Murtz On The Scene: Canada’s Got Talent Finale Review & Interview With Winners Sagkeeng’s Finest

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TORONTO – While I certainly would have never predicted it, it appears that Sagkeeng’s Finest are now Canada’s finest as well.

The trio of traditional dancers from Sagkeeng’s First Nation, Manitoba were the unlikely winners of the show’s $100,000 prize, a trip to Tobago, the keys to a Nissan GTR, the opportunity to perform on Citytv’s New Year’s celebration and “the chance to perform in a Las Vegas show.”

While I didn’t get the chance to see the performance finale as it was scheduled on the same night as the Survivor One World finale in New York, the popular thinking was that dance group Freshh or rock band Angry Candy would take home the victory given their strong online supprt. I also believed that the smalltown tap dancers didn’t really stand a chance against groups with multiple members who all had large family voting support back home. In all honesty, I actually suspected Sagkeeng’s Finest to finish in last place out of the top 12 acts.

With that being said, the beauty of competitive reality television talent contests is their unpredictability and when host Dina Pugliese announced that Vincent O’Laney, Dallas Courchene and Brandon Courchene had made it into the top three acts ahead of Shale Wagman, Emilio Fina, and Julie Lafontaine, I knew that we had the makings of a major upset and that is exactly what we got.

I have been trying to rationalize, justify or even explain the methodology behind Canada rewarding the trio who only started dancing together when they heard about the competition and aside from the small-town appeal, I really can’t come up with anything. Was their act and look unique? Certainly. Completely Canadian? Undeniably. Globally appealing? Definitely not. As a result, I am sure it was their underdog je ne sais quoi that warmed the hearts of Canadians around the country as well as the judges who initially put them through.

What I found incredibly refreshing was how humble the teenagers were in their victory and how much of an impact it will have on their lives. The boys were completely overwhelmed with emotion and that is something that I haven’t seen from any of the reality show victors that I have met in years.

The one thing that the boys proved to me is that anything is possible and that however rare it has increasingly become, nice guys sometimes finish first.

I caught up with the Canada’s Got Talent winners for a post-show interview. With fair warning, the audio isn’t the best.

Murtz Jaffer is the world's foremost reality television expert and was the host of Reality Obsessed which aired on the TVTropolis and Global Reality Channels in Canada. He has professional writing experience at the Toronto Sun, National Post, TV Guide Canada, TOROMagazine.com and was a former producer at Entertainment Tonight Canada. He was also the editor at Weekendtrips.com.