When members of the Rose family lost their fortune and their lavish home, there was almost no indication that the fictional town they landed in was located somewhere in rural southern Ontario.

The only whiff of Canadiana in the pilot episode of Schitt’s Creek slipped through in a scene where parents Johnny and Moira sit with their adult kids at a roadside diner, coming to grips with their new reality. “I had a second cousin in Elmdale who did telemarketing, he made a ton of money,” the sympathetic waitress Twyla commiserates. “Turns out his entire business was illegal and he lost everything.” Elmdale is a rural community on the north shore of Lake Erie. Like the place, the drive-by reference was easy to miss.

Though Schitt’s Creek never waved the Maple Leaf, executive producer Andrew Barnsley insists Canada was at the heart of the production from the start. It was an issue his team had to navigate carefully because of the rigid definition of Canadian content set out by the federal broadcast regulator.

“We actually got into some interesting conversations with Canadian funding bodies around that,” Barnsley told The Logic. “For it to qualify as Canadian, do you have to say it takes place in Canada?” 

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is now rethinking that definition as it prepares to enforce Ottawa’s Online Streaming Act, which reforms the Broadcasting Act and demands some streaming services pay into the development of Canadian shows and movies. Overhauling the regulations, which haven’t been substantially updated for more than three decades, is an attempt to preserve Canadian storytelling in the age of digital television—an industry now dominated by American streaming giants.

While the online distribution of TV shows has meant greater competition for views, Canadian hitmakers like Barnsley see the change as an opportunity to treat Canadian content as a valuable export, rather than its familiar role as a bulwark against U.S. culture, or worse, a cringy charity case. 

“Being Canadian had this sort of negative connotation associated with it, and it turned viewers off,” Barnsley said of Schitt’s Creek. “What we wanted to do was attract viewers.” To put it mildly, they succeeded. The show went on to become a massive hit both inside and outside Canada. It swept the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2020, breaking the record for most awards given to a comedy series in a single year.

Not all Canadian producers agree on the best way to change perception of the country’s cultural output, though.

As it stands, a show’s Cancon status is determined by a point system: two for a Canadian director, two for a screenwriter, one for a lead actor and so on. Shows that rack up at least six out of 10 points, hire Canadians to key jobs and pay 75 per cent of their expenses to Canadians or Canadian companies can call themselves Cancon—a designation that unlocks special funding and tax credits. Under the Online Streaming Act, streaming services must also set aside digital shelf space on their menu pages for Canadian productions.

Given Canada’s limited audience, getting more people to watch Canadian shows means putting them on screens around the world. The current system was designed for the days when TV shows appeared almost exclusively on cable channels, but with the advent of streaming services, global audiences are now just a few clicks away. 

For Barnsley, the key to reaching them is putting Canadians at the heart of productions without rubbing viewers’ noses in it. “We wanted people to come in and kind of be embraced by the point of view and the sensibility, instead of something that we know has, historically, sometimes been a turnoff.”

Every creative voice that shaped the show was Canadian, he stressed, as were the people leading production. “From a sensibility point of view, from a perspective point of view, Canada was in there,” he said.

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Canadians, of course, are more accustomed to seeing their talent shipped abroad than their productions. Plenty of Hollywood A-listers boast connections to this country, but few star in TV and movies designed for Canadian audiences. Vancouver-born Ryan Reynolds has come home to invest in Canadian fintech and introduced boxed scrambled eggs to Tim Hortons, but when he produced a documentary about beloved Canadian comedy icon John Candy, he turned to a crew made up almost entirely by Americans. 

The success of Cancon productions like Schitt’s Creek took some Canadian showbiz expats by surprise. “Schitt’s Creek is funny, and it’s a Canadian show,” Vancouverite Seth Rogen marvelled on The Howard Stern Show five years ago. “The fact that a Canadian TV show has broken through in America is truly unprecedented. It is absolutely remarkable.”

As a Canadian who left to produce American content, Rogen told Stern, he felt he was part of the problem, and lauded Schitt’s Creek creators Dan and Eugene Levy for making the show in Canada.

Last year Rogen’s production company, Point Grey Pictures, dipped its toes into the Canadian market with a CBC reality show that combined his love of pot, pottery and Vancouver called The Great Canadian Pottery Throw Down. Rogen served as a guest judge (alongside host and Schitt’s Creek actor Jennifer Robertson) and crafted a bong as a tribute to the North Shore Mountains.

Point Grey then signed on to Bell Media’s efforts to repatriate Canadian creators from south of the border to produce new scripted series and export the content abroad. Bell also enlisted Tom Green’s production company and Elliot Page’s Pageboy Productions. 

Then, in June, Bell made a bet with an equity investment in Toronto-headquartered Blink49 Studios. In a press release, Bell Media president Sean Cohan described the move as “another significant step in our continued efforts to enhance the reach of Canadian creatives and deliver impactful storytelling that resonates at home and abroad.”

Blink49 is the production studio behind Beast Games, a reality show filmed largely in Toronto that answers the question: what if you stripped Squid Game of its anti-capitalist commentary and made it real? Minus the gruesome deaths, naturally. 

The show offers 1,000 contestants a shot at a US$5-million jackpot, and other cash prizes along the way. The host, American YouTube personality MrBeast (a.k.a. Jimmy Donaldson), has contestants compete in challenges and work in groups, then tempts them with cash bribes to betray their teammates in a psychological game that pits player against player. In a surprise twist toward the end of the season, MrBeast doubled the prize to US$10 million.

