Countdown Canada
a new online release from Black Zero
Dear subscribers,
Last week, Black Zero launched three new discs - of films by Christine Lucy Latimer, Richard Kerr, and Larry Kardish. You can order them here. However, with our focus on Canadian cinema, Black Zero couldn’t pass Canada Day without observing it…
Please find below a new Black Zero publication - a free, online release.
In 1970, Rob Fothergill released Canada’s own War of the Worlds—Countdown Canada, a TV news simulation dramatizing the day in which Canada becomes part of the United States. The broadcast included prominent public figures commenting on the last gasp of Canadian sovereignty, some debating the merits of such an assimilation, others engaging in a plea for an independent Canada. It was set in the future (1979), but was aired only five years after the publication of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, a philosopher’s defence of Canada in an era of its diminishing sovereignty, and only three years after Canada's centennial wrestled a confident and complex nationalism back into the public consciousness. Countdown Canada was bought by the CBC and aired nationwide in September of that year, prophesying what a future of apathy and inaction could bring to the nation.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKER: Robert Fothergill is a playwright and professor emeritus of theatre at York University. In addition to his plays, he is the author of Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (1974). He was the founding director of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and made five films between 1966 and 1975: Oddballs, Solipse, Love Seen, Countdown Canada and Campaign.
Countdown Canada is presented here in a 2K scan from Fothergill's personal print, which was gifted to me upon his retirement from York University.
In addition to the main feature (above), here is an introduction that Rob and I gave when we presented the film as part of the Ad Hoc screening series at Innis College. Thanks to Eva Kolcze, who shot this video.
And finally, here is a new video essay on the film. In addition to being part of this release, The Invasion Will Be Televised is the first episode of a new ‘spin-off’ of Art & Trash, Northern Light, on Canadian cinema. I had planned to release it throughout the summer but I’ve been presented with an opportunity to produce it in partnership with a new platform arriving this fall. So, future episodes will be available starting in September or October.
THE INVASION WILL BE TELEVISED: COUNTDOWN CANADA AS ANTICIPATORY DOCUDRAMA
In September 1970, the CBC broadcast a special presentation, in the style of a news-magazine program, that dramatized a peaceful annexation of Canada by the United States. The final hours of Canada’s independence play out on television, with the country’s leading cultural commentators debating these interesting times, interspersed with scenes depicting dissent and rioting by a hostage Canadian populace and the pageantry of surrender. Countdown Canada was a speculative docudrama rooted in an existential threat that had felt very real to Canadians in the years leading up to the country’s centennial—an event intended to consolidate a shared Canadian identity. The broadcast arrived at a moment of national reflection. Quebec’s Quiet Revolution had transformed Canadian politics, revealing fractures to federal unity, while separatist unrest and the rise of the FLQ revealed the fragility of the Canadian state. Pierre Trudeau’s early federalism promised a pan-Canadian vision that emphasized bilingualism and civil rights, but which struggled to define cultural sovereignty. There were also external pressure of American cultural dominance: by 1970, American ownership of Canadian magazines, newspapers, and television outlets was widely perceived as a threat to national autonomy. This concern had been growing since the O’Leary Commission’s 1961 report on foreign media ownership, and was amplified by Dave Godfrey’s 1968 essay collection The New Romans, which argued that Canada's absorption into the American empire was not a question of if, but when. Countdown Canada staged a creeping annexation—by invoking media, market forces, and ideology. A declining sense of national identity was making the country vulnerable to cultural and military domination from its southern neighbour. It risked becoming just another theatre of the Cold War. Countdown Canada anticipates challenges to Canada’s sovereignty, reminding the viewer that the cost of democratic self-determination is to foster a strong, distinctive national identity. If Canada cannot adequately and plainly define what makes it Canadian—and what beliefs lie at the heart of its identity—how can it hope to deflect a cultural invasion by America, with its declarations of individualism, its freedom rhetoric, its colonial fantasy of manifest destiny?
