Canada Reads during COVID-19

On March 13, 2020, the CBC announced that the 2020 season of Canada Reads was postponed until further notice due to the COVID-19 pandemic[i]:

Given the ongoing developments with COVID-19 and the related travel concerns, Canada Reads has made the difficult decision to postpone next week’s event until we can convene our stellar panel of advocates in front of a live audience.

CBC Books

Since the announcement, the CBC has implemented several new ways for Canadians to engage with Canada Reads programming while practicing social distancing.   

Author Spotlight episodes       

In place of the show, the CBC hosted a series of one-hour programs on CBC Radio, each dedicated to one of this year’s books and authors. These one-hour programs are referred to as “Spotlights” and have been made available for download on the Canada Reads website, iTunes, and other podcast apps. 

Ali Hassan opens the special episodes with a short announcement that Canada Reads has been postponed, a brief summary of the special episodes, and an introduction to this year’s books and defenders. The episodes include a trailer of each book, and then they move into a mix of the authors reading excerpts, and interviews with either the authors or the defenders.

On Twitter, some users have responded positively to the special programming. For example, user @Rustykitty65 has commented that the episodes are a great break from, presumably, news about the pandemic:

We’ll continue to explore public responses to the special programs in future, but for now it’s interesting to see the podcasts framed as a kind of escape from the reality of COVID-19.

Facebook Group Author Q&As

Additionally, every week in April the CBC’s Canada Reads Facebook group hosted Q&A sessions with each of the authors.

These Q&A sessions were announced in a Facebook post on March 27, 2020. Group members were invited to post their questions as comments on the threads set up for each author. The first session was held on April 2 and featured a Q&A with Jesse Thistle, author of From the Ashes, followed by Megan Gail Coles on April 9, Eden Robinson on April 16, Cory Doctorow on April 23 and, finally, Samra Habib on April 30. The Q&As were later shared as Canada Reads articles (Jesse Thistle, Eden Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Samra Habib, and Megan Gail Coles).

Although we plan to break down the kinds of questions being asked and the larger discourse taking place during these Q&As in another post, here is an overview.

Questions were submitted through the Facebook threads, but also through Instagram and by email. In these latter two cases, the questions were posted by the CBC Books account on behalf of the submitters:

Some participants submitted specific questions to each author; others, like Caroline Nicholson, submitted the same question to all the authors. Here is Caroline’s question from the Q&A with Jesse Thistle:

Most of the posts involved a question and a single response (sometimes followed by a thank you from the participants, which shows not just participant engagement but perhaps also a perceived connection between audience and author). However, as can be seen in the exchange above, sometimes participants responded to the authors’ posts and engaged in more of a dialogue.

With the exception of Samra Habib, the authors responded to participant questions using the CBC Books account. In the exchange above, for example, Jesse Thistle is the one who is responding to Caroline Nicholson with “Mega love to you”—not CBC Books. Samra Habib, on the other hand, chose to use her personal Facebook account. Notably, Cory Doctorow doesn’t have a Facebook account and encouraged participants to delete their Facebook accounts following the chat.

The authors all engaged with the audience through the same medium, but each did it on his or her own terms. The range of interactions on Facebook suggests a level of connection between author and audience that goes beyond what is possible when listening to Canada Reads on the radio.

On June 25, 2020, the CBC announced that Canada Reads 2020 will now take place July 20-23. It will be interesting to see whether the additional pre-broadcast programming shapes the debate—and whether all of the extra time at home during COVID-19 means more people are reading the books and tuning in to the broadcasts.

[i] The announcement originally posted on March 13, 2020 has now been updated to indicate that Canada Reads 2020 will now take place July 20-23.