Blink49 CEO John Morayniss described it to The Logic as “the most expensive reality series of all time,” noting that, at its peak, the program employed 1,700 people. The show was criticized over allegations related to the safety and treatment of staff and contestants, but in its first five episodes, Beast Games reached 50 million views, breaking Amazon Prime’s record for most-watched unscripted show. “It’s a great coup to make a show like that in Canada,” Morayniss said.

As the studio looks to export more distinctly Canadian offerings, Morayniss favours an entirely different approach to Cancon than the one Barnsley took with Schitt’s Creek. He suggests regulators lean into their cultural mandate and require shows to focus on uniquely Canadian stories. At the same time, he said, the CRTC should loosen the rules around creative inputs, allowing shows to hire the best writers and talent they can find.

“Give a little more flexibility so that those Canadian companies that make those shows have a better shot at actually making money off the asset, building their business,” he said. The less restricted creators are, he added, the more profit they can drive from their productions. 

Those earnings can then be reinvested to build up show-making infrastructure in Canada, Morayniss said, potentially unyoking producers from cultural funding and freeing them to take creative risks with Canadian stories.

Media policy expert Irene Berkowitz, the author of Mediaucracy: Why Canada hasn’t made global TV hits and how it can, agrees that flexibility in the point system would give producers the leeway to prioritize growing their audiences. “You may be surprised to learn our 10-point system, which I believe is the oldest, has the least points and is the least flexible of 10 peer countries,” she told a panel of CRTC policymakers at a hearing in May.  

She suggested the regulator increase the number of points available, but not make any of them mandatory. Instead, funding support should be proportional to the number of points they rack up, which will benefit high Cancon achievers, she said. 

The panel seemed to appreciate the economic bent of Berkowitz’s argument, but pushed back on whether it would satisfy the CRTC’s cultural mandate to showcase the Canadian experience. 

“There’s a series of public policy objectives in the Broadcasting Act, in regards to social unity, to cultural diversity, to representation of cultural diversity, to official languages,” CRTC’s vice-chair of broadcasting Nathalie Théberge told her. The regulator would have to reconcile Berkowitz’s economic model with those policy goals, she said.

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There’s one Canadian show that would score a full 10 out of 10 points for Canuck cast and crew and its distinctly Canadian flavour. Before Letterkenny premiered in 2016, Canadian comedies aimed for broad appeal, said producer Mark Montefiore. “It was the beginning of the streaming era, especially in Canada, and our philosophy was, no, lean into the specificity,” he said. 

More than leaning into its Canadian roots, Letterkenny burrowed deep into the subcultures its characters inhabit. Like Schitt’s Creek, it is filmed and set in small-town Ontario. But there’s no doubt where the folks in the fictional town of Letterkenny are living. The comedy is about the daily struggles of the area’s hicks, skids and hockey players. They reminisce about singing O Canada in school while munching on all-dressed chips, conversing in the often vulgar lingo typical of the real-life communities that inspired them.

In Season 3, the show explores the divide between English and French-speaking Canada with the introduction of French hicks (or les hiques, as they’re called) when the main characters go ice fishing in Quebec. Their run-in with a nearly identical company of francophones leads to a battle of insults that would be genuinely difficult for someone from outside of the country to follow. 

“Go eat a Nanaimo bar in Kamloops!” one of les hiques shouts across the frozen lake.

“Why don’t you go savagely force-feed a duck and then enjoy your foie gras in a sugar shack, Trudeau!” a hick responds. It all ends in a friendly round of beers.

The foremost goal was appealing to a Canadian audience, but building Canada into the DNA of the show actually makes the characters more relatable, said Montefiore. “It’s so specific that it actually becomes universal.” 

Letterkenny originally aired as a TV show on Bell’s Crave service, but was picked up by Hulu for U.S. audiences in 2018 and quickly developed a cult following. 

The show’s success had a lot to do with the entrepreneurial instinct of its creators, said Montefiore. “We were able to retain ownership and we’re able to retain distribution rights, we’re able to have shorter licensing periods, which allows us to be able to then invest in our brand, build it,” he said. The production company has hosted live tours, sold merchandise and expanded the franchise with spinoff Shoresy, which is focused on one of the hockey players from Letterkenny, and a six-episode animated prequel about the lives of the main characters as children. 

“We need policy to encourage and promote entrepreneurialism in this country when it comes to the creative sector,” Montefiore said. “We need the opportunity to be able to take our own risks, but also the opportunity to collect the reward when there is a reward.”

After all, he noted, it’s not just talent that often flees to the U.S. to make it big—IP often goes south, too. Creators sometimes feel they have to hand the rights to their creation to sell their shows to the likes of Hulu or Netflix. But if platforms are forced to carry more Cancon as part of the Online Streaming Act, Canadians will have the negotiating leverage to keep their IP, he said. Especially if it’s embedded in the regulations. 

Allowing Canadians to control the creative and financial benefits of their creations through IP ownership is a key part of the regulator’s thinking, and it hopes to settle on a model that would satisfy both the Letterkenny crew’s entrepreneurial aspirations and the Beast Games producer’s desire for ultimate flexibility.

All in the cause of eliminating one of the most familiar plot lines in Canadian entertainment—one that (spoiler alert) the coda of Schitt’s Creek appears to play on. When members of the Rose family eventually get back on their feet, and Moira is ready to make her showbiz comeback, she and her husband head to California. 

Maybe, in a universe where Canada got the rules just right, they wouldn’t have to.