Countdown Canada was written and co-directed by literary historian and filmmaker Rob Fothergill, whose wide-ranging and divergent interests—from underground filmmaking, to the archetypes of an emerging Canadian cinema, to the study of English diaries—would later give way to his calling as a playwright. Countdown Canada anticipates Fothergill’s work in theatre, which was also marked by the speculative docudrama, pitching narratives that engage with the figure of Leon Trotsky and the ideas of Alan Dershowitz. With Countdown Canada, Fothergill was crafting a subtle variation on the Mercury Theatre’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast, developing a program with enough veracity to deceive the casual viewer into a state of alarm, as through its use of real commentators playing themselves, and its invocation of the documental witness of news media. As George Grant observed in Lament for a Nation, the idea of Canadian sovereignty had become a philosophical impossibility in the age of liberal internationalism and American dominance. Countdown Canada is, in this sense, not merely a speculative satire but a televised funeral for an idea already eroded by history. It dramatizes Grant’s despair as performance: the spectacle of a nation negotiating the terms of its own disappearance—not through violence, but through consensus, distraction, and media assimilation.
For Grant, Canada’s postwar economic and cultural policies had “led to the impossibility of an alternative to the American republic being built on the north half of this continent.” His was not simply a lament for lost political autonomy—it was a philosophical diagnosis. The liberal commitment to progress, individualism, and free-market integration rendered any form of meaningful national difference unsustainable. Canada had surrendered in a failure of will, imagination, and metaphysical grounding. In Countdown Canada, sovereignty collapses as a fait accompli, confirmed and narrated by television anchors, experts, and commentators. No formal conquest takes place; instead, it is a media event that ratifies annexation as if it were natural, even banal. This televisual rendering mirrors Grant’s philosophical claim: that Canadian sovereignty would be lost not by an external invasion, but by acquiescing to the values and systems of liberal modernity. In this sense, Countdown Canada performs the very kind of "inevitability" that Grant feared—a sovereignty so eroded by ideological alignment with American liberalism that its disappearance would be accepted without resistance, as entertainment. Television chooses the nation’s fate. What Grant saw as a long erosion of identity, Countdown Canada compresses into a single broadcast evening, visualizing the disappearance of the nation as a process of linguistic, cultural, and institutional surrender. That it is styled like a typical CBC current affairs program makes its critique all the more potent: the tools of national communication have become the mechanisms of national dissolution.
Marshall McLuhan’s dictum—that “a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence”—form, and not just content, shapes our perception. “The medium is the message.” For McLuhan, the content of a communication is always subordinate to the way it is delivered: “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.” Countdown Canada does not merely tell the story of Canada’s annexation; it performs it using the authoritative codes and aesthetics of CBC news broadcasting. It mimics the tone, visual grammar, and social trust of Canadian public broadcasting. The illusion is seamless: real media figures—commentators, journalists, and public intellectuals—appear as themselves, offering supposedly live analysis of a speculative political event. The broadcast form creates a temporal and cognitive environment in which the fiction becomes real, or at least plausible. The viewer is not watching a documentary about annexation; they are watching annexation unfold in real time—as only television could rationalize and mediate it.
The medium is the message: form is fate. By adopting the codes of the news broadcast—a forum associated with truth-telling, public consensus, and national address—Countdown Canada renders the dissolution of Canadian sovereignty in an uncanny cadence. The structure trains the viewer to internalize the logic of collapse. Annexation becomes a matter of news formatting: the visuals, the presenter’s poise, the cutting between panel and field footage, all reinforce a sense of public normalcy even as the subject matter is a dire national extinction.
What Countdown Canada demonstrates is that television has the capacity to transcend reporting, to actively supplant political reality. For McLuhan, television becomes an environment that absorbs and reconditions the viewer’s sense of what is real and what is constructed. The distinction between a speculative fiction and a state broadcast collapses. The implications are immense: the broadcast does not just simulate a possible future—it primes the viewer to experience it. As such, Countdown Canada is not merely an exercise in speculative fiction, but a critique of televisual power. Its medium is its most potent message: the idea that Canada could vanish through the quiet, persuasive authority of its own broadcasting voice.
