[F Eh Q is a feature where we answer your questions about Canadian topics. In this installment: CANCON!]


Dear Plaidspin,

Is it true there's a law that Canadian radio stations have to play a certain amount of Canadian music? The fuck?




-Steve

Dear Steve,

Oh no, no no no. "Steve"? That just doesn't fit our elaborate Dear Abby-style sign-offs we've had in our fake letters so far. How about,


Dear Steve Canadian Content Confusion in Cleveland,

Great question, CCCiC.

Let's start with a bit of an oddball anecdote. In the early 1970s, Gordon Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who once held a joint press conference in Toronto with a peculiar request: they wanted Canadian radio to stop playing their songs.


What would compel these successful Canadian artists at the height of their popularity to ask their nation's radio stations to actively shun them? Well, the reason involves something called the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission's Broadcasting Act of 1968, better known as Canadian Content guidelines - or, more colloquially, CanCon laws.


As some people might know - and, if you don't know, this is another one of those secretly embarrassing Canadian factoids we try not to advertise to the world - Canada has protectionist media guidelines written into our laws that ensure a certain amount of Canadian-made music and TV shows get broadcast by Canadian radio and TV stations.

It might sound like the kind of law you'd hear from some backwards tinpot dictatorship - here in the Kajiristan Republic, our Eternal Leader ensures we only listen to pure Kajiristani music, not the indulgent music of the American pigdogs - but it's true. To this very day, Canadian radio stations must play anywhere from 25% to 40% Canadian music, depending on their license type. This is enforced by the CRTC (the Canadian equivalent of the American FCC), and stations can be fined, or even shut down, for refusing to play the mandated Canadian quota. That means classic rock radio playlists that are heavy on Rush and The Guess Who, pop stations spinning Bieber and Avril Lavigne in heavy rotation, and hip-hop stations playing a lot - a lot - of Drake.


(CanCon laws as they apply to TV are interesting in their own right - after all, they've led to a few notable success stories, like SCTV, Kids In The Hall, and Trailer Park Boys. They've also been responsible for propping up a lot of not-so-great shows, like... well, take your pick. But for our scope, let's just talk about music today.)

Back to our friends Gord Lightfoot, Anne Murray and The Guess Who: the reason they were asking Canadian radio stations not to play their records was that, in the nascent days of CanCon laws, there simply wasn't a lot of Canadian music out there. That's one of the reasons the law was established: to build the Canadian music industry from the ground up, by brute-force radio repetition if necessary. The problem was, with radio stations across the country forced to play 25% Canadian music (the quota has since gone up, hitting 30% in the 1980s and 35% in the 1990s, with some newer radio licenses being as high as 40% CanCon), these few existing Canadian artists were getting overplayed to the point of exhaustion. Artists usually love having their songs in heavy rotation, but with radio stations playing a steady diet of CanCon standbys like Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind", Murray's "Snowbird" and the Guess Who's "American Woman" practically every hour on the hour, fans were getting sick of their favourite Canadian artists and were begging radio stations to play anyone else.


Luckily, that meant station directors were forced to play undiscovered Canadian talent to mix up their playlists, which, from that 1970-era vacuum, essentially created the Canadian music industry. The demand led to Canadian recording studios and labels popping up overnight. And that led to bands, and that led to hits - and, by the 80s and 90s, the Canadian music industry had become so robust that many of the biggest music stars in the world were Canadian. Today, it's not out-of-the-ordinary for the US Billboard charts to be absolutely littered with Canadian songs. (For the inevitable wiseass who's just going to skim this article and then post a comment about how Justin Bieber sucks, here's your preemptive "haha, good one, Jay fucking Leno.")

Now, what I'm about to say may be a bit of an unfair characterization - after all, Canada has a rich history of music going back to confederation, including plenty of folk standards, country, and other types of bearded men singing songs about how blue the sky looks - but from a mainstream radio perspective, before 1965 or so, Canadian music was a complete wasteland. Radio stations played almost exclusively American and British hits, save for a few AM Gold oldies from Ottawa's own Paul Anka.


By the time the late 60s rolled around, though, Canada was gradually becoming comfortable in its own burgeoning cultural identity.

Bolstered by the excitement around Expo '67 in Montreal, the election of young populist Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968, and a new generation of baby-boomers coming of age, the great doors of Canadian Culture (once exclusively the domain of stodgy National Film Board documentaries and watercolour paintings of pine trees) were starting to swing open to a new generation of musicians, actors and visual artists. For musicians specifically, like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell coming out of Toronto's fledgling folk scene, career options at home were limited. The only way to make it big for a successful Canadian artist in the 60s would be by moving to New York or LA - there was just nothing to support them at home.


Today, musicians can not only thrive, but have successful careers entirely within Canada. For every story of an Arcade Fire, a Metric, a Broken Social Scene or a Tegan & Sara successfully cracking the US market, there are bands like The Tragically Hip, Blue Rodeo and Great Big Sea who've carved out long and successful careers exclusively in Canada without ever moving the dial south of the border. In a way, those are the real CanCon success stories: not the bands who used Canadian radio as a springboard to world fame, but the ones who can now grind out a career entirely within Canada - a dream that, pre-1970, would have been impossible.

What Determines "Canadian" Music?

In 1991, Bryan Adams, born and raised in Kingston, Ontario, was one of the biggest stars in the world. His cheeseball wedding-dance ballad "(Everything I Do) I Do For You" was a #1 hit, enjoying heavy airplay around the world. Well, it probably would have had heavier airplay in Canada, but there was just one problem: according to CanCon laws, the song wasn't Canadian.


