You know you’re a Canadian entertainment reporter in 2008 when two consecutive mornings involve being in the same hotel space as Brent Butt. Did he get this far just by being a less abrasive replacement for Mike Bullard? The dynamic is basically the same — portly stand-up so shocked by his own fame that he can’t stop chuckling at his own jokes — what’s no longer involved is the pathology.

Butt doesn’t make anyone but himself the joke, though, which ensures that he’s a safe bet to host the nomination announcements for something like Canada’s Walk of Fame. Today at the Windsor Arms Hotel, eight contemporary names were added to a list that will be formally inducted in a CTV-televised event in September, along with a nod to a brother and sister act from early Hollywood.

Ten years after being conceived by Peter Soumalias — an entrepreneur whose interests included operating parking lots and a company that designed toiletries for hotels — the Walk of Fame has earned enough legitimacy to start leveling threats at Toronto City Hall. Plans to relocate the walk from the area around Roy Thomson Hall to the centre of the city-managed Metro Square complex were met with resistance over the proposed concessions to private-sector sponsorship.

While the spat sounded like city council taking a stand against a tacky tourist attraction — one which Soumalias claims will cost up to $10 million to develop and a million bucks a year to maintain — there’s the matter of relevance. What kind of person feels any fulfillment from seeing famous names laminated in pavement?

Soumalias reminded just how humble the Walk’s beginnings were. The biggest star they could get for the first ceremony was Rich Little, who regaled the crowd with 20 minutes of CanCon impressions. There have been 106 other stars added since — more and more of whom are bothering to show up for the annual unveiling. Two names, Bryan Adams and Michael J. Fox, have even promised to appear this time, to formally accept honours received in the event’s early years.

While the list keeps getting incrementally smaller each round, the assertion is made that they’re not going to lack talented Canadians to induct in the next decade. It’s the nature of what constitutes a celebrity is destined to change.

Well documented — to the point of banality — is the path that took The Kids in the Hall from profane pantomime in the backroom of the Rivoli, or k.d. lang from avant-garde cowpunk kitsch, to something like a spot on Canada’s Walk of Fame, and the corporate validation it will reflect. The process of trading up from the starving fringes to a lucrative legitimacy has kept people compelled for decades.

So, what happens when fame is something that’s no longer administered by a multinational corporation? The results will likely be more interesting than this list.

Mercifully, the concept of Canadian fame is a quirky enough genre that Frances Bay, the 90-year-old native of Dauphin, Manitoba best known for a Seinfeld episode where Jerry stole her loaf of marble rye bread, is getting her own star. Bay was given the star in response to an online petition with over 10,000 names, a triumph on par with Toronto narrowly winning over Baghdad as the preferred site of the last-ever Spice Girls concert, or Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf being voted People magazine's Most Beautiful Person of 1998.

The other Walk inductees will be director James Cameron, basketball player Steve Nash and 24-year-old Krakow, Poland-born supermodel Daria Werbowy.

And a Canadian Legends Award will be posthumously presented to a brother and sister, Norma and Douglas Shearer. Douglas was a pioneering sound designer; Norma was basically the silver screen prototype for Sex and the City, but had the good sense to hang up her camisole somewhere around the age of 42 — in 1942.

Somewhere along the line, the brash movie moguls begat the desire of every consumer-product corporate executive to think they were akin to a brash movie mogul, and that’s essentially what’s celebrated through Canada’s Walk of Fame. A champion of the venture, Dusty Cohl, was a cigar chomping and whisky swilling local character, who passed away in January. The event will be held in Cohl’s honour, which might be a reminder of what kind of decorum has prevailed.

Not a public word about the funding issues surrounding a new Walk of Fame site, however. Soumalias, rattling his sabre in April, suggested that he could always move the Walk elsewhere. Not only would that be the perfect metaphor for Canadian celebrity, it would give the idea of fame a chance to start from scratch.

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