Countdown Canada shares DNA with other subversive pseudo-journalistic films that blend documentary form with fictional narrative to intervene politically in public discourse. Its most direct precursor is Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1965), a BBC-commissioned docudrama that simulates a nuclear attack on Britain and its aftermath. Framed in the style of a news report, The War Game combines interviews, statistics, and voiceover with harrowing fictionalized footage of civil collapse. Watkins employs this pseudo-journalistic authority as a truncheon against the public complacency and governmental silence around the realities of nuclear war. The film was deemed too politically incendiary to be broadcast, and was pulled by the BBC—a testament to the threat posed by its subversion of broadcast form. Watkins later made Punishment Park (1971). Structured as a vérité-style documentary of an emergency tribunal where political dissidents are judged and sentenced to death-by-exile in the titular “punishment park,” the film adopts the aesthetic conventions of news reportage and direct cinema. Its fictional elements are filmed in improvisational, hand-held style; its camera crew is rendered a participant-observer. In this form, Punishment Park reveals the fraying lines between judicial procedure and state violence: it speculates on what can—and implicitly does—occur in the ideological structure of American authoritarianism. Like Watkins, Fothergill weaponizes the visual grammar of public broadcasting against itself, turning state-sanctioned form into a site of resistance. These works use pseudo-realism to dramatize the slow erosion of civil liberties, national autonomy, or democratic discourse—not in the future, but now, and in plain sight.
These works provide important coordinates for understanding Countdown Canada. Like them, it uses the visual language of television journalism to simulate political reality. The credibility of television gives the resulting program a heightened urgency. This strategy finds one of its most unsettling expressions in the BBC’s Ghostwatch (1992), a hoax broadcast about paranormal activity in a North London home. Framed as a live investigation and hosted by respected broadcaster Michael Parkinson, Ghostwatch drew on every convention of factual television: call-ins from viewers, roving camera crews, real television personalities playing themselves. The horror of Ghostwatch arises from a subtle modulation of register—the slight lag in audio during remote connections, the low-quality video feeds, the restrained tone of Parkinson’s commentary—all of which are signifiers of authenticity in the visual language of live TV. Ghostwatch, like Countdown Canada, collapses fiction into journalistic form, staging a media event that behaves like a live broadcast. Both programs exploit television’s claim to truth, using that authority and the grammar of the medium to make the speculations of their fantasies into something vivid and real to the viewer.
This formal strategy allows Countdown Canada to do what a traditional drama could not: to generate a plausible sense of political collapse by speaking in the language of institutions—officials, journalists, studio panels, field reporters. As in The War Game, Punishment Park, and Ghostwatch, the fusion of documentary aesthetics and speculative narrative mobilizes audience affect while disguising the scaffolding of fiction. It is a simulation—a projection of political anxieties into the apparatus designed to relay the real.
Today, Countdown Canada can be understood as a precursor to contemporary debates about media simulation, post-truth politics, and the theatricality of sovereignty. Its modest production and brief runtime belie its conceptual daring: that a nation’s identity might be lost not through conquest, but through cultural absorption, passivity, and forgetfulness—made visible, fittingly, on a national broadcast.
Countdown Canada presents a nation televised out of existence. In this, it is not merely a speculative docudrama but an early recognition of sovereignty as a media phenomenon. It stages the absorption of Canada into the United States with talking heads in place of tanks, with consensus in place of conflict. In doing so, it anticipates the slow, procedural erosion of Canadian independence—an erosion whose signs remain visible in the “51st state” crisis of 2025.
The suggestion that Canada could be annexed without armed conflict, simply by failing to articulate its own identity, is no longer hypothetical. In trade policy, foreign ownership, and cultural production, Canada has increasingly ceded ground. Countdown Canada suggests that, should the nation lose its sovereignty overnight, its citizens might fail to notice. The film’s uncanny mode—faux-broadcast, half-familiar, domestically voiced—is precisely the medium through which such an annexation would become palatable: it would be performed, debated, and rationalized.
Contemporary viewers may see Countdown Canada as a broadcast from a parallel Canada—one that is only a few policy decisions, a few trade deals, a few cultural amnesties removed from our own. From this parallel reality, it offers this warning: identity, once surrendered, cannot be reclaimed. The identity of a nation must be a lived experience. If a nation fails to own its identity, someone else may own it for them.
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Can't wait for your next NL vids :)
Also check out two other great pseudo-journalistic TV broadcasts: the 1983 Emmy-winning Special Bulletin and 1994's Without Warning