There’s a lot of old-school CanCon going around these days and, really, why shouldn’t there be?

Despite the pejorative connotations often associated with that term in the golden age of CRTC-imposed Canadian-content regulations for radio in the ’70s and ’80s — when “CanCon” was sometimes invoked to dismiss acts presumed not good enough to cut it without being artificially propped up by quotas — many of the hits from that era have stood the test of time. They haven’t gone away and, consequently, the hitmakers behind them haven’t, either.

Corey Hart has emerged from self-imposed retirement with a new EP and a coast-to-coast spring tour of arenas and amphitheatres set to arrive at Toronto’s Budweiser Gardens on June 14, with Glass Tiger opening. The year to date has given us new albums by the varied likes of Spoons, Marc Jordan, Maestro Fresh Wes and Gino Vannelli, who will himself perform at Toronto’s Bluma Appel Theatre on April 24. Streetheart issued a new career retrospective entitled Life. Legacy. Music. a week ago, featuring an unreleased song recorded with original vocalist Kenny Shields before his death in 2017 and the band is back on the road with Harlequin’s Paul McNair taking up vocals. The Pursuit of Happiness and the Odds sold out the Danforth Music Hall this past January. Aldo Nova, of all people, came back out of nowhere last fall with his first album in 21 years. Meanwhile, Toronto indie bricklayers the Lowest of the Low have a new record on the way next month and the Northern Pikes will release a new album of their own this summer. And on it goes.

To deduce a “resurgence” of classic Canadiana from all this activity is inaccurate, since most of these acts have stayed active in one form or another since they first rose to prominence. The fact that concert-promotion giant Live Nation was willing to make Hart an offer he couldn’t refuse to get him to renege on the tearful, four-hour “farewell” to the music business he staged at Montreal’s Bell Centre in 2014, however, suggests a certain renewal of faith in the commercial viability of the artists who established the CanCon canon.

Hart is obviously in a different situation than, say, Streetheart or Spoons — bands that had faithful mass followings and legitimate radio hits and could sell tens and/or hundreds of thousands of records at home but ultimately got tarred as “too Canadian” by their own people because they never cracked wide abroad — because he sold 16 million records internationally and cracked the Billboard Top 40 nine times at his mid-’80s peak, getting as high as No. 3 in 1985 with “Never Surrender.” But Hart, much like Loverboy or the absolutely huge circa-Reckless Bryan Adams at the time, was also subject to the distrust that bedevilled artists on the other side of what we might term the “Canadian conundrum”: do too well in the States or elsewhere and you were somehow less Canadian. You had sold out. You were pandering to outside tastes. You couldn’t win.

“When I started I got a huge deal in the States but still, in those days, you couldn’t get a chart number if you were Canadian on a Canadian radio station unless you had a chart number in America,” recalls Marc Jordan, who was actually born in Brooklyn in 1948 prior to being raised in Toronto because his father, baritone Charles Jordan — who partly inspired Jordan’s decision to sing with a full orchestra on this year’s standards album, Both Sides — had to go to the U.S. for a time to make a living. “And then if you lived in the States and came home, you’d be hot for a year and then they’d go ‘Ah, you couldn’t make it. You couldn’t hang there, eh? You had to come home.’ It was just stupid.”

Maestro Fresh Wes has a similar story. When the Toronto MC — who released his latest album, Champagne Campaign, in March on the 30th anniversary of his landmark debut, Symphony in Effect — started rapping in the ’80s, there was scarcely a hip-hop scene to speak of Canada so the only way up once “Let Your Backbone Slide” hit was to try his luck Stateside.

“In the mid- to late-’80s, my genre of music was in an embryonic stage in Canada, from a mainstream perspective,” he says. “I got ridiculed because I had supposedly ‘moved’ to the States. I was in New York for awhile and I was signed to a New York label. And when I was in New York, all these cats were hatin’ on me. I was, like, ‘What do you want me to do? I’m signed to a New York label. It wasn’t a Canadian label that signed me.’ Now, the biggest artists, like Drake, I think he lives where? Calabasas? There’s no major issue with that. I bore the cross for a lot of people.”

Streetheart was the perfect example of a band caught in the middle of the Canadian conundrum.

By the early ’80s, the Winnipeg combo had got about as big as it could at home and had no choice but to strike out into the States, for the simple reason that there just weren’t enough places to play in Canada back then. When Streetheart didn’t fly south of the border, the standard “just another CanCon band that couldn’t cut it” insults were hurled its way. The group called it quits in 1983 and wouldn’t reunite until 1999.

“There was certainly that sort of cynicism. I heard lots of that myself,” says longtime guitarist Jeff Neill. “I’m reticent to use the words ‘inferiority complex,’ but the U.S. kind of represented ‘the show.’ It was the major leagues. And one of the reasons Streetheart ultimately broke up was that our management just didn’t have the ability to get the band any traction in the U.S., and without that you were almost just spinning your wheels in Canada.

