Protecting our culture essential to fighting off ‘Americanization’

Canadians can’t sacrifice cultural protection to get a NAFTA deal

Canada might have to give up a lot for a NAFTA deal but there are certain no-go areas, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says. He insists on a dispute settlement mechanism and the cultural exemption clause that protects Canadian cultural products.

“We’ve made it very clear that defending that cultural exemption is something fundamental to Canadians,” Trudeau said last week. “It is inconceivable to Canadians that an American network might buy Canadian media affiliates, whether it’s newspapers or TV stations or TV networks. It would be a giving up of our sovereignty and our identity and that is something that we will simply not accept.”

Or as Unifor president Jerry Dias put it, as the CBC’s Catherine Tunney reported, “Can you imagine Fox TV buying the CBC?”

No, I can’t, but when I’m in Alberta, I see Fox News playing on airport TV screens and it’s not pleasant. (I bought this clever device online that surreptitiously turns off airport TVs but what if I got caught?)

Trudeau is right to be concerned about foreign ownership. I cannot see how government aid to newspapers could work in the ethical sense but even if it did, Postmedia having allowed American private equity firms a stake in the company rules out Ottawa’s help. Should any amount of public funds have gone to David Pecker, Donald Trump’s loathsome friend? It’s unthinkable. Postmedia decided its own fate.

Canadian content is essential. But here’s my problem. Where is Canadian culture and news? Canadian films have wretched advertising budgets and go unseen. Every night when the National leads with an American story, which is often, I switch off.

Clickbait is an intellectual crime. True, nothing’s more grimly fascinating than “Rats ate my feet/Aunt gave my baby cold sores.” I particularly love “Police need help finding motorcyclist’s severed arm.” In Canada? Wow.

But no. It’s a story from U.S. where people are regularly nibbled at by rodents and diseased relatives, and often have to retrieve their own limbs. This is National Enquirer news and we don’t need it.

Canadian publishing frequently produces timid, breathy books afraid to alarm or even interest readers. They read like those First Person essays in the Globe and Mail.

Where’s the literacy? Who is the Gary Shteyngart or the Donna Tartt of this country? Who is our Asne Seierstad, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Francis Spufford, or even Lionel Shriver?

For his latest novel, Lake Success, the great novelist Shteyngart hung with the 1 per cent and then took a cross-country Greyhound bus. He now says the educated American middle class is stuck in “a sh-t sandwich.” The rich talked of eugenics while the poor were “white supremacists talking about crucifying Muslims and Jews.” He sounds worried.

Canada is different. If we’re going to defend publishing, then let’s publish better books and be fiercer about them. I feel like Stormy Daniels’ flame-thrower of a lawyer, Michael Avenatti, advising Democrats asking him about his “fighter messaging.”

“As if anyone can just adopt it and win,” Avenatti said. “My response is the same each time — you are either a fighter or you aren’t.”

So fight back, Canada. Don’t hire Americans to run your museums and galleries. Have you no pride? Journalists, stop writing pop-culture stories without noting for the reader that your subject is Americans in America doing American things.

I wish Canada was more like Quebec, with its own intense TV and print culture. Quebec would peel our hide if we tried to sell it off to the Americans. I’d like Ottawa to be this implacable and find a way to sustain culture with more than mere cultural protection. We need more rules to keep us from being sucked into the American morass.

Trudeau talking NAFTA with Trump people has been a shock. Americans want to run us over with tanks. I have long predicted that Americans will one day invade, the first reason being our clean, cold water.

But in the meantime, they can’t have our culture. When all this is over, we have to bulk up on Canadian culture, tax American cultural behemoths, and make ourselves heard. We are Canadian, we are different and we will fight off the Americanization of our nation.