Officially launched on 5 April 2004, The Greatest Canadian was a television program series by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to determine who is considered to be the greatest Canadian of all time, at least according to those who watched and participated in the program. The project was inspired by the BBC series Great Britons.
Radio-Canada, the national publicly funded French-Language broadcasting agency, was not involved in The Greatest Canadian project, reducing the input of Canada's French-Canadian minority over the results. The CBC did make its website available in French, however.
The "Greatest Canadian" was not decided by a simple popular poll, but was instead chosen through a two-step voting process.
On 17 October 2004 the CBC aired the first part of The Greatest Canadian television series. In it, the bottom 40 of the top 50 "greatest" choices were revealed, in order of popularity, determined by polls conducted by E-mail, website, telephone, and letter. To prevent bias during the second round of voting, the top ten nominees were presented alphabetically rather than by order of first round popularity.
This second vote was accompanied by a series of documentaries, where 10 Canadian celebrities acting as advocates each presented their case for The Greatest Canadian. Voting concluded on 28 November at midnight and the following evening, 29 November, the winner was revealed to be Tommy Douglas.