Northern lights

When you give your film a title like this one, you’re asking for attention. But the makers of Young People F---ing couldn’t have anticipated that their genial little sex comedy would end up the flashpoint for a political firestorm. As the Canadian Senate prepared to debate Bill C-10, which would have allowed the federal government to deny tax credits to films it deemed offensive, YPF was held up like a soiled undergarment as the kind of picture the feds wouldn’t approve of. Never mind that the movie hadn’t been released at the time, or that no senator or MP had actually seen it. When it finally hit the screens in June, YPF did boffo box office. Rumour has it that its writer-director, Martin Gero, is currently working on a follow-up film: Old Politicians Fuming.

In recent years, the quirky Queen of CanLit has successfully remade herself into an inventor (the LongPen for remote book signings) and a playwright (with her 2007 stage adaptation of The Penelopiad). This year, Atwood donned a new guise — economist — and her timing couldn’t have been better. Her Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a penetrating look at the follies of our credit culture, were published in book form this fall just as the world economic crisis hit, and broadcast on CBC Radio in November. Meanwhile, in another lecture — the Hurtig in Edmonton — Atwood turned to politics and tore a wide strip off Prime Minister Stephen Harper for his attack on the supposedly elitist arts. A version of her lacerating commentary appeared in The Globe and Mail.

During the U.S. election, Republican vice-presidential candidate and gun-toting hockey mom Sarah Palin provided a target wider than a bull moose. Notorious Montreal radio comics The Masked Avengers (Marc-Antoine Audette and Sébastien Trudell) scored a direct hit with a prank phone call that grabbed international headlines. Posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Audette chatted with a cheerily credulous Palin for five minutes about everything from the joys of blood sport to “the documentary they made on your life, Hustler’s Nailin’ Paylin,” before finally having to tell her that she’d been punked. “She was as gullible as Britney Spears,” Trudell later told CBS’s The Early Show, referring to a previous Avengers victim.

The bubbly co-anchor of the satirical TV news show This Hour Has 22 Minutes provided some much-needed effervescence to a flat Canadian election — and uncovered a side of Prime Minister Stephen Harper we didn’t know about. Ambushing him at a news conference in classic 22 Minutes style, Hall declared her love for the blue-eyed Tory leader before being shackled and led away. Later, the PM decided to make nice, granting an interview with the besotted comedian, during which he asked her, “You like handcuffs?” Hall’s game response: “Should I like handcuffs?”

Quebec’s superstar diva had the homecoming party of the year. Dion’s free August concert in Quebec City drew 250,000 fans, who stormed the historic Plains of Abraham to hear the chanteuse sing an all-French set. The show, part of the city’s 400th-birthday celebrations, had Dion performing a mix of pop and traditional songs and teaming with another Quebec legend, Ginette Reno, in a closing duet. This turned out to be a banner year for Dion, who also embarked on a five-continent world tour, received an honorary doctorate from Laval University and won some unlikely hipster approval via rock critic Carl Wilson and his book Céline Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste .

If Dion was this year’s homecoming queen, Gehry was its king. The Toronto-born architect, whose international reputation rests on such bold conceptions as the Bilbao Guggenheim, was back in T.O. in November to unveil his $275-million redesign of the Art Gallery of Ontario. A success with the critics and the public, the museum’s new look includes an undulating glass façade, gracefully spiralling wooden staircases and skylit galleries. The AGO was the L.A.-based Gehry’s first commission in Toronto. “It was very exciting to come home and have an opportunity to contribute,” he said at a media conference the day before the museum’s Nov. 14 re-opening.

Hill had to clear a big space off his mantel this year. First, the Burlington, Ont., author’s historical novel The Book of Negroes won the Canadian and Caribbean regional Commonwealth Writers Prize in March. Then, in May, the book also took the main prize. In between, Hill walked away with the Writers Trust Award for fiction. Finally, in June, the Canadian Booksellers Association crowned him author of the year. The icing on the cake came in July, when Hill had an audience with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and found her fascinated with his book. As well she should be. The Book of Negroes is the first-person narrative of an 18th-century African slave who at one point meets with a British monarch to petition for the end of slavery. Hill has another shot at glory in the new year: His book is one of five in the running for CBC Radio’s 2009 Canada Reads contest.

She charmed a national television audience and British musical maestro Andrew Lloyd Webber. Then she went on to melt the notoriously flinty hearts of Toronto’s theatre critics. For MacKenzie, the winner of CBC-TV’s How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, 2008 was a fairy-tale year. A 23-year-old unknown from Vancouver when she was picked by Lloyd Webber as one of 10 finalists for the reality-TV casting contest, MacKenzie out-sang the competition to land the starring role in his Canadian revival of The Sound of Music. But the real test came when the production opened at Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre in October. MacKenzie received a bouquet of rapturous reviews.

Canada’s best-connected hip-hop artist, Offishall had been on the verge of a U.S. breakthrough for years. It finally came this summer, when his seductive single Dangerous charted No. 5 on Billboard’s Hot 100. The song is off Not 4 Sale, Offishall’s fourth album, which features such high-profile guest artists as Akon, Rihanna and T-Pain. Not that Offishall, a.k.a. Kardi, a.k.a. Jason Harrow, needs help from his famous friends. The 32-year-old Toronto musician, whose Jamaican roots are reflected in his reggae-inflected rap, has been a rising star ever since he picked up a 2000 Juno Award for producing Choclair’s Let’s Ride and provided “TDot” with its first urban-dictionary-in-song, BaKardi Slang.

YouTube was an effective weapon in this year’s Canadian election, and nobody wielded it more wickedly than Rivard. The popular Quebec singer-songwriter starred in Culture in Danger (Culture en péril), a witty video assault on the federal Tories’ decision to slash arts funding. Playing a humble supplicant before a federal arts board of rude and imperious anglophones, Rivard has his funding request rejected when his gentle French song about an Alaskan seal (or phoque) is considered obscene. Culture in Danger was uploaded to YouTube on Sept. 18 and in five days received more than 305,000 views, making it the world’s 10th-most-popular viral video.