All Lightfoot, all the time. That's more or less the sound of many Canadian radio stations as it is, but now that the CRTC has decreed that broadcasters must bump up the number of Canadian songs they play every day by a third, things promise to get pretty unlistenable.

It's one thing for the "alternative" rock stations: there's no shortage of groups of cunning young men from the suburbs with an ear for the latest trend – what are known in the business as "artists." But what are the boomer stations to do? How many times can you subject the public to The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald without provoking mass emigration?

Nevertheless, everyone was full of praise for the CRTC's Solomon-like wisdom. Everyone always is. If your livelihood depends upon keeping the regulator happy – and in the Canadian music business, that is the only set of ears that matter – you will always be quick with admiration.

The common refrain after the ruling was that everybody wins. Broadcasters will be allowed to own three and four stations in a single market, which means fat profits for them. The recording industry, meanwhile, gets higher Cancon quotas – within five years, 40 per cent of every broadcast day must be supplied with certifiably Canadian material. Plus they get a cut of the coming industry consolidation: every time one company takes over another, it will have to pay a tax equal to 6 per cent of the deal to one of those industry development funds that have given Telefilm such a good name.

And as for the CRTC itself, it is perhaps the biggest winner. Even as satellite transmission and digital signals are promising to bring hundreds of new sources of broadcast music into the market, the bureaucrats on the commission are still happily pushing the Cancon button as if nothing had changed.

Indeed, the ruling is bursting with fresh edicts, a marker of the commission's renewed resolve to micro-manage the industry into the ground. It is now a matter of official government policy, inter alia, that songs must be played from beginning to end: no playing snippets or medleys to meet the required song-percentages. So along with the various arcane formulae that go into determining who or what counts as "Canadian" – The singer? The songwriter? The producer? The bassplayer? Based on birthplace?

Residence? Accent? – countless new clerical jobs will be created counting the number of "na-na-na-na's" at the end of Hey Jude. Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except the listeners, the people for whom all of these songs are ostensibly sung. The listener gets fewer stations playing shorter songlists. That's showbiz, I guess – or showbiz as it is practiced in Canada, where the avarice of the Hollywood producer meets the officiousness of an East German train conductor, everyone all the while furiously advertising their concern for the public interest.

Even in this perpetual harvest of humbug, this year's was a bumper crop.

"I've been one of the big Cancon supporters in the industry," said a broadcaster, in opposing the increase in quota. "Our business is exposure, not handouts," said a recording industry executive, grateful for his latest regulatory handout. Best of show was this, from the chairman of the CRTC: "the commission is not a censor." The basis for this extraordinary remark – what else do you call a government body that regulates every second of what is broadcast every day on every station in the country? – was the commission's apparent decision not to ban the U.S.-based Howard Stern show, now gleefully fouling the airwaves in two Canadian cities. Even if it did not dare venture into restricting "offensive" speech, the commission might have busted Stern for the greater crime of being American: it's only a short hop from Cancon for songs to Cancon for talk, and after that Cancon for news, I suppose. So perhaps we should give thanks for small mercies.

But of course, it doesn't need to. The stations themselves are already bleeping out his more pungent remarks, in obedience to the "self-regulating" industry body, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council: a transparent front for the CRTC. And the commission was more than ready to hold hearings into the matter in future, should the need arise.

But why wait? Perhaps, in the interest of promising Canadian culture, some promising domestic cretin could be found to take Stern's place. A couple of more rounds of The Edmund Fitzgerald, and fart jokes will start to sound pretty good.