Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney released his budget, and included were $150 million CAD (€92.45 million) for national broadcaster CBC/Radio-Canada to explore joining the Eurovision Song Contest.

Even more eyebrows were raised when Eurovision’s Director Martin Green confirmed that talks between CBC and the EBU are in early stages.

To cover this story from all angles, we first checked in with Dale Roberts from Aussievision to find out how Canada’s potential début is similar and different than Australia’s from 2015. You can read more of Dale’s thoughts about this on Aussievision’s website.

Dale points out that Australians really earned their place in Eurovision, before being invited to join by the EBU in 2015:

“We’ve [Australia] been broadcasting it since 1983. And then actually, the introduction of Australia into the contest was done kind of gradually. We had like them saying hello to us, we had a segment, we had an interval act [2014]. And that was very deliberate to kind of give knowledge about how much we love the Contest, how much the broadcaster SBS had put into it, not by just broadcasting, but by sending commentary teams, and investing in production and actually helping out behind the scenes of the shows. So there’s a surface level going, oh, yeah, very similar, but actually if you’d scratch a bit further, Australia is a kind of much more — no offence — dedicated Eurovision country, compared to 2015 to now to where Canada is.”

— Dale Roberts

With that in mind, our Dave (a Canadian himself) turned to a panel of Canadian Eurovision superfans for their thoughts on the Canadian government spending time and money to enter the Contest. On the panel were:

• Alexander Plant, host of the ESC101 podcast which teaches us something new about the Contest every week
• Matti McLean, artist and performer, creator of the show “A Canadian Explains Eurovision to Other Canadians”
• Shawn Vickar, Eurovision content creator whose TikTok @worldvishawn has over 300k followers and 35M likes

While all the panelists were on board with Canada joining the Eurovision family, they differed in how and when they foresee this happening:

“I think that if Canada is serious in wanting to participate, they need to start integrating it into the general population, sort of cultural zeitgeist. Are they going to participate in 2026? If they would like to surprise me, I’m not going to stop them, but I don’t think it’s going to be for 2026. I think it’s going to be for 2031, because 2031 will be the 75ᵗʰ anniversary, which is going to be probably an even bigger show, given how there’s going to be an extra five years of planning and some extra time that hopefully some conflicts can sort themselves out, both financially and politically.”

— Alexander Plant

“I love the [hypothetical] plan for a national final. I mean, having a representative from every single province and territory is such a freaking cool idea. And then having [it] like Eurovision where the voting system is, you can’t vote for your own province, but you can vote for another province. I need the CBC if they’re listening to hear that, because I think that’s a brilliant idea.”

— Shawn Vickar

“… [W]hen I was touring, half the people would come see my show because they have heard about Eurovision and didn’t know anything about it. And half the people who came and saw the show were intimately familiar with Eurovision and had super strong opinions about Joost Klein […] it’s a really interesting split. But it’s absolutely something that a lot of Canadians have this curiosity about, have this excitement over. So yeah, there is definitely something there.”

— Matti McLean

These were just some of the Canadian reactions. To hear the rest of the conversation, tune in to Episode 157 of our podcast, now streaming wherever you get your favourite podcasts!

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Let us know in the comments or on social media if you think Canada has a place in the Contest and if you think we’ll see a Canadian début in Vienna! Follow along with our social media profiles @buildingbridgespod on the road to the 70ᵗʰ Eurovision Song Contest!