What was the problem? Well, that goes back to the earliest days of the CanCon law, back in 1971, when the Canadian record industry settled on a code to determined what music was and wasn't Canadian. It's called the MAPL system. Pronounced like "Maple". Because of course it is.


MAPL stands for Music, Artist, Performance, and Lyrics. In order to qualify, a work needs to be Canadian-made in two of those four categories. If you're a Canadian singer with a Canadian band and a British songwriter recording in an American studio, you meet two out of four, so you would be considered Canadian Content. (The pie-shaped MAPL logo, which acts as a labeling system included on albums in Canada, would have the "M" and "A" parts of the pie filled out in this case.)

For Bryan Adams, his 1991 album had a dyed-in-the-wool Canuck on the mic fulfilling the "Artist" component, but the album wasn't recorded in Canada, and his studio production and lyrics were co-credited to British super-producer Robert "Mutt" Lange. (Mutt Lange knows a thing or two about CanCon himself, later marrying the pride of Timmins Ontario, Shania Twain.) And so, the album was only ranked a 1/4 on the MAPL system: not Canadian enough for Canada.


Adams was furious. He held a press conference calling for the abolition of the CRTC. Eventually, the powers-that-be relented: because Adams was half-credited for the music and lyrics, they decided that two halves make a whole, and made a special Bryan Adams Exemption to the MAPL rule. Now, if songs are credited with a Canadian artist and at least a Canadian half-credit on music and lyrics, they can make the cut.

Still, it remains a confusing system. Some songs which are not at all Canadian have technically been deemed CanCon-worthy thanks to their lyrics or producer. Thanks to their songwriters and producers, albums by the decidedly-not-Canadian likes of Bonnie Raitt and Rod Stewart have gotten certified as Canadian Content. Meanwhile, Celine Dion's gigantic world-spanning hit "My Heart Will Go On"? Not CanCon. Go figure - we have to be the brunt of Celine Dion jokes, but according to our own laws, her music isn't even Canadian.


The CanCon Backlash

In general, there are two schools of thought about CanCon laws, which, in Canadian media circles, remain just as controversial today as when they were first enforced in the early 70s. On the one hand, there are people who believe that CanCon was a bold idea that ultimately succeeded in creating the robust, internationally-popular Canadian music industry we have today. On the other hand, there are those who feel protectionist restrictions on the media that we can consume makes us little better than some backwater socialist government.


I won't try to force either perspective too hard, but I will say that for all of the CanCon success stories from Bachman-Turner Overdrive to Bruce Cockburn to Bryan Adams to Bublé to Bieber, there are other areas where the law's created nothing but headaches.

In those early days of CanCon when no one wanted to listen to Canadian music - partly because, thanks to a lack of homegrown studios and producers, a lot of it was cheesy and low-quality - radio station directors met their CanCon quotas by stuffing a block of all-Canadian music in the middle of the night. That way, they could play all of the American hits during the daytime, and from midnight to 4AM, just cram in all of the Rush songs they could to meet their quotas. The CRTC got wise to this practice (known derisively within the industry as "beaver hours") and cracked down, forcing radio stations to spread out their CanCon evenly throughout the day.


Particularly in some genres, radio producers have struggled to find enough MAPL-certified music to play to meet their requirements. Classical music is especially tough, with no lyrics (L), and music (M) credited to 300-year-old Germans - that means if you're listening to Canadian classical radio, expect to hear a lot of versions played (A) and recorded (P) by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Rap music is another area that's felt the brunt of CanCon laws. Despite huge popularity in cities like Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto, none of those cities had a dedicated hip-hop/urban contemporary station throughout the 90s. Let's face it: there's only so many times you can play Snow's "Informer" followed by Maestro's "Let Your Backbone Slide" in a day (the only two real Canadian rap hits at that time) to fulfill your 35% quota. It wasn't until 2001 when Canada got its first full-time rap station, Flow 93.5 in Toronto, when acts like Kardinal, Saukrates, Michie Mee and Choclair had enough of a back-catalog of records to make fulfilling a one-third Canadian music quota viable. (For more on Canadian rappers, see Plaidspin's definitive ranking.)


Even then, it's been a struggle for hip-hop radio stations to put a playlist together without flooding the airwaves with the same couple Canadian songs, which might create the kind of cultural-cringe backlash felt by Murray, Lightfoot & co. in the 70s. Through the mid-2000s Flow 93.5 switched to a mainly R&B-based format mainly so that they could get away with playing tracks from the then-massive Nelly Furtado, while in the late 2000s they switched back to a more hip-hop heavy playlist with the rise of a non-stop Drake format.

Then again, with the amount that Drake/Justin Bieber/Carly Rae Jepsen/Magic!/Avril Lavigne/Nickelback/etc. get played on a lot of US pop radio stations, these days there are probably American stations hitting their CanCon quotas. I remember listening to a rock station playing what seemed like Nickelback every hour, and as I made an eye-rolling CanCon joke, I learned that it was actually a station from upstate New York. They just genuinely loved Nickelback.


So that's the story. Yes, Canadian radio stations legally have to play Canadian music. Is it a bold, innovative system that helps foster and protect Canadian cultural heritage in the face of the overwhelming behemoth that is US culture? Or is it a protectionist racket that limits the free speech of broadcasters, bordering on socialism? It's your call. It's an argument we've been having for over 40 years, so it's not likely we'll all agree anytime soon.