WHAT HAPPENED?: Whether you’re a fan of Canadian Idol or not – and I have always been firmly in the latter camp – you can’t help but wonder just why a national network would put on hiatus a show that they’d spent six seasons trumpeting as a ratings triumph and a cultural landmark that only they could have made happen.

The only thing that’s clear right now is that CTV didn’t want the news of the show’s one-year “rest” to break as quickly as it did this week, but a groundswell of online buzz fed by the grumbling that happens when you pink-slip hundreds of cast and crew – aided in perhaps the smallest way by my own inquiries on Tuesday – forced them to make a curt but definitive statement. I still needed answers, however, so I called up Zack Werner, the only Idol personality who has, so far, made any public statements on the news.

After giving me some grief for my anti-Idol statements, Werner said that while he’s not privy to the budgets or decisions made at CTV or by Insight, Idol’s production company, “I do know that every year when we go to renew our deal with the show we're always told that the show is prohibitively expensive and Canadian advertisers are always a hard sell to get them to put any money into a Canadian property. And that given the dearth of automobile advertising that's going to go on in the future, that the sales team at CTV came back to the powers that be and told them that they couldn't make their nut.”

Werner says that one of the reasons they were given for the network’s belt-tightening was the cost of their Olympic commitments. “They paid $100 million for the Olympics, at a time when the economy looked booming, and now they've got to sell the advertising for that,” he said, which quickly led to a discussion of just how CTV will replace Idol in their schedule. “It begs the question - so you're going to put on a less expensive show where advertisers pay less money on slots on shows that are going to have fewer viewers?

“And you're going to pay the license fee, which they're going to have to pay to Fremantle (Idol’s parent company) whether they do the show or not. So the combination of paying the license fee and putting on cheaper programming and selling the advertising for less makes more economic sense than putting on our show - I think that begs some questions, don't you?”

At the risk of sounding altruistic – “because I’m not the most altruistic person in the world” – Werner wonders what message is being sent to the “thousands of kids who, at a time when the economy is selling them a picture that the future is bleak, if you ever needed a dream, and a dream that gave you a chance to compete for it becoming a reality, and understanding what it means to work hard and have an option, now is the time when we need a show like this.

“Unfortunately, it's the worst possible message they could be sending out.”