Permission to Be Canadian
In June 2026, I caught a rebroadcast of a Q with Tom Power interview with Dave Bidini and Kevin Hearn of the Rheostatics. The band was promoting their new album, The Great Lakes Suite, a deeply Canadian work built around the Great Lakes and the legacy of Stompin' Tom Connors. During the conversation, they described how, during the 1990s, Canadian artists around them felt pressure to scrub Canadian references from their songs. The reason was simple: American radio programmers were reluctant to play anything that sounded too obviously Canadian.
The Rheostatics were hardly alone in witnessing this. For decades, Canadian artists have been told that success in the United States requires making their work less Canadian. In 2015, NPR gave this phenomenon a name: "entertainment for export."
The same advice has long appeared in publishing. Author R.J. Anderson has written about being asked to replace distinctly Canadian language and references, changing "tuque" to "knitted hat," "Grade Seven" to "seventh grade," even removing references to milk sold in bags. She has also heard of Canadian authors being encouraged to move their stories to the United States altogether.
Yet when Kelley Armstrong was repeatedly warned that no American publisher would touch her novel Bitten if it remained explicitly Canadian, she ignored the advice. No editor ever rejected the book for being Canadian, and it went on to become a bestseller on both sides of the border.
So, was the advice ever really about audiences? Or was it an assumption, repeated by
publishers, producers, broadcasters, and marketers until it hardened into conventional wisdom?
Schitt's Creek offers one answer. Brad Schwartz, the Canadian television executive who helped bring the show to the United States, later admitted that he worried about it being perceived as "that Canadian show." His solution was to market it as though it were American. What's striking is that no American broadcaster required this. The assumption came from a Canadian intermediary trying to anticipate American tastes.
The show itself never changed. It remained a CBC production with a Canadian cast, filmed in rural Ontario and unmistakably shaped by its Canadian origins. Once audiences actually watched it, those supposedly risky qualities proved irrelevant. Schitt's Creek became a cultural phenomenon throughout North America, and the Ontario locations where it was filmed now attract visitors from around the world.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Vancouver has spent decades doubling for American cities in film and television, while Ontario towns routinely stand in for New England. Most viewers either never notice or simply do not care.
That raises an uncomfortable possibility for Canadian artists. What if the obstacle to success was never American audiences at all?
The same commercial instinct appears outside the arts too. Restaurant chains and retailers obviously also make decisions based on what they believe audiences will buy. If the same anti-Canadian assumptions appear there, they may tell us something about where this thinking really comes from.
Boston Pizza was founded in Edmonton in 1964, yet its founder chose an American city as the brand. No American investor demanded it. No foreign distributor insisted on it. Canadian entrepreneurs, selling primarily to Canadian customers, reached instinctively for American names and imagery. Americans were not the target audience here. Canadians were.
That is difficult to explain if Americans are supposedly the problem.
An even more uncomfortable possibility is that Canadians themselves have absorbed the idea that American branding carried greater prestige. The performance was not for outsiders. It was for us.
That possibility became harder to ignore during the tariff disputes of 2025. New York Fries, founded and operated in Canada, suddenly found itself emphasizing that it had been Canadian all along. The Canadian market had shifted, and decades of cultivated American identity had left the company with a branding problem: its own customers needed to be told it was Canadian.
Canadian artists, meanwhile, seem to have sensed the shift toward acceptance first.
The Rheostatics' latest album leans unapologetically into Canadian landscapes and history. Carley Fortune was told early in her career to move her debut novel from Barry's Bay, Ontario, to an American seaside town if she wanted to sell. She refused, found representation that understood why the setting mattered, and has since sold more than three million books worldwide. When Prime Video adapted her novel, the Canadian setting remained. Fortune has said conversations with producers changed dramatically following the success of Heated Rivalry. Suddenly, filming in Canada no longer required justification. Netflix's own data points in the same direction: in 2025, almost 65 percent of Netflix members globally watched Canadian content.
None of this proves that every Canadian reference is an advantage, or that every warning from a publisher, producer, or broadcaster was misguided. Markets are real, and some stories travel more easily than others.
What it does suggest is that one of the cultural industries' oldest assumptions deserves much closer scrutiny.
For decades, artists were told to lose the tuque, soften the accent, move the story south of the border, make it more "universal." Businesses often followed the same instinct, assuming American identity carried greater commercial value.
Yet again and again, audiences have shown themselves less concerned with where a song, story, or business comes from than whether it is worth their time.
Perhaps the question was never whether Americans would accept Canadian culture.
Perhaps the question was whether Canadians would.
If that answer is finally changing, future Canadian artists, musicians, entrepreneurs, and storytellers may no longer feel they need permission to sound like themselves.
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Further Reading
"Rheostatics are wearing their Canadianness proudly" — CBC Arts/Q with Tom Power, December 2025
"What's the Matter With Canada?" — NPR, All Songs Considered, October 2015
"There's Nothing Wrong with Singing About Canada" — Vice, November 2015
R.J. Anderson, "How To Get Published In the US or UK (If You Don't Live There)" — Go Teen Writers
Kelley Armstrong's Goodreads Q&A on Canadian settings and US publishing
"It started as fan-fiction smut. Now everyone is talking about TV drama Heated Rivalry" — BBC
"Heated Rivalry Author Rachel Reid On Why You're Obsessed with the TV Show" — TODAY.com, January 2026
"What's non-negotiable for Carley Fortune? Keeping the story in Canada" — CBC Arts/Q with Tom Power, June 2026
"Can a TV show make the world fall in love with Canadian summer?" — CBC Arts, June 2026
"Canadian Publishing 2025: Carley Fortune Seduces Millions with Her Rural Romances" — Publishers Weekly, September 2025
"This Summer Will Be Different" — Netflix Tudum, March 2026
"How Schitt's Creek became the bingiest thing on TV" — Toronto Life, January 2020
"Goodwood, Ont., becomes tourist hot spot as backdrop of Schitt's Creek" — CBC News
"Boston Pizza, New York Fries: Tariff war tests Canadian companies with U.S. names" — BNN Bloomberg/The Canadian Press, April 2025
1 - "Thepitchmotel" by AmahlLeDieu at schitts-creek.fandom.com, CC BY-SA 3.0.
2 - "New York Fries, Lloyd Mall Llyodminster 2020" by Rowanswiki, CC BY-NC 2.0. Cropped for layout.
