The MAPL Test

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 kind of 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. 

MAX COLLINS: But if you ask me, the most Canadian part of the series is the music. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s producer and fellow Canuck Max Collins. 

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, Ki.

KI SCOTT: Am I good to press play? 

MAX COLLINS: Yes!

MAX COLLINS: Ki knew and loved a lot of the songs on Heated Rivalry, like this power ballad by the band Wolf Parade. 

[I’LL BELIEVE ANYTHING BY WOLF PARADE] 

MAX COLLINS: The song plays during the emotional climax of an episode when a closeted hockey player invites his boyfriend out to center ice for the first time, and they kiss. 

MAX COLLINS: But Ki isn’t originally from Canada. And they weren’t aware that Wolf Parade is from Montreal. Actually, Ki was shocked to hear that a lot of the big musicians they know are Canadians. 

MAX COLLINS: Finger 11?

KI SCOTT: Oh, I did not know that! 

MAX COLLINS: Yeah. Deadmau5? 

KI SCOTT: Oh, I did not know Deadmau5 was Canadian. 

MAX COLLINS: Oh. Michael Buble?

KI SCOTT: Is Canadian? What?

MAX COLLINS: Yeah! 

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 any time a Canadian celebrity is mentioned people like me love to point it out. Look, we just cannot help ourselves. 

MAX COLLINS: Oh, did you know that Mac DeMarco’s from Canada? 

KI SCOTT: Mac DeMarco is from Canada? 

CHRIS BERUBE: 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 Kaytranada and Propagandi. This is just a small sample of an overwhelming list. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: This hasn’t always been true. 50 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. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The biggest musicians at the time were mostly from the U.S. and the UK, places with a bunch of recording studios to produce music and a bunch 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. 

ALAN CROSS: If you were a Canadian musician, there was essentially no modern music industry. 

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. 

ALAN CROSS: Back then, there was very little in the way of development, nurturing, coaching, mentoring of Canadian– It was just like, you know, get out there and play. 

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. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Alan is not exaggerating here. Another Canadian music industry legend, Stan Klees, saw this bias firsthand. Here’s Klees recounting an experience he had in an interview with music historian Kenneth Murphy. 

STAN KLEES: The guy opened the little envelopes that they got from the record companies, looked at it, and he said, “Canadian shit.” He threw it against a cement brick wall, and it shattered and fell to the floor…

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

MAX COLLINS: Jack London and the Sparrows took it a step further. While their front man was from the UK, the rest of the band was Canadian and put on fake English accents. 

In a similar fashion, a Winnipeg garage rock band, formerly known as Chad Allan and the Expressions, obscured their origins to trick Canadian radio stations into playing their music. They had just recorded a cover of Shakin’ All Over. 

[SHAKIN’ ALL OVER BY THE GUESS WHO]

MAX COLLINS: 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. 

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. “Oh, this is really cool!”

MAX COLLINS: From then on, the new name stuck. And the Guess Who went on to write chart-topping classics. 

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. 

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. 

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 PROMO: Expo 67, the greatest show on Earth… 

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. 

EXPO 67 PROMO: Suddenly, though, Montreal and Canada have found an identity and reputation that owes nothing to the past…

ERIN MACLEOD: I think of 1967 as being a bit of a watershed moment. 

MAX COLLINS: Erin MacLeod is a music journalist and educator. 

ERIN MACLEOD: 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 in the face of the increasing ability of the United States to spread its cultural dominance quite literally everywhere. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Coming out of its centennial year, Canada’s national pride had pulled a 180. Canadians had just experienced 12 months of intense patriotism, and it felt good. 

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. 

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. 

MAX COLLINS: This was such a big deal, the CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, canceled their regular programming that night to talk about it at length. 

GORDON DONALDSON: Good evening, I’m Gordon Donaldson with Norman DePoe. Today has been a pretty dramatic one for broadcasting in Canada. 

NORMAN DEPOE: A 30% Canadian content rule for the use of music by radio stations… 

CHRIS BERUBE: 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. 

MAX COLLINS: Now, was Canada the first country in the world to try out something like CanCon? Ehh, 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 Juneau. 

PIERRE JUNEAU: We believe that there is enough talent in Canada. It’s a matter of making room for the new talents that are developing in Canada… 

MAX COLLINS: Juneau was the chair of the CRTC. And as the biggest cultural rulemaker, 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. 

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 Juneau did not have a clear idea in those early days. 

REPORTER: Is there a definition of Canadian? 

PIERRE JUNEAU: There are so many variables that you have to consider that you can’t make a general ruling. You can have a certain number of guidelines… 

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 MAPL System. 

