Its final hosts were Beverly Thomson and Marci Ien, with Jeff Hutcheson presenting the weather forecast and sports.
CTV's first attempt at a morning show, Bright and Early, launched in 1966 and was cancelled the next year;[1] among the presenter lineup was future federal Liberal cabinet minister Jim Fleming, who read the news headlines.
[3] Peters had intended the show to be produced out of Vancouver, but agreed to a Toronto-based production in order to bring CFTO-TV's owner John W. H. Bassett on board.
[3] The 90-minute program launched under the title Canada AM on September 11, 1972, with Carole Taylor and Percy Saltzman as hosts,[4][5] and Dennis McIntosh as newsreader.
Long-time host Norm Perry joined in 1975 and would remain with the programme until 1990, making him the longest-running co-host in the show's history.
In fall 2000, CTV decided to match NBC's expansion of Today by adding another hour of Canada AM from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. local, which aired on O&Os and some affiliates.
During the early to mid-1990s, Canada AM also aired a one-hour weekend edition, although this was essentially a "best-of" package of that week's regular shows.
Another weekend program, Good Morning Canada, was launched in the early 2000s but was also pre-taped using segments from local stations; it was cancelled in 2009.
Canada AM underwent a format change on January 28, 2008, which saw the show expand to six hours of live programming between 6 a.m. and noon ET every weekday.
The format change was marked by the addition of a second on-air team from CTV British Columbia in Western Canada, consisting of host Mi-Jung Lee and weather presenter Rena Heer in Vancouver, and news anchor Omar Sachedina in Toronto.
[15] For several years, in the 1970s and 1980s, the theme music was an instrumental version of The Moody Blues' "Ride My See-Saw", which was recorded by Ronnie Aldrich and the London Festival Orchestra; by the mid-1980s "Ride My See-Saw" remained the theme music of Canada AM, but an orchestral version was used rather then Aldrich's.