From Dead Things on Sticks (aka screenwriter Denis McGrath):

• Let us all praise Gassy men
  “It’s really difficult to believe that Corner Gas has only been around since January, 2004. It’s waved a tattered flag for Canadian-produced programming at a time when that programming was at an all time low, when regulatory changes and the peculiarities of the Canadian broadcast system rendered it a defiant, inconvenient truth. If one day, creative people can actually look out on a stable and sustaining Canadian domestic television industry, it will be Corner Gas that carried the water at a very dark time.”