Canada AM
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Canada AM

Canada AM was a Canadian morning television news show that aired on CTV from 1972 to 2016. Its final hosts were Beverly Thomson and Marci Ien, with Jeff Hutcheson presenting the weather forecast and sports. The program aired on weekdays, and was produced from CTV's facilities at 9 Channel Nine Court in Scarborough, Toronto.

In addition to CTV's local owned-and-operated stations (O&Os) in Eastern Canada as well as affiliate station CITL-DT Lloydminster, the program also aired on independent station CJON-DT (NTV) in St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, as well as CTV News Channel, the network's 24-hour national news service. The program previously aired on CTV's O&Os in Western Canada, until they launched their own all-local morning news programmes called CTV Morning Live on August 29, 2011.

CTV's first attempt at a morning show, Bright and Early, launched in 1966 and was cancelled the next year; among the presenter lineup was future federal Liberal cabinet minister Jim Fleming, who read the news headlines.

Ray Peters, the head of Vancouver's CTV affiliate CHAN-TV, had been an avid viewer of NBC's Today Show, and lobbied CTV to reinstate a morning program in order to compete with the American networks. Peters had intended the show to be produced out of Vancouver, but agreed to a Toronto-based production in order to bring CFTO-TV's owner John W. H. Bassett on board. The 90-minute program launched under the title Canada AM on September 11, 1972, with Carole Taylor and Percy Saltzman as hosts, and Dennis McIntosh as newsreader. Taylor left the show in 1973 to host W5, and was succeeded by Elaine Callei; however, Callei left the program within a few months, and was in turn succeeded by Helen Hutchinson, who for a time hosted concurrently with her tenure as co-host of the evening newsmagazine series, W5. Long-time host Norm Perry joined in 1975 and would remain with the programme until 1990, making him the longest-running co-host in the show's history.

For most of the 1990s and 2000s, Canada AM had a consistent running time of two and a half hours, airing between 6:30 and 9:00 a.m. local time, with most affiliates repeating the previous night's late local news at 6:00 a.m. As the program is produced live for the Eastern Time Zone, the program would be "delayed" in Atlantic Canada to 7:30-10:00 AT / 8:00-10:30 NT.

The first half-hour would typically consist of a rundown of news headlines, sports, and weather, followed by a lengthy business news segment produced by Business News Network; for a few years the 6:30 half-hour was in fact a semi-autonomous program known as AM Business. From 7:00 on, the program used a format more in line with its U.S. counterparts. In its final seasons as CTV's Vancouver affiliate, CHAN-TV (known on air as BCTV) would pre-empt the first 30 minutes in favour of its own morning newscast, and eventually delayed the remainder of Canada AM by an hour, i.e. 8 to 10 a.m. (it did not carry the additional hour discussed below).

The program also includes opt-outs for news updates from a local anchor at each station at the end of each half-hour. The network would always produce an alternate national segment for stations not using the opt-outs, as well as CTV News Channel.

In fall 2000, CTV decided to match NBC's expansion of Today by adding another hour of Canada AM from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. local, which aired on O&Os and some affiliates. This would include a "coffee talk" segment as well as other lifestyle features. As a result, CTV dropped the recently renamed Live with Regis and Kelly. As Live continued to have strong ratings stateside, the Canadian network re-added the talk show in fall 2001, bumping the "coffee talk" hour to 10:00 a.m. in most areas, before abandoning the final hour entirely later in the season.

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