Fri 10 October 2025 23:00, UK

As ever, assessing Canada’s most successful artists reveals the age-old disconnect between critical acclaim and who sold album copies by the bucketload.

It’s easy to revert to the Maple Country’s lauded rock canon as figuring Canada’s most rewarded musician. While towering figures of the US West Coast’s counterculture, 1960s titans like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen all sold records in the millions, but don’t even orbit the lofty top 100 global big sellers, despite their Rolling Stone stature.

Boasting mammoth sales for specific albums, neither Alanis Morissette nor Shania Twain—yes, the twangy country pop sensation actually hails from Ontario—escapes the lowly end of the million-sellers, even though the respective Jagged Little Pill is Canada’s second most successful album, and Come on Over still stands strong as the seventh of all time worldwide.

For the country’s second and third place, we have to stay put in 21st-century pop. Justin Bieber wins bronze with over 150million claimed sales, coasting through the often uneasy transition from child star to adult big name with commercial ease following 2009’s My World EP. Only topped by Eminem in the hip-hop world, rapper Drake comes in second place with an extra 20m sales on top of Bieber, one of contemporary music’s most phenomenal popular artists, and certified as the 20th biggest selling of all time.

Yet, for Canada’s all-time record, we have to step into a realm far removed from good taste but showered with mountainous levels of album sales that the country’s not likely ever to witness again.

So, who is the best-selling Canadian artist?

In at number one with no contest, Québec’s ‘Queen of the Power Ballads’ Céline Dion towers over all Canadian competition, with a rock solid over 150m certified unit sales, enjoying the lofty milestone of the 18th biggest selling artist of all time ever.

A national star across the 1980s with a string of French-language records, Dion reached international attention with her 1988 Eurovision Song Contest winner ‘Ne partez pas sans moi’. Before long, she swiftly found enormous success in the ghastly adult-contemporary world. Winning a Grammy Award for her title track to Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in 1991, Dion seemed to enjoy King Midas’ touch; every single and album dropped across the next few years, hammering both Canada’s Records, Promotion, music charts as well as the coveted Billboard Hot 100 and 200 albums ranking.

Not content with smashing records with 1996’s Falling into You, pushed to every mum’s CD collection by the glossy ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’ written by Meat Loaf partner Jim Steinman, Dion entered a whole new level of radio and TV ubiquity with the following year’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ for James Cameron’s Titanic melodrama. A glossy yodeller that no one could escape, pushing both its associated soundtrack album and Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love to further record sales, it was the second biggest selling single by a female artist ever, behind Whitney Houston’s equally wincing ‘I Will Always Love You’ cover.

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