Historically, morning TV in Canada has been the location of the marginalia of television culture. Farm reports were regular features of morning television after the sign-on of local stations in the early 1960s, and some local religious programming was part of early regional television in a rotation that covered the principal Christian denominations. After 6:00 A.M., television became the province of news or children’s programming. Children’s programming generally divided along the lines of syndicated U.S. situation comedies and cartoons with live hosts who catered to the local market. In commercial television the early-morning hours were the province of the local station and rarely determined by network time organization. This resulted in a great variety of programs across the country. A morning movie could be part of one television market, while the Junior Forest Rangers part of another. Because the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) partially operated on a network of commercial affiliates, the early-morning hours were generally not programmed with CBC network feeds. One of the principal changes of early-morning television that moved it closer to its contemporary form was the shift away from this local focus to network programming.

In 1972 CTV, a private network established in 1960, introduced Canada A.M., a program modeled on Today, a long-running U.S. program on NBC. Canada A.M. is a news and chat show—with regular bulletins of news, sports, and weather—that begins each day at 6:30 and runs until 9:00 A .M . In its live presentation and with its relatively relaxed hosts who move seamlessly into softer news stories and entertainment gossip, Canada A.M. attempts to be an ambient program designed to be used during other preparations for the workday. The CBC also launched CBC Morning News, which provides a similar diet of bulletins and easy-listening banter among hosts and guests. The rest of the CBC’s early-morning schedule is designed for preschool viewers, with programs such as the British Columbia–produced Scoop and Doozie and the Nelvana-made computer-animated cartoon Rolie Polie Olie. Regional networks such as Global in Ontario have counterprogrammed against this style of “flow” television with either reruns of children’s cartoons (which provides needed Canadian content) or religious programming drawn from both Canadian and U.S. sources.

The pattern of morning network television shifts quite dramatically after 9:00 A .M .; the news flow model organized for the working audience transforms into something that targets those connected neither to work nor school, and the divide between the commercial stations and the public broadcasters becomes more obvious. Public stations generally engage in children’s educational programming aimed primarily at the preschool age group. The provincially funded education networks such as TVO in Ontario and the Knowledge Network in British Columbia vary this diet with programs aimed at older students within the school and university system. With its larger mandate, the CBC’s programs operate commercial free, providing a series of critically acclaimed and internationally successful children’s series, which have included the long-running Mr. Dress Up, Fred Penner’s Place, Under the Umbrella Tree, and Theodore Tugboat. These programs have followed in the tradition of Chez Helene (1959–72) and the Friendly Giant (1958–85) as staples of childhood experience in Canada. A Canadian version of Sesame Street has run on CBC since 1973, and inserts of Canadian puppets and stories (including French-language training) derived from Canadian city and country landscapes have increased from five minutes to 25 percent of the program content of this U.S. program. Sesame Street and the Canadian coproduction Arthur, an animated series about an aardvark and his family and friends, bookend the CBC’s morning programming for children.

In contrast, the commercial free-to-air stations have provided almost exclusively adult-oriented programming during this same time period, with talk and game shows predominating in the schedule. Dini, an hour-long talk show hosted by Dini Petty in the tradition of Oprah and Donahue, has had a successful Canadian run on CTV and BBS and made a brief appearance in the U.S. market. Peppered into the schedule are im-ported U.S. programs such as Regis and Kelly, which provide talk-celebrity shows better connected to the Hollywood circuit of stars, or issue talk shows such as Barbara Walters’s talkfest The View. Exercise programs have on occasion been successful at either the pre– or post–9:00 A.M. slot. The most successful in terms of Canadian and U.S. syndication was the 1980s Citytv production The Twenty-minute Workout, which featured three female models performing aerobics routines to a Miami Vice–like synthesized backbeat soundtrack.

Religious programming is also presented on Canadian television to some degree. The most prevalent Canadian program to compete with U.S. productions is 100 Huntley Street. Like the “infomercials,” religious programs often buy blocks of time directly from the station and use them for their own forms of promotion. Because they are often out of the general flow of morning television, such programs are also placed further to the margins of early morning.

Weekend morning television presents another principal distinction in Canadian programming. On both Saturday and Sunday mornings, the commercial stations expand their children’s programming to span virtually the entire time period. This focus on cartoons and hosted programs aimed at children gradually dissolves by late morning into sports programming. Sunday morning is divided among a variety of Canadian and U.S.-based religious programs and children’s television. The religious programs are further subdivided between local production and more slickly produced syndicated shows.

The expansion of Canadian television channels since the 1980s has made the temporal designations in programming—such as the category of “morning television”—less valid. The patterns of morning television have instead been expanded into actual channels, where the former marginalia of television populate the entire broadcast day. For instance, CBC Newsworld, the 24-hour news channel, does alter its content throughout the day, but the general pattern resembles breakfast television news programs that predated the channel’s launch. Subtle differences can be seen in channels producing what could be described as microgenres. MuchMusic, the nationally distributed cable music channel, organizes its morning into Videoflow and the retro-oriented mid-morning ClipTrip.

These channel orientations are complicated, however, by technological factors. Satellite distribution, unless it delays the signal—as it does for the more traditional networks of CTV and the CBC—means that programming strategies of the cable-to-satellite channels break down in their attempts to match the temporal flows of their viewers. Programming designed for morning television in Toronto would appear in its satellite feed as very early morning television in Vancouver. Partly as a result of these difficulties, one can discern a slight tendency to program for the most populous part of Canada, connected to Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, all in the eastern time zone.

Nevertheless, what can be identified more generally is that morning television, as it is now presented through the more than 100 channels available on Canadian television, may be slipping into programs associated with other day parts and even other generations, or “eras,” from previous years of television. Past television becomes the domain of channels such as Bravo, and the distinction between morning and prime time appears to dissolve. Cable channel advertising decisions now rotate commercials through the entire day of programming. Such a strategy indicates that the newer cable channels aim to gather their target audience through cumulative reach, rather than with the purchase of a particular prime-time moment at a premium rate.

Morning television, then, does continue to provide particular categories of viewing practices and has produced associated genres connected to this marginalized part of television. The emerging reality of multichannel television in Canada has made this sense of Canadian morning television and its connection to a temporal identification less distinct, but it is nevertheless a clear and continuing pattern in both programming and production practices.