Judging for the pageant was based very clearly from Day One on poise, personality and intellect. Talent soon entered the equation, as did a separate presentation in evening gown, referred to by many contestants early on as their "chance to dress up."
These seemingly basic categories can, however, present problems. It was easier in the early days, circa 1957, when each contestant wore a gown, swimsuit and talent outfit she personally bought, showing either her own individuality or pre-programming from her local director. Soon, Canadian designers and manufacturers stepped in, and by the 1970s, each contestant had her very own Sea Queen swimsuit and party dress provided for her, leaving the idea of distinction to, like Björk, dance in the dark.
Not long after, someone at the pageant’s head office had the brilliant idea to put each contestant in the exact same swimsuit, and Miss Canada headquarters soon decreed it was to be not just one or two girls whose local pageant committees had limited fashion sense wearing dowdy dresses, it would be all 40-plus girls wearing the same tacky gown. Miss Canada lost half of its charm right there.
To make up for this obvious lack of fashion insight, television viewers suffered through 19 years of the Miss Canada Designer Collection, arguably as interesting to watch as the New Homes Channel, where top Canadian designers lent their fabulous wears to completely inexperienced and too curvy girls from mysterious locales like Medicine Hat, Fort St. John and Swift Current. (Only a very small number of experienced models ever made the Miss Canada Pageant runway, and just two women with any catwalk experience outside their province have ever won the title.) However, it is fair to say that if couturiers wanted to spotlight their clothes in the 1970s and '80s, the Miss Canada Pageant was indeed the way to do it. High television ratings and viewers looking for glamour meant potential sales and cheap, nationwide exposure to famous Canadian chaps like Alfred Sung and Dominic Bellissimo.
Though beautiful clothes on beautiful women was the credo for this spectacle of Canuck pulchritude, let’s look at this realistically Could Miss Northern Manitoba make your fashion shine? How many women are 36-24-36 in a place called Flin Flon, Manitoba?
Talent figured highly in the pageant in its early days. While not mandatory in the inaugural bathing beauty parade, it became a requisite part of the competition in 1947. The winners of the Miss Canada title have exhibited talents both superlative (the 1949 winner even won a preliminary talent competition at the Miss America Pageant yes, the Miss America Pageant) and mediocre, ranging from operatic arias to speeches on their hometowns. The winner in 1953, an aspiring veterinarian, planned a lecture on canine surgical procedures, but opted at the last minute to go off-the-cuff and extol the virtues of her beautiful hometown, Kelowna, very likely benefiting herself in the process. The 1970 winner, in a performance still remembered by many pageant veterans as both bizarre and beautiful, gained the title by reciting a soliloquy from "Hamlet" in English, French and Spanish.
Since each finalist was required to perform her talent for the live nationwide broadcast, and since most contestants did not have conventional pageant talent, girls were forced to cut corners. Candidates have credibly danced ballet, folk, Latin and tap, and sung everything from Puccini arias to Whitney Houston, but we have also seen several exhibitions of ice skating, pantomime, imitations and impersonations, poetry recitals, and the proud little presentations of homemade clothes, art and calligraphy.
In 1973, arguably the worst year for talent ever, the first runner-up performed a karate demonstration, then proceeded to model homemade designs for the remaining minute of her allotted time, while the victor that year chose to "sing" a Scottish folk song, barely emitting a note that resembled anything musical. Mercifully, talent became a category in which one group winner was declared the following year, and it was only she who performed on the television broadcast, so there was no longer a need for lackluster talent to made the airwaves.
Still, some talent winners did slip through the cracks, representing an obvious lack of taste on the part of the panel of judges. In 1984, following on the heels of Canadian Lori Fung’s victory in the first Olympic rhythmic gymnastic competition, talent winner Miss Laval by comparison played with a ribbon for three minutes while bounding up and down a flight of stairs. The only positive thing that can be said about the "interpretive dance" done by talent winner Miss Mississauga in 1985 was that her little ballet outfit was cute. In 1987, Miss Montreal, the eventual first runner-up, sang "Memory" from "Cats," a beautiful song otherwise butchered by her thick Quebecois accent.
It was rumored that talent never counted for more than 10 percent of the final scoring before it was dropped completely from the ballot and became merely a demonstration sport, but barely any published report can corroborate this theory. Perhaps it was for the best that the talent competition faded in importance, though sales in Tylenol surely dropped sharply where they once had skyrocketed.
