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Mandel made similar sentiments during his livestream, which he did as a means of addressing “some misinformation.” In it, he asserted that the station will still pay royalties to the comics it broadcasts. “You can still make money, you can still program, and you can still be a part of JFL,” he said.

This still doesn’t address the real concerns of Canadian comics, however, and that’s whether their material will be played with the same frequency. In an e-mail to Just For Laughs, Fay wrote, “We know we will be paid royalties whenever our track is played but no longer know if, when, or how often these will get played. We do not know the criteria or process for being selected or ‘curated.’”

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“[N]ot a lot of information has been given to us and that is a huge part of the problem,” he tells us.

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The abruptness of the programming shift is also a cause for panic in the community. “They’ve clearly been working on this for months, something like this doesn’t just happen overnight,” Toronto comic Nick Beaton told the Gazette. “If they’d said five months ago, this is what we were moving towards…at least that would have given us a chance. This is just overnight. They came in and took it away.”

In his livestream, Mandel said that Just For Laughs was approached by SiriusXM Canada, who wanted to “retool” Canada Laughs. “A lot of it was really good and a lot of it was comedians who were independently recording and submitting their own stuff and getting royalties,” he said. “For whatever reason—I’m not in the SXM business—but they approached us because they wanted to retool that station. When networks want to retool things it means they are not totally satisfied with how their customers are receiving it.” Mandel said if it weren’t for Just For Laughs, Canada Laughs would’ve disappeared. “It was going away,” he said.

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Now, the community, led by The Canadian Association of Stand-up Comedians, are doing their part to address the issue head-on. In a tweet on Monday, the CASC said it was “creating an informed strategy” to address the issue, and would be holding a Town Hall at Toronto’s Comedy Bar on Tuesday.

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“We are anticipating a response from Just For Laughs and SiriusXM to questions sent late last week,” they wrote on Facebook. “We look forward to sharing their thoughts and discussing a focused approach at the Town Hall on the best way to deal with the situation and support Canadian Comedians.”

“This is an incredibly hard pill to swallow,” Fay says. “This is more than a loss of a gig or a venue being shut down. It took me 10 years of performing before I was ready to put out an album. Ten years of hard work, late nights, hundreds of shows, mostly unpaid. Thousands of kilometers travelled all to get the skill and jokes needed to do an album. Those royalties felt like back payments for all the work it took to get to that point. And now it’s gone.”

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Below, see tweets from a number of those impacted.

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