THE PROPOSED OVERHAUL OF CANADIAN CONTENT REGULATIONS ANNOUNCED LAST MONTH WAS A MAJOR EVENT. NOW TWO NEW STUDIES ARGUE THAT THE INTERNET MADE THE REGIME OBSOLETE.

Contradictions are at heart the of our cultural nationalism

There was much excitement a month ago, when the heritage minister revealed her plan to “blow up” the Canadian cultural regulatory regime. That’s how it was reported — a “revolution,” it was called — and that’s more or less how Mélanie Joly talked about it. “The current model is broken,” she said. “Everything is on the table.”

Gosh. Except that even as she was boasting of her willingness to blow up current models on the table of the revolution, the minister was proclaiming her unyielding belief in all of the assumptions of the ancien regime.

If the current model was broken, all that was needed was to “bring it up to date” to “harness its full potential.” If the complex web of content quotas, subsidies and public ownership in which the communications industries have been enmeshed these past several decades had failed, that should not be taken to mean the government might now relax its grip. Rather, she said, “the issue is how can the government be relevant today.”

If, likewise, the regulations had failed to keep pace with such changes in technology as, say, the Internet, it was only because “the legal and regulatory framework hasn’t been developed in a holistic manner.” She clearly intends to fix that, starting with an online public consultation on “the best way to support content.” Sample question: “What are the key roles for CBC/ Radio Canada to play in Canadian content creation? Please select up to five items.”

But perhaps I am being too harsh. Perhaps, in the coming policy review, the minister will be persuaded the world has indeed changed. Perhaps she will even read this week’s report from the C. D. Howe Institute, arguing that content quotas in particular should be dismantled, along with foreign ownership restrictions and regulations requiring cable and satellite providers to spend fixed amounts on content, to be replaced with direct subsidies out of general revenues.

If so, the result will undoubtedly be a more efficient system of promoting Canadian content. But it will do nothing to address the fundamental contradictions at the heart of cultural nationalism. Which is rather more the point: it isn’t just that we have chosen the wrong policies to promote it, or that these have become obsolete, in this age of limitless spectrum and radically reduced distribution costs. It’s that the whole pursuit was wrong-headed.

The theory behind it remains more or less as stated almost 90 years ago, in the report of the Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting (quoted in the Howe report): that the easy availability of programming from outside the country “has a tendency to mould the minds of young people in the home to ideals and opinions that are not Canadian.”

Or more lyrically, that it should be public policy to “tell ourselves our own stories.” For if we did not — if, that is, we did not protect Canadian artists, or more particularly their business partners, from this foreign onslaught, or force Canadians to finance through their taxes what they would not willingly pay for at the register — we would no longer be Canadian.

It is worth noting at the outset that, although this is ostensibly a discussion about the arts, the object of the policy is quintessentially political: the inculcation of appro- priately national, if not nationalist, sensibilities in the populace. In other countries the nation creates the culture; in Canada, culture is supposed to create the nation.

This would be an odd idea, even if you could force Canadians to watch CanCon (as opposed to forcing broadcasters to show it). The cultural differences between Canadians and Americans, so robust as to justify our distinct nationhood on their own, are at the same time so wispy as to dissolve in the face of a few imported films and TV shows (and, let us not forget, songs and books and magazines).

But wait. If Canadians are so different from Americans, presumably Canadian artists would have an innate advantage: their alien rivals would be unable to tell us our own stories in quite the same way, even if they chose. Foreign producers have bigger budgets, economies of scale and so on? So what? They’re not in the same business.

Or to the extent they are — for art is universal, in the way that news, for example, is not — then those economies of scale are just as available to Canadian producers as any other. There is no obvious reason to assume the rest of the world has no interest in hearing our stories, and much evidence to the contrary.

But never mind. Assume the worst: deluged in foreign content, we cease to be who we are, becoming instead … someone else. But whoever we became, it would still be us: in the same way that “who we are” today differs enormously from who we were 50 years ago. And who are we now? As Martin Short once put it, “we’re the people who watch a lot of American TV” — as good a short definition of Canadian identity as any other.

Well, “American” TV, much of which is created by Canadians. As if the other paradoxes and contradictions of cultural nationalism were not enough, there is no self-evident definition of “Canadian content.” How do we define a Canadian? Parentage? Place of birth? Residence? What makes a Canadian story? Written by a Canadian? Set in Canada? “Identifiably Canadian themes,” whatever they are?

Now add together all the moving parts needed to make a film or TV show — producers, directors, actors, writers, “inbetweeners” — and you have the absurdity of CanCon as it is actually practised, teams of dedicated bureaucrats using precision-crafted calipers to determine that, say, a Blue Jays broadcast from New York is Canadian but a Bryan Adams song is not.

No. It isn’t the results of CanCon, risible as they are, that condemn it. The whole enterprise was misbegotten from the start.