Here’s Connor’s interview with Steve Darling on Global TV News – September 13th, 2007. It was his first TV interview and he left the house at 6:00AM so he could be at the studio in time to do it.

Here’s the song – “End of the Line” performed live in the news studio – September 13th, 2007

I signed on as a judge for the CBC’s ‘Seven Wonders of Canada’ when it was still just a twinkle in a radio producer’s eye – a modest and hopefully fun idea, intended to spark some positive dialog about our amazing country. Very soon, though, I found myself watching, impressed, as the CBC staff improvised maniacally – like the Grateful Dead at an all night jam – to keep up with the overwhelming and unexpected national momentum they had inadvertently created.

The initial infrastructure for the show was quickly humbled by the country’s enthusiastic response to the idea of picking seven favourite Canadian wonders. The 7WC website underwent several hasty renovations and the online voting system strained and choked under the weight of it’s sudden popularity. My job, as a judge, slowly began to seem just a tiny bit more … complicated.

I still have the first email from the CBC producer. It refers to the “feedback that we hope to get from listeners”. Over 20,000 pitches and more than a million votes later, I was shuffling my tour schedule to accommodate the three and a half hour “Judgement Day” television and radio segment at the CBC’s Toronto studios.

Conference calls hammered together a complicated, but hopefully fair, procedure by which we would proceed. The judges painstakingly filled out spreadsheets listing all fifty-two short listed nominations and the criteria that had been determined at the outset. The online voting would be factored in, but not relied upon completely, because many worthy nominations lacked the population base to generate the kind of pride-driven community voting that characterized some of the more seemingly popular wonders. One of my hopeless favourites, for instance, – a seventy kilometer in diameter impact crater – blasted into the Canadian Shield 200 million years ago and still looking like a fresh bullet wound – probably received very few votes beyond that of Canadian astronaut, Marc Garneau, who had photographed it from space and pitched it on one of the first ‘Sound Like Canada’ Seven Wonders shows.

Despite the fact that I’ve visited two thirds of the 52 nominated wonders, I felt obligated to take the time to study them all – confirming and adding to what I knew, and learning about those places I’ve never been. I spent hours discussing potential nominations with family and friends – quickly learning that no two seven wonders lists are the same. It was an enriching, rewarding and, yes, fun experience.

I’m proud of the list of seven that Roberta, Roy and I ultimately settled on. It was borne of compromise and will be seen by many as flawed, but I hope those people who cared about the outcome will understand that we did our very best to represent them. From the looks of things, the Seven Wonders of Canada program was just the beginning of the CBC’s celebration of a country that boasts hundreds of wonders – not just seven. Check out the 7WC website to see the much larger and – much more important – picture that they present there.

Finally, and even though nobody’s asked me, here’s my *personal* seven wonders of Canada:

Niagara Falls
The Rockies
Haida Gwaii
The Ice Road from Inuvik to Tuktoyaktuk
The Manicouagan Crater
The Thousand Islands
The Lobster Pound in Hall’s Harbour NS

Now YOU try to get your list down to just seven!

UPDATE – “One thing’s for sure, the Sleeping Giant is awake now” – Roy MacGregor – Globe and Mail
UPDATE 2 – “Geographical correctness run amok” – Christie Blatchford – Globe and Mail
UPDATE 3 – “More on the Seven Wonders of Canada” Jonathan Whitten & Cathy Simon – The National – Blog

Tuesday is my interview day. Some Tuesdays I do four or five interviews back to back, half an hour apart. It can get confusing remembering what you’ve said to your current interviewer when you’ve already answered the same questions two or three times. This potential problem is more than offset by the fact that I prefer concentrating the interviews into one day to having them popping up randomly during the week – which is how they used to happen.

I did two interviews last Tuesday – one with a newspaper in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta and one with a magazine in Toronto, Ontario.

While discussing the fact that many people come to see my band multiple times, the Fort Saskatchewan interviewer told me that he’d seen Trooper fourteen times. When discussing the same topic half an hour later with the Toronto writer, I proudly mentioned the Fort S. writer/fan.

“Well, he’s got me …” he said sounding a little disappointed, “I’ve only seen you twelve times”.