MAX COLLINS: Okay, here’s how it works. MAPL is a four-letter acronym. M-A-P-L. Each letter signifies a part of a song’s production process: music, the artist, the performance, and the lyrics. A song has to check off at least two of the four letters to qualify as CanCon. To check off the M, you need music that’s composed entirely by a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. 

CHRIS BERUBE: For the A, you need an artist performing the song who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident. 

MAX COLLINS: For the P, the performance, live or in studio, has to be recorded in Canada. 

CHRIS BERUBE: For L, the lyrics of the song have to be written entirely by a Canadian or a group of Canadians 

MAX COLLINS: So, let’s pretend that we are a radio DJ from 1971, and let’s test out the MAPL 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 Macleod, 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 You checks off three out of four MAPL 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. 

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 U.S. 

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 that it was ratings poison unless it was already big in the U.S. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Granted, there were some Canadian musicians making it big in the U.S., like Neil Young, The Guess Who, and Joni Mitchell. But critics of CanCon were concerned there simply wasn’t enough decent Canadian music to meet the requirements. 

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. 

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 11:00 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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: These time slots 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 6:00 am and 6:00 pm. So, radio DJs tried another scheme. They started playing songs that were definitely not Canadian, but still managed to sneak their way into the MAPL System. 

MAX COLLINS: Picture this. 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 CanCon!” 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 Mornin’ Rain. 

[EARLY MORNIN’ RAIN BY ELVIS PRESLEY]

CHRIS BERUBE: Early Mornin’ Rain was originally written and performed by a Canadian singer-songwriter, Gordon Lightfoot. 

[EARLY MORNIN’ RAIN BY GORDON LIGHTFOOT]

MAX COLLINS: Remember, a song only needed to meet two out of four letters in the MAPL 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. MAPL test 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 Kay 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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: The Kingston, Ontario, pop rocker, Brian 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 Lange. So none of the songs on that album qualified as CanCon. 

ALAN CROSS: Brian Adams, born in Kingston, raised in Vancouver–huge star in the 1980s–I mean, there’s nobody more Canadian than Brian Adams. Canadian radio stations… “It’s Brian Adams! Of course it’s CanCon!” So we started playing it and then the CRTC said, “Not so fast.”

CHRIS BERUBE: Ever since his album got disqualified, Brian Adams has been really vocal about hating CanCon laws. Here he is in the ’90s speaking to the press and just trashing the system. 

BRIAN 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 tim. 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. I mean, you’d never hear Elton John being declared un-British. You just wouldn’t. It’s just a disgrace… 

ALAN CROSS: Yeah, it just underscores our point of how stupid this is. MAPL System is terribly, terribly flawed. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It was a basic matter of supply and demand. CanCon laws created an instant need for music that could pass the MAPL test. 

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. 

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. 

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.”

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 U.S. Take for example, Corey Hart, the Sunglasses at Night guy. 

[SUNGLASSES AT NIGHT BY COREY HART]

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. 

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 Prozzak. 

[SUCKS TO BE YOU BY PROZZAK]

MAX COLLINS: Their music videos were all over Canadian TV. I always thought they were European, but nope, it’s CanCon, baby. 

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. 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.

MAX COLLINS: CanCon may have kick-started 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. 

JAY FERGUSON: At the time, it was such a story, like a Cinderella story. “Who’s this band from Halifax?”

CHRIS BERUBE: This is Jay Ferguson, the guitarist and vocalist in an alt-rock band called Sloan. 

[IF IT FEELS GOOD DO IT BY SLOAN]

CHRIS BERUBE: They were pioneers of Canada’s indie music boom in the early ’90s. 

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. 

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 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. 

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. 

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? Why is Geffen signing this band that has played a dozen shows?”

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. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: But while this suggests things were going great, the MAPL System is far from perfect. 

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. 

MAX COLLINS: Has anybody ever referred to Sloan as a CanCon band? 

JAY FERGUSON: No one’s ever said that to my face. Let’s just put it that way. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Jay Ferguson again. And he totally saw this inferiority complex around Canadian music first-hand. 

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, Sloan? They’re from Canada. They don’t count.”

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Rollie Pemberton is a rapper from Edmonton, Alberta. He performs under the stage name Cadence Weapon. 

[OLIVER SQUARE BY CADENCE WEAPON]

CHRIS BERUBE: And he says CanCon can create this feeling of our bands being tokenized in a way. 

ROLLIE PEMBERTON: I think there’s a bit of an 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 we’re lesser than because we have this benefit of CanCon. 

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 MAPL System? Really? 

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 MAPL System–it wasn’t needed for them to break out. 

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. 

ROLLIE 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. 

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. 

MAX COLLINS: So you’ve been referred to before as, like, a “CanCon” musician. 

