Unlike the traditional factory floor, the comedy club is not a natural incubator of working-class solidarity. Individual spots on a typical weekend show are specialized and hierarchical (starting at the “middle” or “feature” act, rising to the host or emcee, and culminating with the headliner); performers take the stage alone, kill or bomb alone; get sitcom deals or late-night spots in a zero-sum game played against their peers. If the French peasantry was a sack of potatoes, today’s stand-ups are a tray of individually impaled cocktail wieners, vying to get picked.

Despite these inauspicious conditions, however, this month Canada’s English-language stand-up comedians scored a major victory against one of the world’s biggest comedy brands, using collective action to preserve a royalty stream worth over a million dollars in a country where opportunities for comedic talent are scarce. An attempt was made by Just For Laughs — a festival and multimedia content corporation now nominally headed by comedian and television presenter Howie Mandel — to rebrand the CanadaLaughs SiriusXM satellite radio station, and replace royalty-generating, independently produced audio comedy with sound-only rips from a backlog of Just For Laughs television tapings featuring mostly Hollywood comedians. An instant backlash ensued.

Unlike the markets in densely populated, largely Anglophone countries like the United States and the United Kingdom, the comedy scene in Canada has always struggled against three main barriers to economic viability: a relatively small population, a landmass second only to Russia’s in physical size, and a long, culturally porous border shared with the country housing the international center of entertainment capitalism. Comedy club pay rates have been unchanged for decades, with headliners earning as little as $225 dollars for an in-town club set and having to find their own accommodations for off-nights on the road. Los Angeles, New York, and London have been the last best hopes for the few Canadian comics lucky enough to work there legally (or for the quieter, sneakier ones who couldn’t).