by Susan Riley
Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 17, 1997
Republished with permission
Myth One: New, border-leaping technologies make Canadian content rules and other attempts to regulate the airways old-fashioned, even ridiculous.
For all its promise, the Internet isn't going to replace books, magazines --even newspapers-- any time soon.
While the information highway is an abundant and unregulated source of free information-- everything from American lesbian glossies, to the World's Great Books --StatsCan figures suggest that only seven per cent of Canadian homes are wired. Besides, says Keith Kelly of the Canadian Conference of the Arts: "It's hard to imagine snuggling up with a laptop to read Alias Grace."
As for direct-to-home television, there is already a significant grey market among rural and small-town dwellers who are beyond the reach of cable. They buy discs that beam a nearly unlimited supply of American programming into their living rooms.
But the existence of this equipment doesn't mean Canada has to abandon dreams of making room for Canadian content, Kelly says. What's required is a Canadian company obtaining its own satellite space, the capital and the political backing to offer grey-market subscribers a competing service featuring Canadian programming.
What's needed, in other words, is a combination of private enterprise and political will -- not capitulation.
Myth Two: The feeble measures intended to protect Canadian culture will be swept away by the immutable forces of globalization.
There is nothing immutable about globalization, although Canada is particularly vulnerable, by virtue of geography, to its reach. Toronto communications consultant Paul Audley says globalization is a fancy word for Americanization; it describes the agenda of a group of multi-national companies with their origins in the United States (Time Warner Inc., Walt Disney Co., Viacom Inc.), for whom Canada is only an extension of the American market.
Audley prefers the term "internationalization," which suggests a world explosion of many different cultures, rather than globalization, which leads to "centralization of decision-making and narrowing of choice."
He found this distinction, not in an NDP policy book, but in a 1987 paper produced by former Tory communications minister Flora MacDonald.
And while Canada is vulnerable to American cultural domination, it is not alone in trying to carve some space for its own culture. From France to Australia to Saudi Arabia, other countries have devised barriers and incentives to offset the deluge of U.S. films, television shows, and rock stars.
As Copps pointed out last week, even the U.S. uses protectionist measures. Foreign ownership of American television licences is restricted to 20 per cent. And the Clinton administration has been castigating China for ignoring U.S. copyright law at the same time as it criticizes Canada's new copyright legislation for unfairly favouring Canadian artists.
Myth Three: Cultural nationalists want us to pull a curtain around Canada and turn our backs on other cultures.
As Copps points out, Canada is "the most open market in the world" when it comes to culture. Ninety-six per cent of the movies that appear in our cinemas are foreign, most American. Four out of five magazines sold on every newstand are foreign, most American.
Three-quarters of the television we watch every night is foreign, most American. Seventy per cent of the content on Canadian radio stations is non-Canadian, mostly from the U.S.
Indeed, so overwhelming is the U.S. domination of our cultural market that author John Ralston Saul says we should not refer to tactics designed to preserve some small toehold for Canadian work as "protectionist," but as "anti-combines measures" aimed at breaking monopoly control of the culture sector.
Myth Four: Canadian artists -- Alanis Morissette, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje -- can compete with the best in the world without the benefit of state subsidy or support.
Partly true, except -- as Atwood and Ondaatje readily admit -- they would not have achieved their present success without early support from the Canada Council (which provides grants to aspiring writers), and from small, state-subsidized presses.
As for Morissette, Shania Twain, and Céline Dion -- energy, talent and good management, not Canadian content regulations, made them stars. But they don't represent the norm.
Billboard's current listing of Top 100 albums, for instance, includes only three Canadian names: Dion, Morissette and Twain. And a survey of the charts on both sides of the border in 1993, turn up only three Canadians on the U.S. Top 100 and 15 Canadians on the analogous domestic charts.
Nor should the success of these megastars overshadow the flowering of other home-grown talent (from Jann Arden, to the Tragically Hip, to the Rankin Family) and hundreds of lesser-known artists who have benefited from Canada Council grants, Canadian content regulations and exposure on the CBC.
Myth Five: Nobody cares about culture these days.
This is a hard myth to dispute in the face of polls that show scant public support for restoring funding to the embattled CBC. However Audley, a former Gallup pollster, says polls that ask Canadians to chose between spending on culture or on hospitals are manipulated to produce a predictable response. Such stark choices -- between enhanced child benefits and new military helicopters, for example --don't happen in real life, or, at least, in real bureaucracies.
Meanwhile, there are other indications that Canadians do care about the fate of the CBC. Significantly, Copps was able to extract $10 million from a tight-fisted Paul Martin last week for CBC Radio -- an inadequate gesture, but one prompted by pressure from Liberal MPs under siege by disappointed CBC supporters within their constituencies.
When it comes to other cultural products, Canadian vote with their wallets. Mega-bookstores have opened in several cities recently, stimulating sales (some 33 per cent of them Canadian titles) and fuelling a boom in publishing. More than one million people are expected to visit the Canadian Museum of Civilization this year; another 500,000 or more visit the National Gallery of Canada in a given year.
Public libraries are busy, the Great Canadian Theatre Company and the National Arts Centre theatre series are playing often to sold-out houses and CBC-TV's new all-Canadian prime time line-up is attracting rave reviews and large audiences.
Myth Six: Like any product, culture only has value if you can export it.
This notion underlies Trade Minister Art Eggleton's controversial speech of three weeks ago, and isn't an unusual stance for a trade minister to adopt. However, as no less enthusiastic an entrepreneur than Robert Lantos, mercurial chairman of Alliance Communications Ltd., pointed out recently, his company, a leading exporter of television shows and films to the U.S., would never have grown without a sound domestic base.
And while rare and special artists produce work that transcends national borders and sound universal themes, there are other cultural products and expressions peculiar to Canada -- and no less valuable for it. It is hard to imagine an export audience for the topical and Canadian This Hour Has 22 Minutes, for instance, or for author Peter Newman's exhaustive accounts of Canadian history, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be encouraged.
Culture isn't softwood lumber; it has more value at home, than it does tied up in bundles and shipped to Japan.
Myth Seven: More government funding for the arts will solve everything.
Wrong. More funding is more likely to enrich cultural bureaucrats, not an evil outcome in itself, but no guarantee of a strong indigenous culture.
As it happens, direct subsidies -- such as those provided by the Canada Council and provincial arts councils -- are allowed in most trading agreements. Their main drawback is that they drain the federal treasury and make finance ministers crazy.
Even if governments were willing to spend $100 million, say, to replace lost advertising revenues to Canadian magazines now threatened with unrestricted American competition -- even if the money was available, money alone won't preserve our culture.
Audley argues that without laws that allow Canadians to distribute, market and promote our own products, culture becomes a sort of "sheltered workshop." That used to be the case with the National Film Board, which produced often-brilliant films that no one ever got to see. (These days the NFB features and documentaries appear on speciality channels and educational networks like TVOntario, although they are still essentially excluded from Canadian cinemas.)
The facile conclusion is that there is nothing simple, or tidy about the debate over the vitality of Canadian culture. In his celebrated speech, Eggleton complains of the "hodgepodge of Canadian content rules applied in a patchwork fashion, inconsistent from one sector to another and unclear in their goals."
There is an unstated yearning here, for a simple formula that can be applied to all cultural sectors -- who knows, perhaps to all cross-border trade -- that will ensure that everything flows smoothly, forever. Talk about myths.
Susan Riley is a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen.
