NO ONE CONSIDERS SUICIDE SQUAD A CANADIAN MOVIE

no matter how much of our land it availed itself of or how many of our people toiled behind its scenes. Those are imports to which we merely lend our space and labour. Real Canadian movies are written and directed by Canadians. They star Canadians. They – and this is where it gets confusing – tell Canadian stories.

What do Canadian stories look like? Or rather what kind of stories, to invoke the phrase deployed with such conviction by Rudy Buttignol, are “in the national interest”?

Is Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg’s erotic thriller about a depraved pair of drug-addled twin gynecologists, in the national interest? What about Michael Snow’s one-take avant-garde masterpiece of the late 1960s, Wavelength? Pick any dozen classics of our national cinema and you will struggle to find a unifying theme or ethos, or indeed any shared feature at all besides the coincidence of their creators’ citizenship. And if what constitutes a Canadian film really is as simple as that – if all it can be said to come down to is that the artist responsible holds our passport – how can we begin to fault Joly’s deal for failing some high-minded demand?

Does Netflix need to commission Goin’ Down the Road: The Return for us to feel that its money has been spent on content sufficiently our own? Or can we accept that it’s enough for the streaming service to commit – as Joly said it did in the first place – to making “original productions in Canada,” written and directed by citizens who live here?

It is reasonable to expect, I think, that Netflix will want to do this anyway. Netflix is in the business of buying and producing content it feels is needed in any number of lucrative territories: there are Spanish-language Netflix Originals available to drive subscriptions in Mexico, just as there will likely soon be glossy Quebecois thrillers on tap to court viewers there. Netflix is still in the business of making accessible, attractive, mainstream-friendly shows, location notwithstanding. I understand the fear – and the attendant impulse to legislate the fear away – but it’s worth remembering that Quebec, too, is a prospective market. Quebecers still flock to Quebecois films. They will no doubt flock to a streaming service that offers them Choses Etrangeres.

While Kate Taylor seemed certain that “the likes of Narcos and House of Cards will still hog most of the attention” amid a slate of CanCon TV on the streaming service, I wonder if the programs Canadian writers and directors will want to make won’t simply be the likes of Narcos and House of Cards?

I don’t imagine the proclivities of the country’s aspiring showrunners are so different from our neighbours to the south that we’ll only come up with variations on Corner Gas. More probably we’ll have a Canadian Master of None, a Canadian Bloodline or a Canadian Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. In the same way that Drake or the Weeknd are entirely ours without their identity seeming weirdly conspicuous, a new wave of Canadian Content on Netflix could be fully of this country without feeling as if it’s been built to the specifications of a mandate.

That wouldn’t just be invaluable. It would be in the national interest.