting. But, you know, you can't say that those things would have been produced without some level of public support and public money. Right?
- [43:16]
Max Collins
Yeah. So this is all kind of like top level, of course. But there are really easy ways in which an everyday person can support the arts. You know, go see a concert, go to a museum or a gallery, check out a Canadian TV show, you know.
- [43:32]
Chris Berube
Yeah. Just see what's happening locally and support it. Max, you and I could be talking about this for 10 hours. I think we talked about much music at one point. I feel like that's a whole other episode. We'll have to figure out Canada's answer to mtv. Max, this has been a true delight. Thank you so much for doing this. It's been a real pleasure talking about everything Cancon with you.
- [43:53]
Max Collins
Thank you. I had a lot of fun.
- [43:55]
Chris Berube
We have a very special bonus that is accompanying this episode. There are so many great Canadian artists and Canadian songs that we were not able to get to in this episode. So Max Collins is creating a special playlist that you can Listen to. Visit 99pi.org we will have our Canadian music playlist along with annotations. That's 99pi.org 99% visible with was produced this week by Max Collins, edited by me, Chris Farube, Fact checking by Graham Hacha, mixed by Martin Gonzalez. Music this week by Swan Real with Mia Byrne and Kaylee K. Moimaloy. Special thanks this week to Jay Coburn, Key Scott, Kenneth Murphy, Kai Lumbang, Lynx Music in Toronto and David Smith at War Door Studios in London. The one in England, not the one in Uncle Ontario. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney hall is the senior editor. Kurt Kohlsted is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh Lasha, Madonn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Talon and Rain Stradley. And of course, the big boss, Roman Mars. The 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in Oakland, California. But today's episode was produced in beautiful Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Maple Test passed, Cancon certified. You can find us on Bluesky as well as our own Discord server. And you can find a link to that special playlist and every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.
- [45:46]
Max Collins
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- [45:58]
Commercial Announcer
Make it quick, young man.
- [46:01]
Max Collins
Aw, see? Pop up just.
- [46:05]
Commercial Announcer
I think we should call a doctor.
- [46:07]
Chris Berube
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Max Collins
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Max Collins
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Alan Cross
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