Have you heard Solomon Ray’s new album Faithful Soul? It’s number one on the gospel charts—and entirely AI generated, just like the musical artist behind it.

The idea that a hit Spotify artist might not be human is a satire of the attention economy itself: an ecosystem once based on authenticity and connection now topped by a synthetic voice engineered for maximum uplift. What does “soul” even mean when it’s made by software trained on real music?

In a year when other “ghost artists,” like Velvet Sundown, also made headlines, Canada is being forced to rethink an old problem. The fight is about platforms, algorithms, and the ever-hazy question of Canadian content—or CanCon. Traditionally, CanCon policy has been about ensuring the ongoing survival of compelling, high-quality works by Canadian creators. The phrase “Made by Canadians” has been a guiding principle.

CanCon emerged during a distinctly sovereignty-driven era. In the 1960s and ’70s, Ottawa worried that broadcasters, studios, and cultural products from the United States were overwhelming Canada’s airwaves and shaping Canadian identity. CanCon quotas, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the Broadcasting Act, Telefilm, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation were all established as tools of self-determination. They were designed to ensure Canadian stories had space to exist and compete inside a market where foreign players, especially US networks, held disproportionate control. Today, the threat is foreign AI models—and a flood of synthetic media that collapses the very meaning of “Canadian” in the first place.

A few weeks ago, the federal broadcast regulator, the CRTC,

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