Canada is joining Eurovision at the exact moment a chunk of Europe is trying to leave it.
CBC/Radio-Canada confirmed on Canada Day that the country will compete in the Eurovision Song Contest for the first time in 2027, becoming the first new nation to join the contest since Australia in 2015, according to The Hollywood Reporter’s report on the announcement. The debut follows a vote at the European Broadcasting Union’s 96th General Assembly in Prague on June 25, where CBC/Radio-Canada was upgraded from associate member, a status it had held since 1950, to full membership.
“Our participation in the Eurovision Song Contest, starting next year in Bulgaria, will allow Canadian talent to be showcased on one of the most storied music stages in the world,” said Marie-Philippe Bouchard, CBC/Radio-Canada’s president and CEO, tying the announcement to the holiday. Canada will compete in the semi-finals when the contest is held in Bulgaria next year, and CBC has said it will announce later this year how it plans to select the act that represents the country.
The timing is the awkward part. The 2026 contest that just wrapped saw Spain, Slovenia, Ireland, Iceland and the Netherlands walk out over the participation of Israeli singer Noam Bettan amid the war in Gaza, and sponsors pulled financing alongside them, leaving the EBU short on both broadcasters and money in the same year it welcomed its newest full member.
Two of those five walkout countries were not objecting to a pop performance in isolation. Iceland and the Netherlands had already joined the expanding case against Israel at the International Court of Justice months before the contest aired, part of a wider fracture across European institutions over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The Eurovision boycott was a cultural extension of a legal and diplomatic position several governments had already staked out.
Canada’s relationship with the contest is not actually new, just indirect. Céline Dion won Eurovision in 1988, but she sang for Switzerland, not Canada, because there was no path for a Canadian entry until this week’s vote in Prague. The country that produced one of the contest’s most famous winners spent nearly four decades as a spectator to its own trophy.
The EBU now counts 115 member organizations across 57 countries, and the Prague assembly used the occasion to take up the contest’s other running problem: the credibility of its televoting system, which the union has faced pressure to reform after years of complaints that block-voting and diaspora mobilization skew results away from the songs themselves. Canada’s admission and the voting overhaul both arrived at the same meeting, one expanding the contest’s footprint while the other tries to repair trust in how it crowns a winner.
What the EBU has not settled is the more basic problem. Whether Israel competes again in 2027, whether the countries that walked out in 2026 return, and whether sponsors who pulled their money come back are all questions still open heading into Canada’s debut. A contest can add a country faster than it can win back the ones threatening to leave, and Canada’s first entry may end up performing in front of a smaller, angrier version of Eurovision than the one it spent 76 years watching from the outside.
For CBC, none of that changes what Wednesday’s vote actually bought: a seat at a stage Céline Dion once won without her own country’s flag behind her.
