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Also available on The National Post’s The Ampersand!
Monday night marks the first live performance episode of Canadian Idol’s 6th season. The competition looks as tough as ever as 24 of Canada’s top singers from all over this awesome country fight to earn the seemingly useless title of Canadian Idol.
This year’s finalists feature singers from Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Newfoundland, British Columbia and Ontario. Looking at the Top 24, I can’t help but notice that my home province, New Brunswick, has been shut out yet again. That marks two straight years that not one officially bilingual singer has gotten through to the viewer-voting portion of the popular summer series.
Come to think of it, New Brunswick has never had a serious contender for Canadian Idol, which seems surprising seeing as how we are the home of such famous singers as Roch Voisine and….
Some New Brunswickers will argue that in Season 3 we had Casey Leblanc, who made it all the way to the Top 5. But those people are also from Nackawic and in the minority. The rest of us look at Casey like our own little Sanjaya: an okay singer who over stayed her welcome, thanks to a devoted voting population.
That voting population also tried to help Brandon Jones from Quispamsis, but he only made it as far at the Top 7, at which point he most likely returned to his job at the ever popular New Brunswick call centres.
But then again the voting process for Canadian has never really been all that fair has it? How can it be when some provinces have millions and millions of people while others celebrate reaching six digit-sized populations?
It seems odd to me that no one as ever really acknowledge how unfair the voting process is in Canada. Out of the past five seasons two winners have been from Ontario, two from Alberta and one, irony acknowledged, from Quebec. Which, correct me if I am wrong, are also Canada’s most populated provinces.
Maybe the show should be split up to make it fairer. The smaller provinces and territories (Yukon, Nunavut, NWT, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and PEI) should all team up for their own version of Under-Populated Idol. The eventual winner takes on the champion of Over-Populated Idol. The winner of that can be crowned the real Canadian Idol and collect their prize of low-rotation radio play and a lifetime worth of awkward conversations with Ben Mulroney.
At least for now, it looks like fellow New Brunswickers will just have to wait until maybe next summer to have our day in the spotlight. Until then, we’ll have always have the McLobster sandwich and Roch Voisine. Suck on that Ontario!
