Canada becomes eligible for Eurovision after EBU membership vote

CBC/Radio-Canada became a full member of the European Broadcasting Union on Thursday after a vote at the EBU’s 96th General Assembly in Prague, opening the door for Canada to submit an entry to the Eurovision Song Contest. The move ends a long period in which Canada sat on the edge of the contest as an associate member dating back to 1950, while the broadcaster now gains access to member-only networks and services tied to public broadcasting cooperation.

The EBU changed its statutes to allow some broadcasters outside Europe to become full members if they operate a public service media system aligned with Council of Europe standards and hold observer status with the organization. The union said its membership now totals 115 organizations in 57 countries, and it paired CBC/Radio-Canada’s admission with access to the Eurovision News Exchange and Euroradio Music Exchange, along with broader collaboration on journalism, verification, digital news and data.

CBC spokesperson Leon Mar said, “We’ll have more to say about the Eurovision Song Contest later,” stopping short of confirming that Canada will actually enter. That caution matters because full membership makes Canada eligible, but eligibility is not the same as participation. The broadcaster still has to decide whether to treat Eurovision as a genuine programming target or as a diplomatic-cultural signal that Canada is widening its media and cultural footprint toward Europe.

The push has political roots in Ottawa. Prime Minister Mark Carney raised the idea of Canada joining Eurovision in the 2025 federal budget, bringing a pop-culture question into the orbit of government policy and national branding. For a country that often frames its global identity through public broadcasting, multiculturalism and soft power, the prospect of Eurovision fits a broader effort to deepen institutional ties with Europe without joining the European Union itself.

Canada’s Eurovision lineage is thin but not nonexistent. The country competed in Eurovision Young Dancers in 1987 and 1989, and its strongest link to the contest remains Céline Dion, who won Eurovision 1988 for Switzerland with “Ne partez pas sans moi” in Dublin. Australia remains the only country outside the European Broadcasting Area to have competed in Eurovision, after a special invitation in 2015, which shows how the EBU has already used exceptional arrangements when the contest’s reach served its wider public-media brand.

Whether Canada turns eligibility into an actual entry will now depend on CBC/Radio-Canada and the EBU’s contest machinery. For the moment, the vote in Prague has made Canada part of Eurovision’s institutional perimeter, and not yet part of the lineup.