“We were doing well in Canada. Every record would reach ‘platinum’ status, which sounds impressive but in Canada that was 100,000 records. And it’s very simple math: whatever you made from a record was almost what it cost you to make a record back then, so you never really made any money and, because we were a Canadian touring band, there were only so many major cities that we could play.

“You’ve heard this before, I’m sure, but when you tour in the U.S. and you do a 100-city tour, you don’t make any money until the 51st show. So if you do eight shows in Canada, the only people who make money are the trucking company, the lighting company, the audio company and that sort of thing. The band doesn’t really make anything just because it costs you so much money to go do a big show, but you kinda have to do a big show because you’re an arena band. It was very tricky. Once you climbed up, you couldn’t go back.”

These days, Canada can lay claim to some of the biggest pop stars on the planet, and has for years. Drake, Shawn Mendes, the Weeknd and Justin Bieber rule the charts in much the same way that Bryan Adams, Céline Dion, Shania Twain, Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette have in the past.

We’re a little surer of ourselves in 2019, both from a cultural and a music-industry perspective. There’s much less self-doubt. There’s a sustainable network of large and small rooms to play in across the country. We’ve developed a sufficient amount of pride and self-confidence that the CanCon staples who didn’t travel as well beyond our borders, back before the Tragically Hip made it OK to be a primarily homegrown phenomenon, can now be celebrated for their place in building the Canadian industry up to where it is today.

There should never have been any shame in loving Chilliwack or Chalk Circle or April Wine or Prism, but there was a time when cultural immaturity rendered them second-class citizens in the eyes of their own country. That’s changed. And if you leave home because you blow up internationally, you’re celebrated for it rather than the other way around.

Also, of course, it helps to have an actual history of popular music in this country. Even in the ’80s, it was still fairly patchy and trapped in America’s long shadow. Now, we have a sense of perspective on how we got to where we are.

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“One of the big differences now compared to, say, 20 or 30 years ago is that people like Corey Hart and Bryan Adams and Anne Murray and Céline Dion were, like, the only ones who made it,” opines Michael Barclay, co-author of the indispensable Have Not Been the Same: The Can-Rock Renaissance, 1985-1995 and the man behind last year’s Tragically Hip biography The Never-Ending Present. “We had very few people to pick from and it was the same people at the Junos every year and all that stuff, whereas now — and this has been true for at least 15 years — no matter what genre of music you’re into, no matter what level of success you’re attracted to, there’s so much. Canada keeps hitting home runs on every level in every genre, and Canadian culture is not defined by just two or three icons, right? Drake is the biggest artist in the world, hands down (but) there’s a long list of people who can triumph. Including Triumph. Who are not back together.”

“Canada, I’ve always felt, never really respected its own — not only in music but in a lot of areas, like art — and I think that is changing, finally,” agrees Jordan. “And maybe that’s a generational thing, where the stuff that came out in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s now seems like part of overall history, not particularly Canadian. It’s just music. Some of it’s good and some of it’s better than others. I would say it went from ‘dismissive’ to ‘inclusive.’ ”

Again, too, the music hasn’t gone away. All those songs that might once have been viewed through the lens of a CanCon-born inferiority complex have stuck around. Several generations have embraced them and clung to them now despite having plenty of other Canadian music to choose from. Could it be the music was actually … good?

As Toronto booking agent Ralph James, noting that such oldsters on his roster as 54-40 and Sass Jordan are “busier than ever,” put it to me drolly last week: “And the bands don’t suck. I think that’s a key component in the whole thing in the continuation or the prolonging of their careers.” And he’s right. Most of these artists have stuck around for a reason.

“There’s actually an elevation of some of this music, especially if there were one or two hits by some of these artists,” offers music writer and broadcaster Bob Mersereau, author of The Top 100 Canadian Albums and The Top 100 Canadian Singles. “It was heard as much as the Rolling Stones or anybody else along the way. It was played on an equal footing so it’s actually, in a way, more popular than it was at the time for new generations. They know these artists just as well as they know any other artist. So there’s an equal footing that’s been placed on them. And they’re iconic names, they’re iconic Canadian names. There’s a status they have that they didn’t actually have in the ’70s and ’80s. Now, they’re ‘classic.’

“Legacy bands are really respected now and Canada has legacy bands, and that’s important to people. That’s important to young people. They like the idea of rock ‘n’ roll having a history in Canada, whereas it didn’t before. We now have a 50- or 60-plus-year history of success to look back on. Honestly, when I was a disc jockey starting in the late ’70s and early ’80s, the attitude still kind of existed that we were ‘second rate’ compared to Britain and the U.S. and that’s just not there anymore.”