My friend Dave over at Bumpershine sent out a request to a bunch of bloggers, musicians, industry types to send in their top picks from the Polaris long list. The Polaris Prize, for those who don’t know, is a juried competition that selects about 40 Canadian CDs that were released in the previous year. The winner gets $20,000. The main idea is to celebrate Canadian music regardless of genre, sales, etc. and just focus on the quality of the music.

Anyway, Dave invited me to participate and so you can find my picks here. Like I mentioned in my note along with the picks, many of the releases I chose skewed towards the Quebec side of things, most likely because I’ve been checking out a lot of stuff since I moved to Montreal a couple of months ago.

You can find the full post here, along with the picks of all the members of the “unofficial jury” and the tabulated shortlist. It will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the official list when it is announced on Monday.