I’M JUST SAYIN’: Yesterday began with an anonymous reader sending me an e-mail asking how I felt, now that my recent prediction - that one major Canadian network would probably always have an edge over its competition as long as it has two big reality franchises in its schedule – was obviously stale-dated, now that said major network was cancelling one of the shows.

After a quick Google and a check through the rest of my inbox, I wrote back and asked just what the hell they were talking about – this would be big news, and there wasn’t a sign of it anywhere. It was true, they replied – cast and crew of the show had been pink-slipped just before the holidays. A further Google revealed the likely source – an item on the votefortheworst.com web site, claiming that Canadian Idol was “cancelled, over, kaput, done.”

I put a call in to a CTV publicist, who claimed that this was the first he’d heard of it. I asked him to “either confirm or deny” the story, rather relishing using those words as they were meant to be used for the first time in my whole career as a journalist. Wisely, he declined to do either, and said that he’d try to get someone from programming for me to talk to, though he wasn’t making any promises.

Another trawl through the web came up empty – no press release from CTV, no brief from the Canadian Press, but just before noon, a new thread had opened up on CTV’s own web site forum titled “no more Canadian Idol,” and in just over two hours, the sadly inevitable post blaming Steven Harper was up, followed by a quote vaguely attributed to Idol judge Zack Werner lamenting that “after 6 years the economy has come crashing down on idol. strange that ctv has sponsers for a show on which we watch american kids seek fame and fortune by singing but not enuff sponsers for our own.”

Reactions on CTV’s forum ranged from skeptical to hysterical, but by 2 p.m. there was a Facebook group devoted to saving the show, and further rumours were circulating between the Facebook site, CTV’s forum and VFTW that another network had come to a deal with FremantleMedia and Insight Productions, the show’s international and local producers, to take it over. With only two private major networks in the whole country, that would mean Global was being as conspicuously silent as CTV.

As I write this, the “Save Idol” Facebook site has 80 members, my e-mail source has gone silent, and CTV has finally come back with a terse message that “as a result of the current economic climate, production of Canadian Idol will rest for the 2009 broadcast year,” though they retain the rights to the show. And that was the day that was.