Last fall, desperate Canadian novelists flooded email accounts, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages with a single-minded, plaintive plea: please vote for our books on Canada Reads. A popular show broadcast each February on CBC Radio, Canada Reads usually involves a jury of five advocates, each championing the book they think deserves national attention. Episode after episode, volumes are voted off, in the style of the reality TV show Survivor. To mark the 2011 season, the program’s tenth, the producers decided to do a twist on this format, adding an American Idol–inspired audience participation system to the Survivor template. Votes from listeners created a short list of forty books, which was winnowed down to ten by another round of literary electioneering. From among those ten, the jury chose the five worthy of their advocacy.

By late October, after the top forty books were chosen, the goal of making the top ten inspired especially intense importuning. “Either vote INSIDE on Canada Reads, or I will strangle myself with your pearl necklace and call the police,” tweeted Kenneth J. Harvey, the noted Newfoundland tough-guy writer, in an only half-joking parody of the many novelistic supplications circulating around the literary world. Harvey was equally sardonic when Inside failed, tweeting, “Now that #CanadaReads is done, I must find a new focus for my begging. Spare change? Got a smoke? You drinking that?” On her Twitter account, Lynn Coady, another sharp-tongued child of Atlantic Canada, cast a skeptical eye on the entire grubby election process, asking, “What if the #canadareads nominees end up being whichever authors are most shameless about soliciting friends and family to recommend them?”

Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel Essex County made the top forty, inspiring his publisher, the American company Top Shelf Productions, to launch a campaign on the book’s behalf. Top Shelf’s shrewd publisher and editor, Chris Staros, notorious for his barefaced and brassy promotional tactics, pitched his appeal to US comic book fans (voting was open to anyone with access to a computer). “Let’s rally as a comics community to put a graphic novel in the Top 10!” he exclaimed in a widely circulated press release. This pandering paid off for Lemire, who won a spot in the top ten, and eventually made it into the final five.

It’s a measure of how profoundly Canada Reads has reshaped our literary landscape that the show has turned novelists — usually a rather introverted lot who spend their days locked away wrestling with sentences — into arm-twisting politicos eager to woo the crowd. The show’s importance can be explained in simple economic terms. Only a small circle of Canadian novelists, such as Margaret Atwood and Douglas Coupland, earn a living from their craft. For the vast majority who fall outside this fortunate club, only two surefire roads to bestsellerdom and financial security are available: you can win either the Giller Prize or Canada Reads. This is the bleak reality behind the unsettling eagerness of writers lobbying to be shortlisted.

Canada Reads is a kingmaker in our literature. Like a fairy godmother, it has magically made princesses out of young writers like Heather O’Neill, whose debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, won in 2007. Even more miraculously, it has brought back from the dead novels that had been buried in remainder bins and used bookstores. Hubert Aquin, Frank Parker Day, and Paul Quarrington were once names known only to coteries and tiny cults. Canada Reads gave them a second and more favourable look by a mass audience.

The resurrection of Day’s 1928 novel, Rockbound, was an especially impressive feat. In early 2005, this story of communal strife on a small island off Nova Scotia had only a pallid half-life, kept in print by University of Toronto Press as a historical curiosity. On average, it sold 200 copies per year. Thanks to the forceful advocacy of novelist Donna Morrissey, Rockbound won Canada Reads and went on to sell more than 35,000 copies. Other, less obscure winners have done far better: the contest is credited with 80,000 new sales of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion.

As an inciter of excitement about our literature, Canada Reads is inarguably a phenomenon. The show’s triumph has come during a difficult decade in which both CBC and the Canadian publishing industry need all the success stories they can find. In a time of rising flood waters, Canada Reads has been a life raft for both public broadcasting and literature. Given how necessary Canada Reads has become to writers and publishers, it seems churlish to question the show. But the very power of Canada Reads, now a national public institution on many levels, demands that we give it greater scrutiny.

Those who work on Canada Reads tend to wave off criticism by offering a dismissive account of their own achievements. When I interviewed Jian Ghomeshi, who has hosted since 2008, he said it’s wrong to take too serious a view of a show that was, after all, modelled on Survivor. But despite its origins as pure and unabashed entertainment, Canada Reads has become something larger: a harbinger of a changing literary landscape that the program has done no small part to transform.

If Canada Reads is an essential life raft, we need to ask who gets to make it on board. And where, exactly, is this shaky boat taking us?

To understand the impact of Canada Reads, we need some historical perspective. Book discussions on the radio are almost as old as broadcasting itself. In the ’30s and ’40s, American shows such as The Lively Arts and Information, Please! tried to bring genteel high-mindedness to radio listeners in deliberately accessible and ingratiating ways, often with a dash of chummy affability. Typical was Sunday Evening at Fannie Hurst’s, where the then popular novelist invited friends over for coffee to discuss books with her. “All book shows strove, one way or another, to entertain as well as enlighten,” cultural historian Joan Shelley Rubin noted in her 1992 book, The Making of Middlebrow Culture. “Nonetheless, they constituted a particular kind of amusement that, to varying extents, mingled ideals of character and liberal learning with elements of fantasy, ‘fun,’ and the veneration of personality. Like other middlebrow forms, such programs also oscillated between the association of literature with privilege and with accessibility, featuring experts who projected both superiority and kinship to the average reader.”

Canada has had its own brand of middlebrow book chatter, with celebrity authors such as Pierre Berton serving as our counterparts to Fannie Hurst. But we’ve also had a vital counter-tradition, best exemplified by the storied career of Robert Weaver, who worked at CBC from 1948 until 1985. In 1954, he proposed that CBC do “a literary magazine prepared for radio presentation.” While the network brass worried that such a show would be too abstruse for average Canadians, he nonetheless received the go-ahead. His program, Anthology, would play a central role in nurturing the unequalled flowering of Canadian literature that blossomed from the ’50s through the ’70s, providing a venue for writers like Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine, and many others. Among the show’s devoted listeners was critic Northrop Frye, who called it “irreplaceable.” Thanks in large part to Weaver, CBC served as one of the great patrons of Canadian literature for several crucial decades.

In an interview published in a book devoted to Weaver’s career, Janice Kulyk Keefer asked a troubling question: who at CBC can step into Weaver’s shoes? While CBC has many fine literary programs, there is now no real counterpart to Weaver at the network. Eleanor Wachtel’s show, Writers and Company, to take one example, is superb, but she’s more invested in the canon of world literature than in discovering new Canadian talent. Surely given that CBC’s mandate includes an educational function, the absence of a contemporary Weaver figure constitutes a notable failure.

Canada Reads’ key innovation is that it brought the sensibility of modern celebrity culture to an ostensibly literary program. It never presents a discussion that features just writers; nor does it ever use professional literary critics. Although such eloquent authors as Leon Rooke and Lisa Moore have been jurors, they’ve had to rub shoulders with a wide variety of non-literary celebrities, including musicians (Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo), politicians (Kim Campbell), comedians (Scott Thompson), and even an astronaut (Steve MacLean).

The show’s use of celebrity jurors has been much criticized, especially in academic circles. University of Guelph scholar and poet Smaro Kamboureli accused it of relying on “the tropes that inform the culture of celebrity.” Talin Vartanian, developer and producer of the show from 2002 to 2007, has argued that using celebrities has been crucial in helping it garner a wide audience, now numbering more than two million listeners annually.