JEREMY DUTCHER: I love that. I hate that. I love that. That’s so funny to me. 

MAX COLLINS: Jeremy Dutcher is a world-renowned singer and composer, and a Wolastoqiyik member of the Tobique 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 wax cylinder recordings by his ancestors, singing in Wolastoqey. 

[MEHCINUT BY JEREMY DUTCHER]

JEREMY DUTCHER: There’s less than 500 fluent speakers of this language left. And so a big reason and important mission for me is to bring awareness to this disparity and this precarity and also celebrate the beauty of what’s there. 

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 Rollie Pemberton again. 

ROLLIE 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 end up benefiting. So there isn’t anything to be like, “Hey, we need this percentage of CanCon to be BIPOC artists.” They don’t have that. 

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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It turns out the MAPL 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. 

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 even happen. 

ERIN MACLEOD: Without a willingness on the part of the companies who are not Canadian, unfortunately, 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 MAPL System. 

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 it. It 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. 

MAX COLLINS: That was really well done… [LAUGHS] 

MAX COLLINS: 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 it–it deserves to be supported. 

CHRIS BERUBE: When we come back, Max Collins and I are going to nerd out about some more CanCon stuff. You do not want to miss it, right after this. 

[AD BREAK]

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, we’re back with producer Max Collins. Hey Max! 

MAX COLLINS: Hello, I am very ready to give you some more riveting cultural policy history from Canada. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, I am born ready for this, so what do you have for us? 

MAX COLLINS: We spent a lot of time talking about Canadian content lots 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. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yes, absolutely, because TV in Canada is also subject to content laws, right? 

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 6:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m., prime time, on weekdays has to be CanCon. 

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? 

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. 

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. It is on a lot, I find. 

MAX COLLINS: Another way that they get to this 50% mark is by using spinoffs or franchises of non-Canadian TV shows. 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? 

CHRIS BERUBE: I have seen this 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 Canada. 

MAX COLLINS: Yeah, absolutely. 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!”

JON MONTGOMERY: 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’ve performed the steps correctly, he’ll present them with their next clue…

CHRIS BERUBE: 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…

MAX COLLINS: Yes. That is true. And for the record, I grew up in Calgary. I learned line dancing in junior high gym class. I know how Canadian that is. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s authentic, yeah. Totally.

MAX COLLINS: Yeah, exactly. But there’s other examples of this, too. A recent one is Law & Order: Criminal Intent. I think it’s set in Toronto. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It is. It certainly is. 

MAX COLLINS: Yeah. That’s a spinoff of Law & Order, of course. On French language TV, there’s Chanteurs Masqués, which is a spinoff of The Masked Singer. That’s an American competition show that is based on a South Korean competition show? 

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 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. 

MAX COLLINS: Yeah, it’s Canadian rinky-dink. 

TIM WARMELS: Hi there. 

APRIL BROCKMAN: Hi. 

TIM WARMELS: What’s your name? 

APRIL BROCKMAN: April.

TIM WARMELS: Where are you from? 

APRIL BROCKMAN: Wasaga Beach, Ontario. 

TIM WARMELS: Oh, nice! 

APRIL BROCKMAN: You know it? 

TIM WARMELS: Yeah, yeah… 

MAX COLLINS: I don’t know. If you ask me, it doesn’t feel like it’s in the same spirit as CanCon quotas on the radio. It’s not really supporting innovation in Canada. That brings us back to the question of, like, how do we actually support arts made in Canada? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. And do you have an answer for this, Max? What is your big solution to all of this? 

MAX COLLINS: Hot take, but funding? You know, like, tax credits, bursaries, grants, all that…

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, 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 were produced by private broadcasters. But kind of everything in Canada has some level of public support and public funding behind it. 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 find a global audience. And that’s very exciting, but you can’t say that those things would have been produced without some level of public and public money, right? 

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. Go see a concert. Go to a museum or a gallery. Check out a Canadian TV show, you know? 

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 MuchMusic 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. 

MAX COLLINS: Thank you, I had a lot of fun. 

CHRIS BERUBE: 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% Invisible was produced this week by Max Collins. Edited by me, Chris Berube. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real, with Mia Byrne and Caylee Cay-moy-Malloy. 

Special thanks this week to Jay Cockbrun, Ki Scott, Kenneth Murphy, and Kai Lumbang, Lynx Music in Toronto, and David Smith at Wardour Studios in London, the one in England, not the one in Ontario. 

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is the senior editor, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. 

The rest of the team includes Jayson De Leon, Emmett FitzGerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Talon and Rain Stradley, and of course, the big boss, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible 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 MAPL test passed, CanCon-certified. 

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our own Discord server. You can find a link to that special playlist, as well every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.